It may sound like a lame excuse, but one of the things that makes DVDs as expensive as they are is the packaging. Cases, labels, that cool printing on the disc, itself, and any liner notes can really add up in the costs department. So, how do you get around that?

Download movies directly to your computer?

Eh, well, yes, that’s one way–but what if you don’t have a computer or don’t have one with you?

Pay-per-view?

Uh, OK, that would work to, but what if you don’t have a TV with access to a PPV.

Plan ahead and rip some DVDs to your iPod.

ASIDE from that, starting next year you can go into your local Walgreen and use a kiosk to burn off a movie onto a DVD that you can then take with you. All right, so the audience for someone wanting a DVD burned in this fashion would be incredibly small, what with so very many options for acquiring movies. The iTunes Music Store just went wireless and ripping your own DVD is not very challenging. So, what’s the attraction to this kind of tech?

More…

Sheesh–I guess I’ve been out of the gadget loop because I heard about the iPod Touch (the rumor about the all-touch-screen iPhone look-a-like with a huge flash drive and wireless connectivity), the iPhone Nano (the dumbed-down, priced-down version of the iPhone, and of course, the iCar (a car to be co-developed by Apple and Volkswagon or Jaguar) but I only today spotted what many are calling the iPod Nano Phat. “Phat” was the word added to the original design of the Nintendo DS that hit stores to describe how much bigger it was than the DS Lite while still suggesting it was kinda cool. It was also shorthand for fugly.

The same goes here, I think. It seems like all Apple did was widen the iPod Nano to give it a wider screen. This is kind of a stupid move on its own because who will suddenly change their mind about a Nano because it now plays videos on a still-too-small-but-slightly-bigger-screen?

Beats me, man.

What they should do tomorrow is announce the iPod Touch and the iPod Touch Nano–which would be, respectively, the full-sized iPod with the wide-screen taking up the entire face of the iPod (similar to the look of the iPhone) and a much smaller iPod, the same size as the current Nano’s only it should have a touch screen taking up it’s entire front face, too. Once the click-wheel disappears from the full-sized iPod no one will want to see it anywhere.

So will he announce any of the above? Obviously, we’ll just have to wait and see what Steve says. If he says something amazing or amazingly unimpressive, I’ll blog on it for sure. If it’s something “eh” like Beatles music on iTunes or something like that, I got some other stuff to do with my blogtime.

OH yeah and one other feature with the iPod Touch would be wifi. At the very least it’ll be able to buy mp3/4s off the iTunes store and at the very most it’ll surf the web like the iPhone can, it just won’t have any cell phone features. If the latter happens, I’m going to have to sell a kidney to get one. I’ll react like Gomer Fricken’ Pyle and yell “SHAZAM!”

You can check out the Gizmodo.com post I stole the above pic from.

Oh and I just checked out AppleInsider.com and found a few interesting headlines:

Major electronics launch; new iPods & iPhones; Apple lobbying

DigiTimes vouches for multi-touch iPod with WiFi

Apple’s next-gen iPod nano takes its lumps as current models run dry

That’s the site I’ll be checking first since they did such a great job liveblogging the iPhone announcement.

Let’s hope these rumors are right and that Steve will actually be announcing something important this time, as opposed to another device that looks slick but does what many other devices of its kind already do.