Mainly due to time constraints, I've decided to continue the Digital Ethics series (and for the forseeable future, all my other ‘blogging’ stuff) on my blogger.com site.

http://x1brettstuff.blogspot.com/

It has a different RSS feed than this site, so if you haven't already changed it, now would be a good time.

My kidz have used Apple Macintosh computers since they could mewl and puke. They don’t really remember a world without the internet. Records and cassettes seem as quaint to them as crystal sets and wind-up gramophones do to me. All of them are now teenagers (one of them not for much longer :-) and each has a PowerBook and iPod that you would remove from them only by employing extreme violence.

If you read my blog (see link at bottom of article) you’ll know that one of the regular events in my life is driving the 150 miles between London and Lincoln to collect/deliver my kidz. You’ll also know that I prepare an iPod playlist for the kidz to listen to on their portions of the journey. Sky (the one who’s not going to be a teenager for much longer) will sometimes sit next to me and, if a song plays that she likes and hasn’t already got in her iTunes collection, she will make a note of it. Then, when back at my house, she uses a nifty program called Blue Coconut to wirelessly transfer the songs from my iTunes library to hers.

Because I know that Sky enjoys new music, I will often lend her my latest CD purchases to listen to. A while back I offered her a couple of CDs by artists I knew she liked. The conversation went something like this:

“Hi Sky, here’s some CDs you might like to audition”.

“Thanks pappy-man, have you already ripped them to your iTunes?”.

“Yep”.

“Oh, in that case, don’t bother leaving me the CDs, I’ll listen to them off your computer”.

Initially her reply puzzled me. The reason I had given her the CDs is because (to me) part of the experience of purchasing music is browsing the cover artwork and sleeve notes. However, if Sky wants to look up lyrics, pictures or stuff about the artist, she is more likely to use Google. She can audition the tracks directly from my iTunes playlists, and any of them that she likes, she can copy to her hard drive. She also knows that I will have annotated and added the relevant artworks to the tracks, saving her even more time and effort!

So, we now have a situation where a digital file is seen as preferable to a physical item. The CD is no longer seen as a covetable object, instead it has become more like the wrapper on a chocolate bar, attractive and protective, but something that can be discarded after the item it contains has been consumed. The ‘ripped’ songs sound as good as the CD (OK, that’s technically debatable, but we’ll leave that for another time). And they are stored in a form where they can be browsed, organised, played and shared in ways that even the largest CD jukebox could never hope to match.

And my kidz have access to these (free) files from a huge range of sources – including me, their friends, peer-to-peer file sharing programs like Acquisition and LimeWire, and bittorrent sites like Pirate Bay and IsoHunt. And not just music. They can now access just about any television programme or movie in a similar manner.

Last year I was asked by three people if they could copy my 20,000 item iTunes collection to their own hard drives. My reply was negative in all three cases, but (assuming they had 80 gigabytes of free storage) they could have transferred the (selected and edited) contents of my 3,000 CD collection to their computers in less than an hour.

And if you can’t be bothered to search for files on the internet and your stingy friends won’t let you copy their collections, a quick search on eBay will reveal that you can purchase a couple of DVDs containing the entire ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ collection for £9, including postage and packing. That’s over 2,000 songs. As the seller’s blurb states...

‘If you were to buy the original albums (if you could still get hold of them) it [sic] would set you back close to £800.’

The advertisement also states:

This Auction is 100% legal if you abide by the terms and conditions... The DVD’s [sic] are for back-up purposes only – it is the buyer’s responsibility to own or possess the original recordings by the artists, and should the DVD’s [sic] contain any albums that are not owned by the buyer – then it is their responsibility to destroy/remove any albums from their collection within 24 hours of receipt to abide by international copyright laws. I will not be held responsible for any misuse of this item and accept no responsibility once this item has been despatched.

Yeah, right!

So, we are now in the situation where you can acquire a huge music collection for next to nothing. Surely now the music companies will crumble and fall? You’d think so, wouldn’t you? In the next Digital Ethics article I’m going to take a look at some of the reasons that I think this is unlikely.

Warning: This article has nothing to do with the ethics of digital. However, it does provide the context for Digital Ethics #7, which will have a LOT to do with the ethics of digital.

On January 9, 2001 at the MacWorld Expo, Steve Jobs announced iTunes, a ‘brand new’ concept in playing music. Like many things Steve says, it was an exaggeration. MP3 player/organisers had existed on the PC since 1998 (see Digital Ethics #5). However, Steve’s popularising genius was nowhere more apparent than in this simple program. To quote Cabel Sasser, the creator of Audion, one of the Mac’s best digital music players...

‘iTunes was, of course… brilliant. It single-handedly taught us an entirely new philosophy on software design. Do you really need that preference that [only] 1% of your users will use? Can you find a better way to design that interface than having each function in a separate window? Can you clean this up, even if it means it’s a little less flexible? iTunes blazed the trail for clean, efficient software design for a broad audience… It was a way to take a complicated digital music collection, and make it easy. Sure, it was limited, but man was it easy.’

And it was free.

However, iTunes was merely the beginning of Mr Jobs’ plan for global digital music domination.

In the late 1990s, a young product designer called Tony Fadell tried to start an electronics consumer products company. After failing to get financing, he was employed by Apple, first as a contractor in February 2001, and then in April that year as the senior director of a (top secret) project.

On October 23, 2001, at a ‘press-only’ event, Steve Jobs announced the availability of a new portable music device, the iPod. There had been no rumours about this product, no reason to believe that Apple would ever enter this sector. Browse the results of a Google search for 'october 23 ipod announce' and you’ll see that industry reaction was initially very mixed. History shows that the iPod is one of the most successful and influential consumer products. Ever.

A lot of words have been typed about the iPod being a ‘design classic’. About its simplicity and ease-of-use. However, the ‘extra sauce’ that made the iPod such a phenomenal success is the synergy between it and the iTunes program.

There were other digital music programs available on the Mac and the PC, some more powerful, some plain awful. iTunes hit the ‘Goldilocks Zone’... it was ‘just right’ for the majority of its target audience. Simply put, iTunes made the business of acquiring, organising and transferring digital music a pleasant (and addictive) experience.

The iPod was originally a Mac only product. In 2002, Apple released the second-generation iPod in two versions, one for Mac users and one for Windows users. The only difference between the packages was the bundled software. The Windows iPods came packaged with MusicMatch software, probably the best PC music organising software at the time.

A ‘feature-for-feature’ comparison put MusicMatch ahead of iTunes. But PC users wanted iTunes. Before long, there were thousands of people petitioning Apple for their own version. In 2003, Apple released third-generation iPods that included a Windows version of the iTunes software.

By October 2004, iPod dominated digital music player sales in the United States, with over 90% of the market for hard-drive-based players and over 70% of the market for all types of players. This trend is reflected worldwide. iPod sales are now past 42 million units, 12 million of them in the last three months of 2005.

In 1987 the German Aerospace Agency funded a project for the Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen to find ways to compress digital sound and video data. Various methods were experimented with, and in 1991 the Musicam technique was chosen for its efficiency, simplicity, musicality and robustness. The MP3 format (Moving Picture Experts Group Audio Layer III) evolved from this project.

A couple of years ago, my daughter Sky invited some friends to stay at my place for a few days. As I chauffeured them from Lincoln to London, they fed me a steady stream of their favourite CDs to play on my MPV’s sound system. All of them were copies, the album’s name scrawled across the label in permanent ink.

When we reached my house I mentioned how I had enjoyed a couple of the tracks by H.I.M. and Nightwish. The owner of the CDs handed me a battered case, stuffed with hundreds of CDs and invited me to make copies of the ones I wanted. Not one CD in the wallet was a ‘legal’ copy. I asked if these had been duplicated from original CDs. The answer, ‘No, I copied my friends’ copies’.

And why not? Unlike tapes, the sound quality from a copied CD is identical to that of the ‘master’, and will probably outlive its artist’s popularity. Recordable CDs are available at less than 10p each, a hundredth of the cost of a chart CD. And duplicates are easily and speedily performed.

Simply put, even rich western teenagers aren’t going to spend the majority of their hard-begged disposable income on something they can get a lot cheaper from another source. Especially when there is so much other stuff they want (e.g. concerts, computers, clothes) that isn’t so easily duplicated.

And the music industry still hasn’t died! 2004 saw the best year-on-year trend in global music sales for half a decade. Over £19,400,000,000 worth of commercially-recorded CDs were sold. That’s just a few thousand dollars short of Vietnam’s gross national product for the same year.

Home-recorded CDs seem to be functioning in much the same way as cassette tapes did, disseminating music to a wider audience. Teenage birthday and Christmas requests continue to include their favourite artists’ latest CD releases. Despite the identical sound quality of the duplicated CD, there is still seems to be something more satisfying about the ‘genuine article’ with its properly printed cover artwork, track listings and sleeve notes.

In the next article, I will be looking at the next evolution in digital, and how the recording industry began contacting their lawyers.

Crash is an articulate and captivating film. Mark Isham’s soundtrack is an essay in sparse loveliness (think of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports), the actors play their parts with pace and emotion. The photography is sumptuous, with breathtaking, state-of-the-art camera work. Morally, its tightly-linked vignettes are evocative of Chaucerian fabliaux, mocking human conceit and hypocrisy. The film is brilliantly paced, seeming far shorter than its two-hour running time. I will almost certainly watch it again (if only to see Sandra Bullock being so atypically horrid).

Morality seems to be high on the agenda in western entertainment right now. The hugely-successful Desperate Housewives is Canterbury Tales tranplanted to suburban middle-class, 21st Century America – with not a single peccadillo or faux pas going unpunished. Lost is a series of personal stories and flashbacks woven into a flimsy adventure mystery that does everything except have ‘R-E-D-E-M-P-T-I-O-N’ running along the bottom of the screen.

I watch Desperate Housewives and Lost as mainstream entertainment, and am often pleasantly surprised at how they manage to lift the genre into something a little deeper and thought-provoking. I watched Crash expecting to experience something more complex and profound, and was disappointed to experience a tightly-scripted, but ultimately predictable series of set pieces leading to a number of artfully constructed denouments.

Crash’s main disappointment was that it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I have lived long enough to be aware that even the best humans are racist. I know that every good thing I do is riddled with mixed-motives and conceit. I am faced daily with the unpleasant truth that life is a confusing melange of unanswered questions and contradictions.

The targets were too easy. Corrupt politicians anyone? Ungrateful rich women? Even the ‘surprises’ are too broad-brush. A black police-chief who refuses to confront racism because he knows it will cost him his job. An honest cop whose disillusionment causes him to make a tragic misjudgment. It all smacks of the politically-correct preaching to the politically-correct.

The 1999 film Magnolia is regularly name-checked in reviews of Crash as being similar in style and content. Where Magnolia differs is in its refusal to try and wrap things up. Its characters are even more grimy, conflicted and confused. There is coincidence. There is redemption. There are lessons to be learned. But the information is delivered in such a manner that they dawn on you in ways that are ultimately more satisfying and powerful than Crash’s cleverly crafted, but pedagogic conclusions.

In 1979 Philips and Sony teamed up to design a digital audio disc to replace the LP as a primary medium for marketing and distributing music. Compact Disc (CD) reached the market in late 1982.

The first CD players cost over £600 (that’s about £2,000 in today’s money). The discs cost as much as three times the equivalent vinyl LPs. The artwork area compared poorly to that of a 12” LP. The jewel cases were (are!) badly designed and easily broken. Audiophiles criticised the new format’s sound as ‘thin’ and ‘lifeless’. And the shiny silver discs weren’t as ‘indestructible’ as the original advertisements suggested.

And yet the CD format was a huge success. Within a year of its release, many people were replacing their LP collections with CDs. The ‘record’ companies could hardly believe their good fortune, people were buying the same music twice!

Why? Convenience. The elaborate ritual of removing a vinyl LP from its two sleeves, carefully positioning it on the turntable’s platter, checking that you had the correct speed engaged, switching on the motor, manoeuvring the tone-arm into the correct position and then gently lowering the cartridge onto the LP may be evocative and romantic, but it’s also time-consuming. And you have to repeat the procedure every 20 minutes!

By contrast CDs have a maximum playing time of about 75 minutes (allegedly chosen because the president of the Philips wanted something that could play his favourite piece of music – Beethoven’s 9th Symphony –without interruption). Individual tracks can be conveniently accessed at the push of a button, or played at random. Unless treated with clinical care, vinyl LPs degrade with age and use. As long as CDs are handled appropriately, they will provide an indefinite supply of hiss- and pop-free music.

I waited until 1989 to buy my first CD player. Up until that time, I would buy an LP, then record it onto compact cassette, keeping the LP as a ‘master’ copy. The cassettes would be used at home, in my car’s audio system, and at work. However, vinyl LPs were becoming increasingly scarce (see the link at the foot of this article), and some recordings were only being released on CD. So, in September 1989, I purchased my first CD player, along with a copy of Bob Dylan’s ‘Oh Mercy’. I remember setting the player up at my design studio and enjoying the simplicity of ‘popping and dropping’ the polycarbonate disc into its tray, and pressing the ‘play’ button.

The CD got played countless times. Partly because of the novelty of the new format. Partly because it is a brilliant album. However, Daniel Lanois’ shimmering production and Dylan’s world-weary genius can’t adequately explain how many times it got played. The real reason was laziness. It was just so easy to leave it running, on random, or repeat.

CDs simplified my life. No longer did I have to record each purchase to tape, I just played the item I bought. No more kneeling by my hi-fi stack trying to balance sound levels. No more calculating how to squeeze all the tracks on to one side of a C90. No more hand-writing each track name onto the cassette’s inlay sleeve. And no more waiting until I was home to be able to read the sleeve notes!

Soon I had a 10 CD autochanger in my car – 160 songs accessible at the click of a button – no more fumbling in the cassette rack, or laborious fast-forwarding or rewinding to find a particular track.

Gradually my CD collection grew... and the cassettes got played less and less. My resolution to only buy CDs that I hadn’t already got on LP faded quicker than a cassette tape’s metal oxide coating. In 2002 I threw my entire collection of cassettes into a skip. I hadn’t played any of them for over three years.

(An interesting slant on why polycarbonate beat vinyl)   

In case the previous article’s cliffhanger has been causing you lost sleep, home taping didn’t kill the music industry. In fact many (including myself) would argue that it unwittingly helped it sell even more records by using an ancient method that predates billboards, radio and television. It’s called ‘word-of-mouth’ (now often referred to as ‘viral marketing’) which is still the most effective method of spreading just about any information, and the primary method of bringing new artists to a wider audience.

But why, I hear my imaginary audience ask, if you already have a copy of a song would you then go out and buy it on record? Well, it’s a good question, and deserves an answer. A deep sense of moral duty? A strong desire to add to millionaire rock stars’ bank balances? Maybe... but I suspect these weren’t the primary motives.

A home-recorded compact cassette was rarely a thing of intrinsic beauty. Most came decorated with (if you were lucky) hastily hand-written album and track titles on the cover insert. The sound quality was hardly ever comparable to the original record, and even the best recordings faded with use. You were constantly reminded that what you had was a pale facsimile of the original item.

So, there was always the incentive to go out and buy the ‘real thing’ with its superior cover artwork and the promise of better sound and longevity. Birthday and Christmas gifts might have occasionally included a ‘value pack’ of blank compact cassettes, but rarely home-recorded ones (and yes I know there was a huge pre-recorded compact cassette market... I’ll explain this later, all right!) The recording industry’s profits were safe, for now.

In the next installment we’ll see the reason for the having the word ‘Digital’ in the series’ title.

My first attempt at musical piracy was when my brother and I experimented with a ‘portable’ reel-to-reel tape deck. Our favourite song was a 7" single of ‘Snoopy vs the Red Baron’ by the Royal Guardsmen, which we were doing our best to wear out (along with our mum’s nerves) on the family record player.

At this time (c.1971?) our family was living in Australia, and the tape deck’s primary use was producing voice recordings to send to relatives. I’m not sure why (I think it was so we could play the song in our room, rather than being restricted to the lounge), but Gareth and I realised that we could use it to record music as well. We then spent the rest of the day struggling to get a ‘perfect’ recording of the aforementioned song. The main technical problem was that the hand-held microphone picked up background noise much better than the song we were trying to record, the slightest movement would be painfully apparent on playing back the recording. After much frustration, we eventually settled on a final ‘take’ spoiled only by our mum calling us for lunch toward the end of the song.

I don’t think this particular incident hit the music industry too hard. Anyway, we had already bought the record, so although we were breaking the letter of the law, we could have argued that we were just making a ‘backup’ for personal use. However I had embarked upon the ‘slippery slope’ of duplicating copyright material.

As I entered teenage years, the era of the compact cassette dawned, and the family music-centre was employed to produce compilations of songs recorded from radio broadcasts. These would be listened to by myself, and shared with friends.

Of course, the recordings were hissy and low-fi. Songs I really liked were saved up for, and bought as singles or albums. I can still remember how exciting it was to visit Sellanbys in South Harrow, deciding on the records I wanted most within the budget I had, then rushing home to listen to them in all their ‘hi-fidelity’ glory (with the volume cranked up as loud as my parents would allow).

However, I soon realised that recordings from vinyl sounded better than ones from the radio. As with the radio recordings, I shared them with friends. Well, I say ‘share’, often they weren’t returned. So, I would record another one. I had become a murderer. I was ‘killing music’…

While my enduring images of robots are of the 1950s science fiction variety (because they are SO cool!), most modern robots are less interesting, performing production-line tasks such as spot welding, spray painting and the assembly of small parts.

The English word ‘robot’ comes from the Czech ‘robota’, meaning ‘servitude’ or ‘forced labour’. It has been around since 1923 when Karel Capek’s play ‘R.U.R.’ (a version of the Golem legend) was translated into English.

As the 21st Century begins, robots are beginning to enter the domestic arena. Robot suction cleaners and lawn mowers are now readily available. But the robots I really want to see are of the anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic) variety. Cute ones, with faces, arms and legs. And I’m not alone. Honda, Sony and Hitachi are all developing robots that can move and interact with humans. However, none of these are yet available to buy.

Business Design of Japan have recently introduced a 45-centimeter robot which rejoices in the name of ‘Snuggling Ifbot’ (I’m guessing it loses something in the translation). With its moving ‘googly’ eyes, a glowing nose and clothed in an extremely fetching astronaut suit, Ifbot has been created as a companion to Japan’s senior citizens, especially those living in care facilities. Ifbot has 40 facial expressions and a 1,000 word vocabulary. It can detect whether you are happy or sad, and ‘loves to get hugs’. It has the conversation level of a five-year-old, apparently plenty to ‘stimulate the brains of senior citizens’.

If a person says to Ifbot, “I’m bored today”, Ifbot could respond, “Are you bored? What do you want to do?”

To the statement, “Isn’t it nice today?”, Ifbot is likely to reply, “It is a fine Autumn day”, by detecting the season from its internal clock.

Preliminary reports show that many of its elderly testers prefer it to human carers, as it doesn’t gets bored with replying, and its reactions are pleasing and consistently affirming.

As well as being good for a natter, the Ifbot can perform calculations, read stories and news, play puzzles and memory games, offer advice and conduct verbal medical checks.

An ideal Christmas gift for that elderly Japanese person in your life, your very own Ifbot is available for around £3,200.

     

The iTunes music store provides an attractive way of choosing from over 1.7 million tracks of legal music downloads at a reasonable cost. And it has been a resounding success, with over half a billion tracks downloaded so far (Trivia Alert: the 500 millionth track was Faith Hill’s ‘Mississippi Girl’). The site now boasts an (unsubstantiatable) 80% of the legal music download market.

I purchase most of my music on CDs, it is often cheaper, and it means I will be able to upgrade my collection as better compression algorithms emerge and storage capacity increases (CDs also function as easy-to-find backups). I occasionally use iTunes for ‘impulse’ purchases, particularly of recently released singles. However, I object to the files being encrypted (even though there are ways to ‘break’ this).

About a year ago, a new music download site emerged, called eMusic. I took up its offer of 50 free downloads, and am now a subscriber. Subcriptions start at £5.77 for 40 tracks per month (14p a track), and the range of music has grown impressively during 2005. Recent downloads have included the latest recordings from Art Brut, Arcade Fire, Antony & The Johnsons, plus a few other bands that don’t start with an ‘A’.

The site is well put-together, with a download manager (PC & Mac), a ‘save-for-later’ feature, and the ability to buy ‘booster packs’ if you run out of subscription credits. The files are unencrypted, high-quality MP3s so they’ll play on most digital music players.

The 50 free downloads offer is still available. You have to give your card details, so remember to cancel within the stated time if you decide not to subscribe!

 (eMusic site)     (free downloads offer)    

Entrepreneurs who spied a niche when Apple unveiled its video-playing iPod are proving that sex sells even in tiny packages – especially when it is portable.

One online social network of amateur pinup girls said it logged 500,000 downloads of the sexy ‘featurettes’ – three- to five-minute video clips – in the first 24 hours targeting the new iPod-toting crowd.

It’s a no-brainer: pornography to go.

The naughtiness is already finding its way into video handhelds through business models tried-and-true – along with some new ones – as the adult entertainment industry works to untether video content. Soon enough, skinflicks whose viewing has been restricted to the privacy of homes and theaters could be on view for all ages to see.

Point to Ponder: The $10 billion-a-year pornography business has become one of the most flush and vigorous in America. It’s bigger than the combined revenues of all the professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises. It’s greater than the take at all the US movie box offices. Ringtone revenues are catching up fast though!

     

Radio 2’s Good Morning Sunday programme interviewed Reverend Rossiter, a former Prisoner of War in Singapore, Thailand and Indochina. To hear this elderly man speak with grace and wisdom on his life experiences was a breath of fresh air.

His answer to the inevitable question of ‘Where was God in the camps?’ reduced me to tears, not because it was original, but because it was from someone who had lived it. The answer? “God was there in every good thing that happened, every person who helped another person, every time people made choices to do good rather than evil”. Asked whether anyone had forgiven their captors for the awful things they had done, he replied that he and many others had, but not all, following it with the rejoinder “Those who forgave have fared far better than those who chose not to”.

Rossiter has since been back to Japan on a peace and reconciliation mission with other ex-Prisoners of War, and said that visiting the Hiroshima sites had helped him to realise that all parties in the war had committed acts that required forgiveness.

When asked whether he was saddened by the fact that Remembrance Day is gradually fading in perceived importance, he seemed reticent to pass any judgment, choosing to remark that he hoped that people would remember the past so that they would do all they could to prevent similar things happening in the future. To which this soft, materialistic 40-something, who enjoys living in the freedom that millions have paid for with their lives, can only murmur a very thankful “Amen”.

     

Having ‘pad-tested’ the Mighty Mouse for a few months I can say (with a number of caveats) that it is my favourite mouse so far. In fact, my previous favourite mouse (the Macally IceMouse) has now been relegated to my old Pismo Powerbook. The scroll ball’s 360˚ smooth and controllable range of movement makes navigating everything from web pages to InDesign documents so much more enjoyable that going back to a ‘conventional mouse’ is as irksome as moving from a two button to a one button unit.

I’ve now bought another Mighty Mouse (am I the only person who dislikes that name?) for use with my Powerbook when at work, and found myself putting it in my bag so I could use it at home this weekend (so, I guess I’ll be buying another one soon!).

Pros...
- scroll ball is smooth and intuitive
- feels good in the hand
- encourages ergonomic movements

Cons...
- not fast enough without extra software
- side ‘force sensing’ buttons are difficult to use
- cable is too short for some applications
- wireless would have been nice

The software that has made it even more usable for me is Steermouse, which allows the speed and acceleration of all functions to be minutely fine-tuned. Because I use a couple of large screens on my desktop Mac, the ability for a mouse to be able to go from very fast to very controllable is vital. Steermouse, in combination with the *cough* Mighty Mouse, allows me to do this better than with any other input device I have used so far.

 (Apple)     (Steermouse)    

A survey released this week by the US tech research firm Telephia says 9% of the wireless population purchased ringtones during the May-August quarter.

The survey says nearly 70% of all mobile phone ringtones have been downloaded by women.

According to the research firm Informa Telecoms and Media, the ringtone market is expected to be worth $4.9 billion this year.

Hip-hop and rap is the most popular music genre, says Telephia, accounting for about 25% of ringtone revenues for downloads of tunes by artists like 50 Cent and Kanye West. Next is pop music with 17% of the market, followed by soul and R&B tones with 14%.

     

Visit the Apple Movie Trailer site and download one of the high definition examples (unless you’ve got a really big screen and very powerful computer, the 720 versions will suffice).

King Kong is a good place to start. Be amazed at just how involving the action is, crisp, clear and 3-dimensional... then prepare yourself for the sobering realisation that all your current equipment will need to be replaced to play the stuff, and that your current DVDs will probably go the same way as your VHS video collections in the next few years.

A number of American TV stations are already providing high definition broadcasts. Sky are promising a high definition service for the UK in 2006.

Point to ponder: the resolution of the current 6cm iPod screen is comparable to the resolution of VHS video recordings.

 (Trailers)      (High Definition TV article)     

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Muster has predicted that within five years, Apple could release an iPod with one terabyte of storage – that’s almost 17 times the maximum amount of iPod storage Apple currently offers.