You may recall that SiliconValleyWatcher broke a story a few weeks back that Apple had signed a deal for a production quantity of AlphaMosaic chips, a multimedia chipset readymade for wireless devices, digital cameras, video playback and 3D gaming apps.

Now comes a Slashdot post from As Seen on TV, who claims to be an Apple employee, saying that a video iPod is a totally stupid idea and not at all what Apple plans. The post was so vehement and seemed to indicate such holistic knowledge of Apple strategy that slashdotters soon suspected the poster of being Steve Jobs himself.

First, here's the gist of As Seen on TV's argument:

The iPod is not, repeat not, gonna say it one more time, not meant to be a video-playback device. It's not even remotely designed for it. The iPod has a tiny hard drive that's designed for embedded applications, and a 32 MB (I think it is) RAM buffer cache that's optimized for dealing with song-sized chunks of data. That's about 4 MB. Even a half hour of HD content is gonna be half a gigabyte. There's basically no way for the iPod to play that without constantly keeping the hard drive running, and that will burn out the drive very quickly. Seriously, under constant use, the iPod hard drives' life spans are measured in tens of hours.

... Remember when I said the problem was part technology and part psychology? People like to listen to music while they do other things. ... Video is an immersive experience. You sit down and you watch it, and you don't do anything else until it's over.

Exceptions? Sure. But Apple isn't a company that makes a habit of marketing to the exceptions. We shoot for a pretty clearly defined target market and let the exceptions buy their gadgets somewhere else. Chiefly because there aren't nearly enough exceptions out there to make it worth going after, financially speaking. We'd never be able to recover what we invest in R&D and design by selling a few hundred thousand units. We have to sell millions of units per quarter, otherwise the business plan just doesn't work.

Fine. But perhaps this is like Bill Clinton's definition of sex. Let's take it on faith that the current form factor of the iPod would not support video. That's hardly the same as saying that it's techically infeasible for a handheld device to be a portable video player. The PSP is already out there playing video. The fact remains is that Apple is buying chips that play well with video, gaming and wireless apps, and that Sony is generating serious buzz with a wifi-connected, video-playing gaming handheld.

The mystery poster says that while portable video makes no sense, iTunes (or iVids) is the right distribution mechanism (after all it is built on QuickTime (and that QT7 has support for anamorphic video). But this statement about intellectual property really seemed to nail Jobs' strategy:

Adding video support was so incredibly trivial, you wouldn't believe it. It's a tiny thing. What's a much bigger thing is the gradual shift, over the past two years, in the way we as a company do business. We are very serious about IP. We've made a name for ourselves as being the one company in the industry that, better than anybody else, understands the need to zealously protect intellectual property. So when we go to (say) Disney and ask them to let us distribute their unimaginably valuable IP over the Internet, we're going to have a little bit more credibility than whatever copycat tries to come along behind us (cough*Napster*cough, cough*Walmart*cough).

Isn't this just arrogant enough to be Jobs himself? It's no doubt a ludicrous thought, but some Slashdotters thought so:

#1: That stuff about watching videos and listening to music is EXACTLY what Jobs said.... #2: Regular employees tend to know a lot about their division and not much about other division. Since you know details about hardware and software, this makes you either an Apple zealot (who has memorized all the hardware configurations and knows how to use every software product), or someone allowed to see the BIG picture, which puts you in upper management. ... #3: You are not afraid of getting fired: Which means if you DO work for Apple you are untouchable. Aside from Steve (who can really only be fired by massive stock holder no-confidence vote) and maybe Philip Schiller (Who like Steve has also been Seen on TV), everyone at Apple is fireable.

Robert Scoble agrees it sounds like Steve but seriously doubts that it is Jobs or any other Apple employee:

This guy sounds a lot like Steve Jobs. I don't believe he's an Apple employee, though. Why? Cause generally the Apple employees I meet are smart and this guy doesn't sound smart at all.

Let's look at this again. I wonder if this guy would have voted to fund the original Macintosh. Or, even worse, would have turned down Woz and Jobs when they were trying to get the initial funding for building their first set of computers, which were definitely aimed at alpha geeks.

Robert shows again that he gets it too, when he writes: "As to a video iPod. That idea has already happened. It's called a Sony PSP. I'm seeing people all over the place watching videos on their PSP's. And every plane I've been in lately has people watching videos on portable devices, many with screens not much bigger than exist on a PocketPC."