A Web site called TVpredictions.com looks into its crystal ball and concludes that the video iPod will be a failure. Philip Swann, president of TVPredictions.com, really hates the idea. In what appears to be a press release, TVpredictions.com writes:

"The video iPod will be Steve Jobs' folly," Swann said. "Americans will not watch full-length videos -- or perhaps even short music videos -- on 2.5-inch screens on portable devices. It makes no sense.

"The music IPod is successful because it replicates something we've been doing for more than two decades -- listening to portable music players while on the go. It's easy because we can continue to perform other tasks while we listen to our tunes."

Swann added: "However, the video iPod will require you to stop what you're doing and focus on a video. Who has the time to do that during the day? Plus, the video will be on a small screen that will make watching highly uncomfortable and unsatisfying.

I don't know who this "Phillip Swann" is, but he's clearly one of those rich fellers who has gold-plated toilets in his home, lights $100 cigars with $100 bills ... and pays people to do his waiting for him.

It's true we Americans are an extraordinarily busy people. But it's also true that a lot of that busy-ness can best be described by that old Army figure of speech, "hurry up and wait."

You hurry up to get to the grocery store before it's too late ... and wait in line at the checkout counter. You hurry up to make it to Starbucks without making yourself late for work ... and then you wait in line forever for your triple half-decaf mocha frappuccino cappuccino. You hurry to the deli to grab a sandwich to bring it back and eat at your desk ... and then you stand on line at the counter while some woman in front of you spends EIGHT MINUTES agonizing over whether to get pepper-turkey or smoked turkey--LADY IT'S JUST TURKEY FOR PETE'S SAKE WILL YOU MAKE UP YOUR MIND!!!!

What do you do while waiting? Well, maybe you make a few calls on your cell phone, maybe you talk to someone, maybe you read a magazine, maybe you listen to some music on your iPod. And pretty soon, maybe you'll watch some video on your iPod.

Travel leads to more hurry-up-and-wait time. If you commute by mass transit, you've got time on the train, bus, or in the van pool that you could be spending with your video iPod. As of 2000 (the last year I've found statistics for), slightly less than 5% of Americans--including more than half of New York City residents--took mass transit to work. More recently, mass transit systems from San Francisco to Pittsburgh have been becoming more popular as gas prices increase.

The big daddy of all hurry-up-and-wait experiences is air travel. A flight from California to New York is six solid butt-busting hours of sitting around and doing nothing. That could be prime time for video iPod consuming.

So, in fact, even the busiest Americans have plenty of time to use a video iPod while waiting for other things to happen.

The second objection to the video iPod is that the tiny screens make for uncomfortable viewing. Again, that's only half-true. In announcing the iPod last week, Apple also announced deals with Disney and Pixar to offer TV shows and movies for download.

For now, there's pent-up demand for movies and TV on the video iPod, as measured by del.icio.us/popular, a page which measures the most popular pages on the community-bookmarking service del.icio.us. The day after the video iPod's introduction, the most popular page on that site was a guide to ripping DVDs for display on the iPod. (Predictably enough, another one of the top 10 pages was entitled, "HOWTO Put Porn On Your IPod." But the title was misleading; the page is just a guide to moving any video, regardless of content, to the iPod.)

However, Swann is right in that I don't expect much long-term demand for watching full-length movies and TV on the iPod. A big-screen epic like "Titanic" or "Lawrence of Arabia" will, at first, have some gee-whiz value in being watched on a palm-sized device. That'll be good once or twice, but when the novelty wears off, so will the appeal.

Likewise, today's TV--like "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," two series included in the Apple/Disney deal--is designed to be watched on people's 62" home theaters, not on a gadget that can get lost between your sofa cushions.

Also, movies and TV are designed to be watched in great swathes of time, not in nibbles a few minutes long.

So Swann is right in that existing movies and TV probably won't be very popular on the video iPod, but there is a new generation of video specifically designed to be watched in intervals a few minutes long, on displays a couple of inches square. These include our own The News Show and the video blog Rocketboom. I watch those every day.

That brings us to Swann's third objection to the video iPod--that it's unnatural. The iPod, he notes, was an extension of what we were already used to: "The music IPod is successful because it replicates something we've been doing for more than two decades -- listening to portable music players while on the go. It's easy because we can continue to perform other tasks while we listen to our tunes."

Again, Swann misses the point here. Portable music, in the form of the transistor radio, was as unnatural as the video iPod not so long ago. Up until 1954, you had to stay in one place to listen to music, but starting in that year, anybody with $50 in their pocket could buy a transistor radio and have music whereever they went. And the Sony Walkman, introduced exactly 25 years later, was another revolution; until then, you were at the mercy of radio DJs as to what music you heard while out and about; now, you could bring your music with you.

(The Walkman was also revolutionary in that it included headphones; anyone who lived through the shoulder-mounted boom-box fad of the 1980s remembers how welcome the silence was.)

The audio iPod was yet another revolution, in that it has enough capacity to store all your music. That seemed insane to me at first. Why would a person want to keep all their music in their pocket? When I leave my house, I don't bring all my clothes with me; I just bring whatever clothes I need; likewise, I'll just bring the music I want to listen to.

Now, it seems insane to not store all your music on the iPod. How can I leave the house without the Harry Belafonte music I bought on a stupid impulse a few years ago? I mean, I haven't listened to it, ever, but I might want to. And, as an added bonus, the leftover space on that big iPod is plenty of room for me to back up my notebook computer when I'm on the road.

The reason I'm giving Swann a hard time here is because I think he's typical of a certain kind of thinking. He looks at technology innovation through the lens of what's currently available, and dismisses it because it's something genuinely new, not a refinement of existing technology.

Swann says: "The video iPod was born from arrogance. Apple has been so successful with the audio iPod that it thinks it can't go wrong. But it will this time. This is an example of a technology that is being launched only because it can be, not because anybody wants it."

That's a risk that any vendor faces when it innovates. Sometimes, the innovation is crazy. But sometimes, the inventor has come out with something for which there's a lot of pent-up demand that's invisible to everybody but the inventor. It's those latter cases on which mighty business empires are built. I mean, who the heck needs an oven that can cook food in minutes with radiation? A box that displays moving pictures? A cheap computer that sits on your desk? Nobody needed those things--until they came out, when it turned out everyone needed them.

The introducton of a video iPod marks the dawn of an exciting time in the evolution of popular art. The video iPod, like the portable DVD players we're starting to see pop up all over the place, allow people for the first time to carry their video with them, the way the Walkman allowed people to to carry music with them. We're already starting to see the emergence of video designed to take advantage of slow download speeds and small displays, and that format is only going to get more popular and more sophisticated in the next few years.

My colleague Tom Claburn has more to say about the video iPod.