Europeans show little interest in video iPod

Posted on 2 Nov 2004 at 13:11

Music will continue its reign as the prime mover of European gadgets, according to Jupiter Research. A survey of 5,000 consumers from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Spain and Italy, revealed that devices that boast video and other high-end features simply don't interest European consumers.

Some 27 per cent of those polled said they wanted a mobile gadget that plays music only. Video-only devices only sparked the interest of 13 per cent. A video and music device would appeal to five per cent and seven per cent expressed interest in a games device that also played video.

And these figures are based on the assumption that such devices are equal in terms of appeal: style, size, weight, battery life and other factors.

'Music is the core for the portable media player,' said Ian Fogg, personal technology and broadband analyst at Jupiter Research.

But it is these other factors that will be the biggest barrier to screen-based devices, said Fogg. A screen large enough to be useful means a bigger and heavier device with a greater power draw meaning a shorter battery life. 'A lot will depend on improvements in technology,' said Fogg, as to whether a video-based device market will prosper. But he couldn't see such devices hitting a mass market 'for the short to medium term'.

Indeed the report predicts the digital music market will top Euro 10.6mn, with the video market being negligible.

Fogg also noted that with video you need access to a range of different codecs - wmv, avi, divx, xvid, mpeg4 and so on - and have to fiddle about with converting files in order to transfer them from a computer to a mobile device.

'There's no equivalent of the MP3 format,' he said.

The market is also currently lacking the infrastructure to give consumers the choice of a wide range of content, as oppose to the OD2-powered services and iTunes available for music. Indeed digital terrestrial television is one of the few options available.

'There aren't any good legal means of getting video content,' said Fogg.

Even Apple, with its iron grip on digital music devices, has not been tempted to tamper with its winning formula and add video or other functions. Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, argues that the iPod experience cannot be translated to video, a point he expanded on in a New York Times interview.

'Apple has been very clever,' said Fogg. He said that the new colour screen iPod is not the focus of the improvements the company has made. 'It's more of a marketing, public relations thing. But the real thing is that the music experience is much better, without increasing the weight or size.'

He said that the colour-screen gambit is really about bring digital music closer to CDs: by showing album covers of music playing, the listener has a more tangible connection to the music as a product, rather than a file of bits and bytes.

But adding music functions to a phone is limited. The power draw on enough memory to store your entire music collection would eat too much into battery life, diminishing the device's usefulness as a phone.

He said music on phones is 'best suited to singles', as a 'digital tapas experience'.

Even so, with 13 per cent expressing an interest in a video device, once the price and size of such gadgetry falls, there should be a nascent market of sorts for the likes of Microsoft's Portable Media Centre.

What Europeans don't want it appears is an all-singing, all-dancing machine: just five per cent were interested according to the survey.