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What the Apple iPad Will Mean for Movies

Before I get into the nitty-gritty, here's my bottom line: this is not a game-changer for movies. Perhaps for print media, but not for home video.

1. The iPad is not a revolution, at best a gradual advancement.

Really game-changing stuff like a camera embedded in the display or a streaming video system may well be in the works for the iPad 2, but nothing announced today is conceptually different than what can already be done with the iPhone.

Yes, the name is terrible, but iPod seemed almost as stupid at first and now we take it for granted. Making a touch interface slightly larger means now it's slightly easier to watch movies on it than on a laptop and a lot easier than a smartphone.

2. This will definitely change the way some people consume movies -- who and how many, it's too early to say.

Sitting with the pad perched in your lap will definitely be a new way to watch movies. It may even be comfortable. I can see this device replacing portable DVD players easily, because it is light and useful for other tasks too.

The 3G connection is too slow for HD streaming and the hard drive sizes are too small for substantial HD movie collections, so I don't think the iPad is going to be for video what the iPod was for music.

In some ways, they have to keep it crippled in these terms to keep Big Media happy. Despite the status quo with audio, Apple is not yet content to have consumers have substantial collections of high-quality video content without DRM. They, like the music industry, will have to eventually, pardon the wordplay, face the music. Today is not that day... media will continue to be consumed in narrow ways.

Who is going to buy this? At first, it will be the early adopters. I think it has a potential as a crossover product. There seems to be no need for netbooks any more with this in the same price zone. But media professionals will still opt for laptops over the iPad because of their higher power and flexibility. We're a long way from touchscreen Photoshop, sadly.

3. The dimensions are awkward for feature films.

The screen aspect ratio is 1.33:1 or 4x3, like old SD television. This is great for anything but modern cinema, which favors wider aspects like 1.85:1 and 2.39:1. The dimensions get even more awkward if you tilt the screen longways up.

Not that this is a dealbreaker. After all, we've gratefully become accustomed to letterboxing and are starting to become accustomed to pillarboxing. A film should always be shown in its intended aspect. The only question is when there are multiple intended aspects, as with Kubrick's later films or the new Star Trek or Avatar, which were shot with an alternate IMAX 4:3 aspect ratio in mind. (My vote is have the reference version of the movie be the one that shows the largest image, since a cropped version can always be created from that version.)

Probably the better ratio for Apple, assuming no engineering or cost restrictions, would've been the Golden Ratio 1.618...:1, acknowledged to be the most pleasing ratio, as it appears in the human face as well as elsewhere in nature. Sure, it would've been a Procrustian pick, sitting between the 1.33 and 1.85 standards, but as it is, going with the 1.33:1 ratio is a backwards-looking decision. Pretty much all content is getting made in widescreen ratios now.

4. The iTunes Extras format is basically a port of DVD menus.

A touch interface for bonus feature menus may open up some new avenues, but I doubt it will set the world on fire. Once again, here was an opportunity to really rethink the movie-viewing experience. Instead, we get something that's like a DVD menu but works in iTunes and on no other platform.

Also, iTunes Extras remain very complicated to create for the average user. I was hoping for an announcement of new iDVD and DVDStudioPro for easily creating iTunes LPs and iTunes Extras. By holding back on this, even for a few months, Apple is throwing a bone to Big Media, who can buy the hotshot programmers to create slick extras while indie filmmakers are still trying to wrap their heads around what an SDK is.

5. The iPad is a harbinger of increasing individualization and personalization of media.

Everyone in the family can be sitting on the couch watching/reading different content. I'm not one of the Cassandras saying this a disaster for society. If anything, everyone sitting peacefully with headphones is probably an improvement on many families' evenings.

From a business standpoint, I'm sure Apple would like each family member to have their own iPad, like many families now have multiple iPods. I think eventually, if only because medical technology will demand it, we'll be able in the near future to flick media (as in the movie Avatar) from a screen to a pad, or from a pad to another pad. So you can sync up your movie viewing with your siblings, even pause so your parents can share a clip of what they are watching. People feel the need to share media, and this is going to put a lot of pressure on DRM restrictions from day one.

6. The iPad's controlled/locked down system means big media can get behind it, which is an initial advantage but a long-term liability.

First of all, the iTunes store's movie section needs to open up more to independent content creators. The podcast section ain't enough! Indie filmmakers should be able to join the gravy train like the independent application developers have been able to do with the App Store.

Amazon has a good system in place with Unbox, but not the hardware to back it up. The Kindle just can't do video.

Bonus thought: Amazon Kindle will add color/video support in the next fiscal quarter or fade into oblivion.

7. Netflix streaming on the iPad would be incredible.

It would also kill sales of movies in the iTunes store, so look for Apple to block it, like they did with Amazon's mp3 Store on the iPhone. The real holy grail is the Infinite Jukebox, a subscription service with literally everything in one database, which can be called with a simple query and click.

A lot of people see this as the way it's heading. Certainly, there's nothing stopping a well-endowed public library from creating something very close to this already. People thought it was public libraries that would kill the print business. Ironically, it was the internet, specifically the search-empowered Google initiatives, that started making big physical piles of books that must be manually searched obsolete.

There will always be collectors, horders, packrats. God bless them, because they save the stuff that we don't know we'll regret losing.

But now there is a whole new category: digital pack rats. People who obsessively preserve ones and zeros on hard drives. As long as their data collections are made public to search engines and safely mirrored, that knowledge is part of humanity's collective knowledge.

It seems too much a public good for a company to have a monopoly over big content collections. That's why Google's Books initiative is considered distasteful, and why the open-content movement gains day by day. The iTunes lock-down perspective is outmoded. Apple had the chance to get together with publishers and create a micro-payment system that could essentially turn media content into a stock market where knowledge is currency.

Instead, I can purchase Star Trek for $19.99 and have it download over AT&T's painfully slow 3G network for $29.99/mo.

Does that sound like a revolution?

MORE:
MacBreak Weekly's extended coverage
Matt Jeppsen at FreshDV has his own 7 Ways the iPad Will Affect Filmmakers
Videoguys' Videographer Wishlist for the iPad
Jonathan Poritsky reviews available iPhone/iPod touch apps for filmmakers and how they might change on the iPad

About J. Ott

John Ott is a writer, filmmaker and futurist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.