Rethinking Video Content Distribution

I attended QuickTime Live a few years back and Apple always boasts how many QT APIs that are on Apple�s developer connect website that make adding QuickTime functionality to your application as easy as drag and drop to Xcode. When Apple announced the iPod photo, you just turned on photo synching and your entire iPhoto library and albums were resized in three versions to fit on your iPod in thumbnail, slideshow and high-resolution versions then put on the iPod using XML so you were viewing your iPhoto library on the iPod with no learning curve. This was simple and easy it required no work and since photos had no copyright issues (since you own them) Apple was happy to provide a conversion for getting these photos on your iPod.

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Now that Apple has a dedicated section of its iTunes store for purchasing video content, they are saying that they won�t build conversion functionality into iTunes 6 for converting those videos to 320x240 for you so they will fit on the iPod but letting you either buy the video or do the conversion manually in QuickTime. I have a one-hour video weighing in at 100 megabytes. It is 640x480 in mov format and I chose to export to iPod format via QT Pro 7.0.3 and it has been 2.5 hours and I am a quarter of the way done. This is being done on an iBook 800 but regardless, it�s a sure pain in the ass. I have to encode one version for regular podcasting and I have to encode another for iPod users that want to watch my podcast in video. I would like to submit this raw file to Apple and they publish it straight to my podcast for a small fee and they post a 640x480 h.264 and a 320x240 version for iPod users. I give them 15 dollars a month to convert a daily one-hour video for my video podcast and I would be happy about that.
My issues aside, I downloaded the Gold digger video of iTunes and watching it on my small iBook screen looks horrible because it�s the size of my finger and blowing that up full screen in QuickTime Pro looks even worse. If this is to succeed, Apple needs to deliver a video file with both version embedded. You double click and you can watch on your screen and sync with the iPod and the smaller version is moved over. Apple could easily make this work since they own QuickTime and it would make consumers happy and would offer no confusion technically speaking. A lot of the Vlogs I currently read post a podcast, video podcast and now an iPod compatible video podcast. You spend an hour recording a show and 3 hours (encoding time included assuming you have a dual 2Ghz G5) encoding for all of the different platforms Apple is currently offering.
Apple has some giant leaps left in order to make content distribution a winner. Dual formats for video downloads, easy synching and auto encoding of videos you want to be placed on the iPod as well as one click publishing of Audio and video formats to iTunes. Podcasting is supposed to be easy not complicated and Apple could not make it any harder for publishers at t his point. One more thing I would like to point out is why Apple does not include an API to allow you to add videos you have downloaded or created to iTunes then auto encode those for your iPod is because not everyone has the latest G5 tower and iPod�s first syncing could take weeks if you have as many videos as I. I have 500 music videos, every Apple commercial and keynote every broadcasted, 5000 photo, and tons of TV shows and DVD movies. On my iBook 800 this would take light years and something I would uncheck doing if Apple did include this but a simple checkmark would be nice for those that had the power to spare. Wait until January when Apple finally makes vide work on its platform and gets its ducks in a row. At this point, I wish Apple had waited until January to get things straight internally then releases this killer new revolutionary product to the world.