Last September, Apple’s Steve Jobs clearly explained the strategy for the iPod during a Special Event. He mentioned that people can now use their digital content on their iPod, in their cars and on their computers. The next step is to be able to access that content from the living room on large TVs through the se of the upcoming iTV device.
However, there is still one crucial piece missing, namely storage. On many PCs, specially on laptops, storage is still constraint. On my 17” Mac Book Pro I use about 25% of my internal HD with digital content, which currently is mainly music and a couple of TV shows episodes (mainly promotional content given away by the iTunes store). However, once the iTV is released, I see myself subscribing to more vlogs and probably purchasing movies, specially if Apple moves to a HDTV quality format.
The obvious question is where will I store all that content? I just checked the size of an episode of Weeds and it weights 357.6MB. In this case, the first season of this show only consisted of 10 episodes, but this is unusual, 22 to 24 episodes is what we should expect. That means that if you subscribe to just three standard 40 minutes shows, you require 25GB of free space on your hard disk drive and that is per year! This may not sound like a major problem if you have one of the new custom built iMacs equipped with a 750GB hard drive, but it should worry the owners of an 60 or 80GB iBook.
So, what is the solution? Desktop users do not have a problem, they can easyly add external hard disk drives and stack them on their desks. However, the world is shifting away from desktops, as most users value more mobility over performance. For mobile users, external drives are not very practical. Don’t get me wrong, I do have an external device for backup purposes, but I do not enjoy the process of taking it out of the drawer where I store it, connect it and later unplug it and return it to its drawer. I can live with it, but I do not enjoy the process. If I had to do that in order to watch a movie or a TV show, it would probably be a show stopper. For me, taking a DVD out of its case and insert it in the DVD player is just much easier.
Of course, there is a solution. It is called NAS (Network Attached Storage). Apple sells a NAS device for its XServe rack server, it is called XServe Raid and allows professional users to store up to 7TB of data which, combined with XSAN, can be shared by up to 64 concurrent users. However, at even under $2 per MB, this product is still clearly aimed at professional users. What home users really need is a smaller capacity wireless NAS device, where everyone at home can store their digital media. With 802.11a/b/g this was simply not possible, but now that Apple and others seem poised to adopt the much faster 802.11n, this now seems like a viable solution. With such a device turned on 24/7 in your den, you could backup your files from your laptop at any time and watch all your TV episodes without having to turn your computer on. Better still, by using RAID and hot-swappable drives, your valuable files would be totally safe.
I certainly hope that Apple is working on a Bonjour discoverable NAS, because we all know that it would transparently integrate with iTunes and the upcoming iTV device. However, should they decide not to enter the market (after all such a device could easily cost more than US$500, which puts it out of the reach of most consumers) there is an opportunity for third party manufacturers such as Linksys or Maxtor that have started dabbling in that market with some promising, though immature products like the NSLU2 and the 500GB Fusion.
November 13th, 2006 at 1:07 am
Don’t forget the USB port on the iTV. They haven’t said what one can do with that yet.