News 

The research firm spent the best part of October monitoring 400 iPod users to discover that video comprised just one per cent of the content played on suitably-enabled iPods.

Nielsen said that a main reason for this is that most of those who purchased video iPods were only after the large storage capacity to hold their music collections. It took 27 days of research to come to that conclusion.

Apple was never in a rush to

ADVERTISEMENT

enable video on iPods, both for technical reasons such as storage capacity and battery life and for the fact the it is well aware that watching video on a handheld device was never going to be more than a marginal activity.

As the company's CEO Steve Jobs explained at the beginning of 2004, portable video will never take off in the same way that music has. Apple enabled iPod video because it could; its video ambitions lie very much with movie and TV show sales in iTunes to be viewed on the computer desktop and, via the forthcoming 'iTV', on a television set.

Such is handheld video's lack of appeal that Creative's latest Widescreen Multimedia Player is being outsold by the brown Zune according to Amazon's US bestsellers list. Oh the ignominy.