Simon’s Blog

The announcement of the video iPod has got many people talking about watching video on the move. Without having experienced portable video, most people think that watching it on a small screen will be no match for watching a big screen television. While this is true to some extent, it’s not as true as many people think.

The reason why watching video on a small screen close-up isn’t as bad as you might think is due to the phenomenon of perspective: objects far away from the eye look much smaller than objects that are close. So, to the viewer, the picture on a portable device propped up in front of them can, in fact, easily look the same size as the picture on a large television at the end of the room.

What’s missing currently from the viewing experiences provided by mobile phones and the new video iPod, then, is not screen size; but screen resolution, screen shape and sometimes video quality (compression artefacts etc.). The problem is that most video content (movies, TV etc.) is now being produced in widescreen formats with aspect ratios of 16:9 and greater. So unless the screen you’re watching video on has a similar aspect ratio to that which the creator of the content intended, the results are often less than compelling. This is because, when video is repurposed for small-screen viewing, some of the video is lost (simply cropped or panned and scanned), or the video is simply stretched and/or squashed to fit the “wrong” shaped screen. The various shapes and resolutions of different types of display are shown below, ranging from mass-market high-definition (HD) television, down to mass-market mobile phones.

What is required for compelling, truly mass-market portable video are screens of an appropriate aspect ratio (16:9) and resolution, combined with small physical size (so that the device can easily be carried everywhere in a pocket). The key to mass-market adoption, then, is form factor. As can be seen from the figure below, which compares two designs of phone with a mass-market form factor (e.g. such as a Sony Ericsson K750i): one with the type of screen common on today’s phones; the other with a screen that could provide compelling viewing of widescreen content.

The days of true “carry everywhere” video for the mass market shouldn’t be too far away. With widescreen form factors, and the best codecs, portable video is going to be great. It will be interesting to see whether Apple gets there first with a widescreen video iPod, or whether the mobile phone companies beat them to it.