the expat demographic

Apple announced a new video iPod yesterday. However, I think the most important bit of information from yesterday's announcement is the offering of video in the iTunes store. People in all the usually Apple forums are complaining the quality is a little too low or Why would you want to pay for something you can Tivo, etc etc ... Well, while I'm sure I'm in a fraction of a fraction of a minority, because I'm living here in Tokyo there is no physically possible way to access US TV.

Not that I watch much TV (I haven't had cable hooked up in over 7 years now) but it's exciting to see where this might lead to -- movies and (hopefully) HBO specific programming. DVD region encoding has really turned into a headache in moving between America and Japan and as such I hardly ever buy DVDs. If I could grab seasons of Curb or Entourage or Rome for a reasonable price online I'd do it in a second. And I'm sure the 4 other Apple using, HBO loving expats in the world would too.

As for the complaints about video quality -- I think it's a moot point. I grabbed some copies of LOST last night and watching them on my 20" cinema display was fine. Then again I'm not one to obsess dover perfect sound fidelity or video quality. Many people complained that the sound files iTunes was offering was far too low a bitrate. Of course these are many of the same people who stoutly proclaimed the iPod was going to be a spectacular failure on launch. I think Apple tends to find the best balance between content size, quality and portability. They've probably thought long and hard on how the video is going to be delivered so I doubt we'll see resolution increases anytime soon.

Me, I'm just happy to see the internet blossoming into the full force media distribution juggernaut it should be.