While I wouldn’t go quite so far as the Beeb, who maintains that consumers “‘snub portable video'” over dedicated music-only media devices, the numbers from a recent survey of Europeans does bear out that people just don’t care about watching video on the run.
At first the numbers don’t look too awful for video, with 13% of those surveyed interested in video devices compared to 27% interested in music-only devices—so about half. Unfortunately, that number gets split in the details, with 5% interested in a music/video hybrid device, with another 7% interested in a videogame/video hybrid device.
Jupiter Research feels that portends a bad scene for portable video:
Mr Fogg said portable video players were likely to remain a niche product that would not be able to compete with devices dedicated to music playback.
The more I use these portable video units, the more convinced I am of my original claims of general consumer apathy towards the devices as a whole. They’re cool in their way, and as technology all portable media players will eventually glom into video/audio devices. But the big units are not going to ever outsell iPod-sized (or smaller) devices.
