Vidcasts

Thanks to the Apple Herd Effect, following Apple’s belated addition of video to the ipod featureset, I assume there will now be a critical mass of video-enabled personal media devices. It’s been a lonely three years or so on the bleeding edge while iPods remained mired in audio land.

Anyway, now I assume that video RSS downloads, ala “podcasts”, will now gain traction. What to call them? Will they still be “podcasts”, or “vidcasts”, or “podvids”? I vote for “vidcast”.

Anyway, I looked at a picture of the new Apple thingy and the screen is just too damn small! Apparently Apple decided to keep its iconic front-panel wheel controller and this badly constrains the possible size of the screen. It did shrink shrink the controller slightly but still, it’s a poor choice. This is exactly the mistake Archos made several years ago when it brought out the Jukebox Multimedia that played videos but used the same design as the preceeding Jukebox Studio/Recorder devices. Archos then, like Apple, chose to keep its controllers on the front panel. Later models abandoned the signature design and used the available front panel space more effectively for a larger screen.

Of course, all this screen finagling would be eliminated if only safe, effective, personal digital laser projection systems would arrive that could paint an image directly and dynamically onto a user’s retina…