RnaLabs

Personal video player (PVP) hardware developers just don’t get it yet. The user experience doesn’t stop at the device, it extends to the desktop.

Take Sony as as example. While the PSP was designed as a gaming platform it seems to be used a lot with video playback from the memory sticks. "The Street finds its own use for things." My expectation is that transfering a video to a PVP device should be as easy as an putting a song on my iPod using iTunes. But not so. There’s no cross plaform iTunes like interface from Sony for managing video content on the PSP. Sony really missed the boat with this aspect of their device. Users have to resort to third-party utilities that manage the alphabet soup of video CODECs, formats, and sizes. If you thought music file formats were difficult, with all the different bit rates and mp3’s vs. AAC’s vs. ogg’s, video is a true nightmare compared to digital music. One look at my compression software and there’s a litany of choices; Quicktime, Real, or Windows Media wrappers, compression in MPEG-1,2,4, Motion JPEG, Sorenson, H.261, H.263, H.264, DV, etc. In addition, there are various frame rates and audio compression choices of various flavors. Wow, what a user experience nightmare. Which really means there’s a huge opportunity for any company that get videos working as easy as the iTunes/iPod, hardware/software marriage. If you’ve seen other PVP’s out there that you think have nailed it, leave a comment, let me know.