Industry analysts Nielsen Media Research have discovered that Apple iPod-toting consumers aren’t going ga-ga for video, with the vast majority preferring to listen to music and audio podcasts rather than watch TV or movies.
Nielsen monitored the activity of 400 iPod users in the US during October and found that videos made up less than 1 per cent of the content played on either iTunes or the device itself.
Things didn’t get much better with video iPod users, with just 2.2 per cent loading up their players with video content.
With many TV shows coming in at 30-60 minutes and most songs hovering around the three minute mark, you’d think that watching video would account for a sizeable proportion of the user’s time.
Instead, Nielsen found that watching video still only accounted for just 2 per cent of total time spent using iPods or iTunes among iPod owners.
Not surprisingly this figure rises for Video iPod users, who were found to spend 11 per cent of their time watching videos.
The figures, contained in Nielsen’s ‘Home Tech Report’, estimates that over one in ten US households (13 per cent) own at least one iPod – that’s around 15 million units – with 30 per cent of those owning video-enabled iPods.
Apple’s own figures put the total amount of iPods shifted so far around at a coffer-boosting 70 million units.
Nielsen’s figures raise questions about whether consumers are going to warmly embrace video on the move as enthusiastically as the manufacturers would like.
We know that we barely ever watch video content on our mobile players, but then we’d imagine the video-playing target demographic is considerably younger than us comparative crumblies (i.e we’re over 20).
Apple, who declined to comment on the study, claimed that their current sales had seen 1.5 billion songs and 45 million videos shifted, and elsewhere Walt Disney recently announced that it had sold around half a million movies.
[From CNet news]
Nintendo’s eagerly awaited 
The first punter to get his hands on the shiny new console was the time-rich Isaiah Triforce Johnson, who had sat outside a New York store for more than a week.
Sony had shipped 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores at the end of last week, but Nintendo boasted that it would have “five to ten” times as many Wiis available at launch, with an end-of-year shipping figure of 4 million units expected.
The BBC is expanding its distribution with Orange to take its international news service, BBC World, to Orange mobile phones in eight countries.
BBC World is held within the commercial arm of the BBC, so Orange are paying the BBC for the privilege of showing it to their subscribers. Gerry wouldn’t give specific details of deal, but we did learn that they don’t do deals on the number of streams that are watched.
Now, we understand that when you agree to install a beta product, you can expect a few glitches.
Immediately, we were plagued with time outs, and that ruddy annoying animated exclamation mark icon that appears when Blogger’s uploading became a near permanent fixture on our screen.
Google’s perpetual betas
Apple have just announced that they have signed deals with six major airlines, offering the first seamless integration between iPod and the planes in-flight entertainment systems.
Google chief executive, Eric Schmidt, has chatted to Reuters about his thoughts on mobile phones, and how their ownership and usage should be free, supported of course by advertising. In his words “It just makes sense that subsidies should increase” as advertising rises on mobile phones.
Google Maps for Mobile now officially supports GPS location information when used with mobile phones … well at least one of them at the moment, the Helio Drift.
A UK company specialising in waterproof bags, OverBoard, have widened their selection of waterproof cases to include electronic gear.
Not content with just providing their leisure range, they’ve decided to tackle the design problem of a waterproof iPod case for extreme water sports, a range they call pro-Sports. Not only are they more rugged, but float, so your rather expensive music player doesn’t start playing its tunes to the fishes.
The time I had with it gave me the impression that the case is very tough. There’s two leads supplied, a neoprene velcro sports arm strap (for attaching to your arm – in the photo) and a safety break neck lanyard.
Microsoft is giving the Universal Music Group (UMG) a per-unit fee for each Zune that they sell, in addition to the money that they’ll make out sell music tracks on it too.
BT has signed a deal with The Walt Disney Company, to deliver their programming over the soon to be launched BT Vision IPTV service.
Names of some of the films will be bound to get some people excited with box-office hits ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,’ the Academy Award®-winning ‘Memoirs of a Geisha,’ plus comedies ‘The Shaggy Dog’ and ‘Scary Movie 4.’
BT Vision has been under development for