As six of us at Poynter pass around the new iPad, I’m the crabbiest person in the room. We’re testing out apps and talking about navigation and features, and all I can think about is how much I’d rather be outside, enjoying the beautiful day. Clearly, I’m not a fangirl. Keep that in mind if I sound surly as I talk about video on news sites and apps on the iPad.
The good news: some video worked great and looked great. The bad news: a lot didn’t. As someone who survived numerous first-day-of-site-redesigns, I thought that overall, the performance was respectable.
My favorite video player implementation on news sites is The Wall Street Journal app. There is limited free content, but on the “Now” version (accessible without a subscription), the video player was embedded seamlessly into the page, played in position or expanded to full screen. The quality of the videos themselves varied wildly. A feature piece looked great, a day-of story on people in line to buy iPads was pretty dreadful.
My favorite news iPad app for photos is USA Today, followed closely by Time Magazine. USA Today’s gallery images were huge and gorgeous, and sliding through them really was a sensory experience. The video was not nearly as impressive. There were no videos in the app, and in the browser version, clicking on a video takes you to a page that says you need the latest Flash player. Which, as I assume anyone who cares enough about video to read this article knows, ain’t happening on the iPad. The app includes the snapshots survey feature, similar to the iPhone, that lets you vote on a question and see results based on your location. I count it as the only true interactivity I spotted in these early apps.
The NPR app has no video, but tons of audio, and lots of ways to experience it. Like their iPhone app, you can create playlists to play stories now or later, download podcasts or just listen to audio within the stories. The photo treatment was lovely. Viewing the NPR Web site on the iPad, videos hung up when I hit the full screen button right away. Once I learned to restrain myself, they played smoothly and looked good.
ESPN’s Score Center XL app ($4.99) has tons of video, and the quality looks even better than it does in the iPhone app.
The Time Magazine app had a video in a story and one on an ad, and both played well.
Video really shone, though, on some of the non-news apps.
Hands-down, the most beautiful video I saw today was in the ABC Player app. It crashed twice as videos were loading, but the third time was a charm, and it was gorgeous. That said, it was highly produced programming, not news content. On the flip side, video on the iPad viewed in the Web browser didn’t play at all.
I wanted to love the Netflix app, but every time I clicked the full-screen button, I lost the movie completely. Once I finally stopped trying to get it displayed full screen, it worked. The video quality was good but not great.
YouTube on the browser performed exactly it does on any computer. Side-by-side comparisons of a YouTube video on the iPad and the same YouTube video on a laptop left the iPad the clear winner, with much better color saturation and sharpness (although the smaller screen helps with that). The glossy screen on the iPad made things look very crisp, but it’s tough to get it angled without glare.
Was I wowed? No. Did I like it? Yes. But I will not rush out and get one. I do think it’s going to be a great way to consume video. While the video players were flaky, and apps blew up, there’s a lot of promise there.
As I’ve been reading the pre-release commentary, one thing that has struck me is the way some have dismissively talked about the iPad as the equivalent of the CD-ROM — a short-term technology. If the iPad has half the impact of the CD, then it will be powerful. I can trace my own interest in multimedia directly to Microsoft’s Dinosaurs (okay, that and “Monty Python’s Complete Waste of Time“). CD-ROMs showed me that we could interact with information, not just consume it.
A couple years later, when I began to create multimedia for the Web, I had something to aspire to, a beginning road map on getting started with interactivity. The CD-ROM was far from perfect, and may not have lasted, but its impact did. I suspect that the iPhone, and now the iPad, even as transitional technology, will have a lasting impact on the future of interactivity, as we handle information with our fingers and hands.
CORRECTION: This story originally confused how video was treated in the New York Times Editors’ Choice app with how video on NYTimes.com appeared on the iPad.
