Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease

What’s the difference between the video ipod and the PSP, related to videoblogging? What I’m interested in is this: how does this help spread the voices of millions of people through video, taking back a medium (video) that has been owned by Big Media for pretty much ever.

The basic difference seems to be that Apple opens up their platform, while Sony closes it. It is almost impossible to get your video on a Sony. It is trivially easy to get it on your video ipod. Just install iTunes and it’s there.

Sony makes its money of the sales of games (a bigger industry than movies, remember?) and movies. Although I don’t know how many people actually buy movies for PSP’s, here in NYC in Harlem PSP’s are everywhere, but people rip DVDs using a bunch of softwares. Supposedly Sony looses $$ on the sales of the PSP, which makes sense, because it is superpowerful: amazing games, wireless internet, and all that for the same price of the ipod? They have to loose money on that.

Meanwhile Apple makes money off the hardware. The music sales don’t make a lot of money, and I don’t expect the video sales to do this either. It’s all about selling ipods. Which are (really) technically fairly simplistic devices. There are a lot of better portable video players out there already, but Apple wins by providing the complete package: device, UI and content via iTunes. Easy.

So for people with a real voice, videomakers, vloggers and bloggers, the ipod will be their biggest audience for a while. The PSP has a much better screen, and is technically much better suited to playing video, but the platform is so closed that you basically need to make a deal with Sony to get your video on there in an easy way.

Videoblogging