James Fee
02-15-2005, 10:00 PM
<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1027711,00.html' target='_blank'>http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,1027711,00.html</a><br /><br /></div><i>"I've polled executives at various companies that make these gadgets, and they say the whole video player industry is in a learning phase. James Barnard, who oversees Microsoft's handheld video player business, points out that there needs to be a lot of compelling content before there'll be demand, which is one reason the company is focusing so heavily on content. "Without content, this category cannot grow," says Jonathan Sasse, president of iRiver Americas, which makes one of the more elegant devices on the market. Sasse sees 2005 as a year of education, after which demand will start to percolate in 2006."</i><br /><br /><a href="http://www.ntk.net/ballmer/mirrors.html">Content, Content, Content</a><br /><br />Without it nothing happens. People were ripping and mixing CDs before the iPod became popular. Unfortunately it isn't as easy to do this with DVDs or your TiVo. It will be up to the content providers (the Time Warner's, Sony's and Viacom's of the world) to create this content in a form people can subscribe to and copy to their PMP. I still can't see people bothering to watch a movie on such a small screen, but I've been more wrong than right about what technologies will succeed.