Interesting Larry, Welcome to iPod ownership -- I have a few previous-5th-gen ipods in the family, and I can say that I'm a bit envious of your new toys (maybe Santa will tolerate a few more iPods under the tree this year).
Your question has a lot to do with issues of Transcoding -- that is taking origional content and repurposing it for different consumption points. If you've noticed, Apple has recently "upgraded" their default consumption format from 320x200 to 640x480. This gives a higer quality video expereince, and increases the video data file size also (not necessarily a 2x increase).
Also -- If you've been playing with Ripping DVDs and moving the content to iPods, you may have noticed some interesting file size issues. For example, a 120minute movie at DVD quality (.VOB) cane be anywhere from 1.75Gb to 3GB depending on compressability and quality of the movie. Using Handbrake (if I rememebr right) re-compresses or re-transcodes the video into something more suitable for the iPod and probably reduces the file size by 1/2 at best. Now, if you play back the DVD and the iPod video on a TV, there would be a noticeable degradation of the iPod video content -- yet if you play it back on the iPod's screen, it's quite nice.
I dont think the tools or resources are there just yet for independant video producers to sell their content (iTunes) as easy as it is for normal "hard goods" sales (DVD's). Hmmm ..
So there's a few questions that you might want to ask:
1) Who is the target market for your "downloadable" videos? How will they consume them?
2) how do you intend to charge for them and then make them available to folks?
3) Do you intend to host your own Digital Media content site?
I dont know how much some hosted websites charge for downloading content, but you can probably see that if you have 10 videos on your website at 1G ea, and you had 500 people a month DL'ing all your videos, it would get into the terabyes of data transfer (which there is probably an associated cost).
Also -- If you put your content in Quicktime format, most folks should be able to see the content just fine as long as they are Windows or Mac users. There are other competing video formats out there too (Divx, WMV, etc) that your customers may prefer. And this means that if you wish to meet that demand, you'd have to transcode each source video into 3-5 formats -- that's a lot of processing time, storage space, and transmit time.
I dont know if there would ever be an opportunity for a specific media producer like yourself would be able to place content into iTunes as a "independant video producer" and let them handle all the heavy lifting (transcoding, commerce, DRM, etc) for a fee of course. I'm sure that's coming, but I dont know how soon.
If you look at what some folks are doing with VideoPodcasts, they are creating content and sending it out to the public. Some are using an advertizing model to get paid, and some are doing it on a subscription basis. Some are using this format as a teaser to sell the real content (think of an "infomercial" format).
In any event, it's a good excuse to start playing with iMovie, Final Cut Express, or even FCP to start working on creating content -- then use QT or like tools to get your content into H.264 for distribution and compression.
Chris Waldrip (CNN?) may be a better source for this question.
There is a good podcast on Digital Video Production (
http://www.d...ionbuzz.com/ ) that you might want to subsribe to and listen in on..
Let us know how your project moves along ..
Mike
