BusinessWeek writes about the possibility of a video-enabled iPod:
"We have a saying around here: It’s the music, stupid," Jobs said in early 2004 when asked whether Apple’s plans for its white-hot music player extended beyond the audio realm. "We have to stay focused on the fact that people are buying these devices because they want to listen to music."
Yet something is in the works. Apple has been talking to record labels about licensing music videos so they can be sold for $2 or so on its iTunes Music Store, says one music industry executive. Media reports suggest Apple is also in talks with TV studios including Disney about getting the rights to other kinds of programming.
This is actually the sort of news that Filipinos don’t really give a crap about, because … well, at the risk of sounding like a bitter third-worlder, DRM is a white man’s technology. iTunes has sold half a billion songs, the counters continue to spin, and support for countries outside of the "chosen few" continues to lag fairly far behind what I like to refer to as "the majority of the Earth’s population".
One possibility is that Jobs could use this opportunity to introduce a subscription service, in which customers would pay a fixed monthly fee to watch as many videos as they want.
Bitter or no, it IS fairly interesting that DRM-protected video subscription may eventually make its way on to our portable devices. (I wasn’t expecting it until 2007 at least, because I figured they would try to solve the music subscription issues first. It looks like they might push forward regardless of how half-hearted the current subscription-based services currently are though.)