The Facts

• Today's world is a world of portable media, movies included. The world is shifting from traditional forms of listening to music and watching movies, from being wired at home to the freedom to listen and watch wherever and when you want.
  
  

Benefits

• People who travel for business, students with time to kill between classes, kids in the backseats of cars and virtually anybody who isn't a couch potato is likely to take advantage of the ability to watch movies on the go. In addition to buying or renting movies online, you can use one of several software packages that allow standard DVDs to be "ripped" into a format that is playable on computers as well as iPods.
  
  

History of

• iPod Touch
  
  The idea of portable video has been around for decades, but with the exception of portable DVD players (and even those can be bulky), there hasn't been much success in selling the idea of watching movies on the (really) small screen. Although the screen of the iPod is much smaller than most video-watching hardware, the resolution and the convenience more than makes up for the size limitations.
  
  

Effects

• Apple's iTunes Store
  
  With the creation of the infrastructure that allows users to download video content (both rented and purchased movies), Apple has revolutionized the movie industry, much the same way it has shifted the music industry away from physical media and into digital files. These inventions, along with devices that bridge computers and televisions, may allow the computer to replace not only brick-and-mortar video rental stores but also services that rent movies via snail mail.
  
  

Size

• Every iPod is not capable of playing movies. Only models specifically designed to play video can do so, and hard drive space on the iPod also limits how much digital video can be stored on the iPod at any time. However, technology is on your side, as developers are constantly creating iPods with larger capacities and high-resolution video files that are smaller.