ViPod Useless Without Disney Deal? I Don't Think So

Sorry to keep rattling on about the ViPod, but until I get one (and probably for a bit afterwards) I won't be able to keep my mouth shut. So, I'm over at IMDB.com looking for reviews in their [http://imdb.com/news/sb/2005-10-13/|news section, today], and I stumble across a huge blurb about how Steve Jobs, the head of Pixar made a deal with former Pixar distributor Disney to provide content for the ViPod. Well, really the paid downloads are for anyone who has iTunes and wants to DL eps of the three Disney shows that are available. This is all a little depressing what with me liking Pixar to keep themselves away from corporate meglith Disney, but this is a deal with Apple, so whatever. The deal for me is the following excerpt from the IMDB news blurb:

In an interview with today's (Thursday) Los Angeles Times, Van Baker, a media analyst with Gartner Inc., called the deal "astounding." He added: "I didn't think [Apple would] be able to line up the content, and without the content, [the video iPods are] useless."

This is one of the most ignorant things I've heard anyone but George W. Bush say in months!

Oh yeah, ViPods are useless without paid content! Is that why mp3 players were so popular before Apple's iTunes store came along? None of us who had mp3 players for years put anything on the players at all because we couldn't buy mp3s from anywhere.

Golly, I sure did enjoy holding those useless mp3 players in my hands.

Idiot.

I'm already tempted to encode some DVDs as mp4s just because it's so damn easy to do.

Ultimately, this just shows you where traditional corporate minds are right now--the dark ages.



OK, I promise--no more ViPod posts for a while.