It’s pretty easy to tell where iTunes makes the bulk of its money based on how it responds when you try disabling some of the media preferences.
Hop into your iTunes preferences and start unchecking media sources, you’ll find that some uncheck without a fight while others throw up messages like this:
and this:
Outside of those two, you can turn off any of the other options without a fight. Wonder why that is? The other ones provide access to free content. No money in Apple’s pocket means it can be hidden without a fuss.
Okay, so maybe it isn’t quite that cut and dry. They do make money on games and ringtones, but I get the feeling that they don’t see this as a big enough business today to force on people.
The one you can’t turn off no matter what is Music. Even if you only use iTunes to download podcasts or watch movies, you have no choice but to be constantly reminded that you’re not using iTunes they way Apple decided you should.
This is how I roll:
Podcasts, then radio and music would be how I’d rank my iTunes listening preferences. I’ve also switched to Amazon as my first choice for buying music, so the default version of the iTunes Music store isn’t exactly helpful either.
It’s pretty easy to tell where iTunes makes the bulk of its money based on how it responds when you try disabling some of the media preferences.
Hop into your iTunes preferences and start unchecking media sources, you’ll find that some uncheck without a fight while others throw up messages like this:
and this:
Outside of those two, you can turn off any of the other options without a fight. Wonder why that is? The other ones provide access to free content. No money in Apple’s pocket means it can be hidden without a fuss.
Okay, so maybe it isn’t quite that cut and dry. They do make money on games and ringtones, but I get the feeling that they don’t see this as a big enough business today to force on people.
The one you can’t turn off no matter what is Music. Even if you only use iTunes to download podcasts or watch movies, you have no choice but to be constantly reminded that you’re not using iTunes they way Apple decided you should.
This is how I roll:
Podcasts, then radio and music would be how I’d rank my iTunes listening preferences. I’ve also switched to Amazon as my first choice for buying music, so the default version of the iTunes Music store isn’t exactly helpful either.
Here is what I’d like to do: Create a Smart Playlist in iTunes that will roll up all of my unplayed podcast downloads into a single playlist I can work my way through while running, biking, or driving.
Since my iPod doesn’t offer a continuous play option for podcast tracks, I’m trying to figure out a way to trick it into behaving in a rational manner.
Here is what logically should work. Create a smart playlist selecting podcasts with a play count of zero:
However, it doesn’t. I end up getting all podcasts - unplayed and played.
Ben suggested I make sure to check the “All Unplayed” option in on the sync interface. Done. No difference. It seems like my Smart Playlist is overriding this setting.
Any suggestions?
Just over a year ago,
Apple’s
legal department told a 14 year old girl to shut her pie-hole after she
suggested to the company in a hand-written letter that they include song lyrics
with songs purchased through the iTunes music store so she could read them while
listening to songs on her iPod Nano.
Antony Bruno from Billboard takes a fresh look at the issues surrounding
music lyrics, explaining that Yahoo is working on granting now 15-year-old
Shea’s wish:
Yahoo untangles
licensing web for lyrics service
Yet
at Yahoo and elsewhere, lyrics remain a notable omission from digital music
files either purchased or acquired through subscription models. Not only do
consumers not receive song lyrics with their download, they can’t search for
songs by lyrics within Yahoo Music Unlimited or any other digital music service
including iTunes.
The cost of including the lyrics to these files — primarily the result of the
licensing fee — would either force digital retailers to increase the cost of
their service or accept less of an already-thin margin.
Bruno points on in his article that the easiest place to find song lyrics online
today is through unauthorized sites. It turns out that those sites are
extraordinarily popular for settling lyric debates, figuring out songs stuck in
your head, and researching songs one wants to purchase. Yet that same research
can’t be easily accomplished today using retail music sites like iTunes.
Just over a year ago,
Apple’s
legal department told a 14 year old girl to shut her pie-hole after she
suggested to the company in a hand-written letter that they include song lyrics
with songs purchased through the iTunes music store so she could read them while
listening to songs on her iPod Nano.
Antony Bruno from Billboard takes a fresh look at the issues surrounding
music lyrics, explaining that Yahoo is working on granting now 15-year-old
Shea’s wish:
Yahoo untangles
licensing web for lyrics service
Yet
at Yahoo and elsewhere, lyrics remain a notable omission from digital music
files either purchased or acquired through subscription models. Not only do
consumers not receive song lyrics with their download, they can’t search for
songs by lyrics within Yahoo Music Unlimited or any other digital music service
including iTunes.
The cost of including the lyrics to these files — primarily the result of the
licensing fee — would either force digital retailers to increase the cost of
their service or accept less of an already-thin margin.
Bruno points on in his article that the easiest place to find song lyrics online
today is through unauthorized sites. It turns out that those sites are
extraordinarily popular for settling lyric debates, figuring out songs stuck in
your head, and researching songs one wants to purchase. Yet that same research
can’t be easily accomplished today using retail music sites like iTunes.
Just over a year ago,
Apple’s
legal department told a 14 year old girl to shut her pie-hole after she
suggested to the company in a hand-written letter that they include song lyrics
with songs purchased through the iTunes music store so she could read them while
listening to songs on her iPod Nano.
Antony Bruno from Billboard takes a fresh look at the issues surrounding
music lyrics, explaining that Yahoo is working on granting now 15-year-old
Shea’s wish:
Yahoo untangles
licensing web for lyrics service
Yet
at Yahoo and elsewhere, lyrics remain a notable omission from digital music
files either purchased or acquired through subscription models. Not only do
consumers not receive song lyrics with their download, they can’t search for
songs by lyrics within Yahoo Music Unlimited or any other digital music service
including iTunes.
The cost of including the lyrics to these files — primarily the result of the
licensing fee — would either force digital retailers to increase the cost of
their service or accept less of an already-thin margin.
Bruno points on in his article that the easiest place to find song lyrics online
today is through unauthorized sites. It turns out that those sites are
extraordinarily popular for settling lyric debates, figuring out songs stuck in
your head, and researching songs one wants to purchase. Yet that same research
can’t be easily accomplished today using retail music sites like iTunes.
Recently Apple sent out a newsletter to videocasters explaining how to optimize their videos for the Apple TV. A lot of it was pretty basic stuff but one section in particular caught my eye. Apple suggests only encoding for the highest resolution iPod and says that’s good enough for Apple TV. I don’t think so, and frankly I think Apple needs to overhaul their device support for online video.
The thought process behind Apple’s suggestion is very sound. If a videocaster creates two versions of the same video, one for iPods and one for Apple TV, they they split the users up between the two formats. Rather than having one format with 5000 users you end up with two feeds of 2500 users each. Apple likes to feature popular videocasts on the front of the iTunes store’s Podcasting section and if you only have 2500 viewers then you may have to double your viewership just to get mentioned (these are made up numbers for the sake of my example). Getting promoted on other sites will be harder too since it will look like your videos are less popular than they really are. The second problem is that some users, like myself, have both the iPod and Apple TV. Which feed should I subscribe to? Having multiple feeds can be confusing to end-users, waters down the popularity of the videos themselves and becomes much harder to manage. This is all true.
iPod video is only 1/2 the lines of resolution that the highest quality Apple TV video can be played at, assuming 16:9 content. On the iPod we’re looking at 640×360 videos while on the Apple TV we can have 1280×720 video. You can imagine how much worse a 360 line video looks than a 720 line video being that 360 is under DVD quality and edging on VHS quality. This makes Apple’s solution less than ideal. As a content creator I not only want to make it easy for my end-users to get the videos, but I also want to show off my material in the highest quality possible.
The solution to this problem is not the responsibility of the videocaster. Apple needs to step up and change the way video is done across all devices so that they match, or they need to change how iTunes deals with video.
Lets first try changing all devices. Apple should update the iPod to include the same hardware h.264 decoder that the Apple TV has. Now an iPod can have 1280×720 playback of video which would allow us to discontinue our iPod feed and go straight to a 720p feed. The same video that plays on a video iPod would play on an Apple TV. The other advantage of this is that now my iPod is HD ready so with an iPod to HDMI adapter cable I should be able to plug directly in to my HDTV and get audio and video in 720p. The disadvantage of this is that 720p is not the holy grail of online video. 1080p is pretty clearly where the iPod and Apple TV need to be. How does Apple deal with this in the future? Update the iPod and Apple TV hardware to support 1080p? What about all the users of the old hardware that only have 720p support? Do we end up with two feeds again? I’m not sure this is the most ideal solution, but it’s better than having devices with different resolutions completely.
The second option Apple has is to change the way that iTunes works with video. Right now Technology Evangelist is working with about six different video feeds: 480p (iPod), 720p (Apple TV), 1080p, 3G phone, PSP and Zune. Imagine being able to drop everything but the 1080p video feed and have iTunes compress the video on-the-fly to the format that it needs. One feed from Technology Evangelist could drive any portable media player that works with iTunes, any media extender that works with iTunes and any local computer playback would be in the highest quality possible. The problem here is recompression time. Right now all iTunes has to do is move the file from your computer to the device you want to play it on. In this new model not only will iTunes have to move the file, but it will have to recompress it as well. The recompression can take ages. That’s where Cringely’s idea of hardware h.264 encoders in every Macintosh comes into play. Offload the h.264 onto a hardware chip so it can recompress the video in real-time or faster. Take that 1080p file and create an optimized iPod, Apple TV and computer playback version and we end up with a very powerful solution. We’re left with a distribution problem of online video being 1080p, but that’s for another article. What about Windows users, what do they do in this scenario?
Maybe there’s a better way to do RSS feeds? No idea, but I do know that what we have right now is broken and someone like Apple needs to step up and fix it.
A reader wrote in with a few interesting iTunes questions I thought I’d throw out to the group. I’ll take a shot at the questions, but would appreciate some additional takes.
1. There are at least three computers that I use on a regular basis, our family computer, my work computer and my laptop, when I travel. I have tried to figure out how to have my subscriptions be the same on each computer. By this I mean that I thought Itunes would be a web based program that when I signed in to my account my menu of my podcasts and subscriptions would be the same no matter what computer I was using. This is not the case. Each Itunes library is linked to each computer not to my account at Itunes. Have I missed something? Is there a place I can see where all my subscriptions are?
Your iTunes subscriptions are tracked within a file called “iTunes Music Library.xml” which resides on your computer. This file tracks both your music files and your podcast subscriptions. It’s not web-based, so you are correct when you state that, “each iTunes library is linked to each computer.”
2. I don’t even bring my connector cord to work anymore, even to re-charge the battery, because it starts up Itunes and if I have forgotten to turn off the auto upload, I have replaced what was already on there. Is there anyway to keep a list of the podcasts I have downloaded, or have subscribed to other than in the notes section on my blackberry?
Your iPod is basically a satellite of one computer. Just like satellites only orbit around one planet, iPods only orbit around one computer. Syncing the same iPod with more than one computer is going to create a mess since the library files are not synced.
If there are podcasts you plan to listen to from your computer rather than on the road (at work or home), you could subscribe to them with something other than iTunes, such as Google Reader. They won’t auto-download, but that’s not really critical with podcasts since they’ll start to play immediately when clicked on unless you’re on dial-up. Using a web based RSS reader like this would allow you to keep your podcast listening in sync at all computers since it’s, well, web based. Here’s a link to Technology Evangelist’s podcast feed for insertion into Google Reader you can use to test this out. You can play the files immediately online, or download them to your computer if you want to play them when you’re offline or to sync into iTunes.
3. “Where would I find information on how to download podcasts to my ipod from sites other than itunes?”
By this, I assume you mean subscribing to podcasts in iTunes that you didn’t find through the iTunes Music Store. One way to do this is by clicking on the RSS icon for a podcast. If you happen to use FireFox, this will take you to a subscription page that lets you choose which RSS reader you’d like to use to subscribe to the show. If it’s a podcast, iTunes would be a good choice. To give this a try, click here for Technology Evangelist’s podcast feed.
4. Is there a way on Itunes, or any other podcast sites, to search for videocasts?”
Click iTunes Story > Podcasts > Then scroll down to “Featured Video Podcasts” to find many popular options. iTunes could certainly do a better job differentiating which podcasts are video vs. audio than to they do today. Other options including video blog directory sites. Here are five to try.
To me, it sounds like your best bet is to pick one of your computers to use as your podcasting base station. Sync with that when you get a chance. If that computer isn’t your work computer, use your iPod during the day or listen to podcasts through non-iTunes RSS readers like Google Reader.
Sometimes I wonder why Apple makes the choices they do for default settings in iTunes. For example, if I subscribe to a podcast feed, it’s probably because I want to listen to the podcasts in that feed, correct? So why does iTunes only download the latest podcast in the feed, rather than all the new podcasts in the feed since the last time it checked the feed? Because of this, iTunes skips podcasts I expected to receive. This is most commonly a problem when podcasters publish multiple new podcasts in the same day. For example, if you subscribe to receive Technology Evangelist’s video or audio feeds through iTunes, you may miss some of our content next month when we’re reporting from the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas.
Here’s the trick to getting all that you expect from your subscribed feeds:
Click into your Preferences menu in iTunes. Toggle to Podcasts, then change the “When new episodes are available:” menu to “Download all” instead of “Download the most recent one.” Problem solved.
I imagine iTunes does it the way they do because infrequent podcast listeners may find the flood of content overwhelming. Regardless, I think they should make this option more visible for all users.
Resources cited during the Metro Brokers Technology Seminar
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