Many, many years ago, a good friend made a comment on the sudden (and new) interest in the Apple Macintosh. This was still in the dreaded days of DOS, UNIX was just starting to come to the PC in the form of Xenix and OS9 (which had nothing to do with OSX or Apple, instead, being a multi-user OS for the Tandy Colour Computer!) and the Commodore 64 reigned supreme in the games market.

Tony said, “In prehistoric days, man communicated by grunts, whistles and pictures. Then we invented words and language. With the Macintosh, it seems we have gone back to where we came from”.

Of course today, we know that observation is not strictly correct, although some would say there is still an element of truth in it. But I have found an interesting parallel of late which interests me.
In the last seven years or so, viewing screens have got bigger and bigger and bigger. I remember switching from a single 15” CRT to a pair of 17” LCDs. In my circle of PC users, I was the gadget geek who had just upped the geek ante – so to speak. Now a 21” or bigger is not that uncommon, especially for those that do desktop based video.

In TV land, viewing screen sizes have grown like crazy. 34”, 36”, 42” or bigger are now a dime a dozen, and the bigger the TV set, the more status you get it seems (I personally prefer projectors, but that’s a whole other story).

On the other side of the coin, using the Tony defence mentioned at the head of this piece, I always snorted with derision when watching video on small, mobile screens was spoken of. It is far too small, hard on the eyes, resolution is crap, and too difficult to create meaningful (and watchable) content blah, blah were my main arguments. Dismissed.

And just as Paul Keating could never say “Tax Cuts” or JWH “sorry”, I could not be convinced otherwise. Sure I had dabbled in the past with Real Video and WMV, but that was more to find out how it worked than seeing any genuine usage.

The Zune has a screen ideal for watching video while on the go

However, I have changed my mind. And the cause? Despite my colleague Anthony Caruana’s story the other week, I find the Microsoft Zune an amazing thing. And creating content is dead easy with no prior knowledge needed as the inbuilt conversion from format whatever to the inbuilt Zune format is automatic. I intend to fully examine what is the optimum for the Zune to eliminate the conversion step (MP4 - > Zune takes about 3 hrs to convert a 50 minute video.

So, for example, if you shoot the family on a camcorder, dump it to your computer, do some simple edits and then render as MP4, it’s a piece of cake to transfer that footage to the Zune.

I find the screen quality quite stunning and certainly on a par with the Apple iPod Touch. For a gadget to keep as a portable viewing device when travelling (and backing up as a portable hard disk) as well as its primary function as an excellent music player, the Zune has set me to thinking on the future of video in the portable world, especially in my sphere of video creation. And I see a very rosy world indeed in terms of content creation.

So what ideas do I have? When I have made the first 10 mill and therefore you are in catch up mode, I’ll let you know....