Video?

Apple seems to have done some really smart things.
I'm sure you all know about the new video-playing iPod. There were (and still are) a number of problems with releasing a portable video player. It's pretty much impossible to release a video player that does video just as well as music. You're obviously going to have to make compromosises. The compromises that Apple took with the new iPod make sense, but I never really thought this was a possible route for them. I was always thinking that if Apple were to make an iPod with video-playing capabilities, then they would make a device that's specially designed for that purpose. They didn't. It's a smart move. Just slap video-playback onto an already popular mp3 player, and video comes along for the ride. I'm sure people are going to use the video-capabilities, which will then grow the user-base which is likely to download video content off of video stores, which will then get the TV industry (not so much the movie industry) to start putting content out for the device, which in turn causes more people to use that content and causes others to buy iPods, etc... Apple never really cared about making a good portable video player, just a portable video player.
And it's working, I've already been hearing news that content from online websites is being made in an iPod-ready version, as seen with the video for the smashmipod website. It will be interesting to see where this takes TV.
So the main thing here is that Apple hasn't made a particularly good product (video-playback wise), but it doesn't need to push video into a high selling point if it wants to expand the market.