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    Categories: Media Usage

What kind of video would you watch on a small portable screen?

The video iPod has sent shudders through the media business, because it offers a new way to watch TV, video and movies. You can download video onto the iPod and then watch it on your own clock as you travel. Plus, new cellular phones are adding the capability to watch video and TV as well. While techie types get excited about such gadgets, what about the general viewing public? Would you watch TV on a tiny device with a small screen? What types of video content would you watch on these? Would you pay for it? Bang the “Comments” button below, and tell us all what you think. Please include your name and location and a valid email address if you want to be quoted in the Your Take roundup post coming next week.

Mark Glaser :Mark Glaser is founder and executive director of MediaShift. He contributes regularly to Digital Content Next’s InContext site and newsletter. Glaser is a longtime freelance journalist whose career includes columns on hip-hop, reviews of videogames, travel stories, and humor columns that poked fun at the titans of technology. From 2001 to 2005, he wrote a weekly column for USC Annenberg School of Communication's Online Journalism Review. Glaser has written essays for Harvard's Nieman Reports and the website for the Yale Center for Globalization. Glaser has written columns on the Internet and technology for the Los Angeles Times, CNET and HotWired, and has written features for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, Entertainment Weekly, the San Jose Mercury News, and many other publications. He was the lead writer for the Industry Standard's award-winning "Media Grok" daily email newsletter during the dot-com heyday, and was named a finalist for a 2004 Online Journalism Award in the Online Commentary category for his OJR column. Glaser won the Innovation Journalism Award in 2010 from the Stanford Center for Innovation and Communication. Glaser received a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and currently lives in San Francisco with his wife Renee and his two sons, Julian and Everett. Glaser has been a guest on PBS' "Newshour," NPR's "Talk of the Nation," KALW's "Media Roundtable" and TechTV's "Silicon Spin." He has given keynote speeches at Independent Television Service's (ITVS) Diversity Retreat and the College Media Assocation's national convention. He has been part of the lecture/concert series at Yale Law School and Arkansas State University, and has moderated many industry panels. He spoke in May 2013 to the Maui Business Brainstormers about the "Digital Media Revolution." To inquire about speaking opportunities, please use the site's Contact Form.

View Comments (14)

  • Right now, I watch anything and everything -- we are in the "novelty" stage after all. Besides, you have to love the irony of using today's most advanced technology to watch old Adam-12 episodes (please, dear IPod God, let there be Wally George reruns for $1.99).

    Nevertheless, it won't last -- but it has nothing to do with screen size. It has everything to do with content and simplicity. Better and original content will attract more users (call it the "Sirius-Stern Effect"), and making the video easier to download will attract more people like me who still think Ajax is a "grease-cutting formula in a lemon fresh scent."

    But until then, I'll watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" for the 100th time, check out "Rocketboom" (Amanda Congdon is the bomb) and relive the joy of Reed and Malloy giving wayward Angelenos the right to remain silent. Too bad Leif Garrett didn't exercise that right in the two-part roller disco episode of CHiPs...

  • I enjoy watching small screen independent productions like The Post Show and Rocketboom.

    My great hope for the world, though, is that technology will progress to the point that those small screen stars can be seen on regular-sized screens. I'm glad that RB has made a deal with TiVo, but I hope that the future is more open source. It would be nice if we videobloggers didn't have to worry so much about putting tiny compressed files on the internet... I would love to put out screen-sized HD digital film, but the world is not ready for it yet.

    My ten-minute weekly videoblog weighs in at around 40MBs. So, until space and bandwidth become cheaper, I don't see high quality content coming out on the internet for a while. I truly hope that someday we will be able to download large uncompressed files directly to our computer-embedded walls for display on our Star Trekkian viewscreens.

  • I agree with Chris McDqueen. If video is available at the airport or while traveling on a bus, viewers would watch just about anything to keep them occupied. The whole issue is the delivery method. Microsofts Bill Gates introduced a special media table at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The media table could be made available at an airport or other public places. It increases the size of a typical PDA screen by recognizing the PDA and projecting an image of the screen onto a table.. It also projects a full size keyboard that uses technology to recognize key strokes. If this technology could be duplicated cheaply, we wont have to worry about the size of a video screen. Obviously there are some major issues here, like privacy, security and the like.

  • I would watch the news since its a talking head most of the time. At least it fills up most of the screen and it's mainly audio content anyway.

  • Anything short and fun. Anything episodic. I think that animated shorts and the modern-day eqivalent of 1940s adventure serials are great content for my ipod or phone. Channel Frederator is a good example.

  • It would have to be a short one, something very informational. Forget advertising in the traditional sense.

  • I wd watch only ongoing news story likely to affect me or mine directly or major cliff-hanger story having immediate wide impact.

  • I would watch almost any TV show on the small screen. As for movies, they would have to be movies that do not rely on special effects or dramatic scenes that could get lost in a small screen.

    I would like to have the ability to watch short newscasts from CNN, the BBC, or the CBC.

  • ok, let's get real. the biggest seller for video on an ipod is going to be porn. like everything else on the net, it will be driven initially by porn. not me though... ;)

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