Apple still has some lock-in for its iOS devices with exclusive apps, but as Android devices get more apps and become more popular.... Apple will definitely have to deal with being a niche player in a wider market (instead of its current dominant role in mobile devices).
I'm not sure content wars will really heat up in 2013, but it's definitely a battle that will be waged in the coming years....
I agree, and that's going to be a major challenge because as the iPhone becomes less the smartphone icon and likewise for the iPad (which both will become over time) then other players have more clout with the producers of content. Apple can't demand premiums and concessions as a second- or third-in-rank player.
Apple, so far, has been quite shrewd about using other people's content to help sell its hardware. The iPod was a huge hit... but it was dependent on music owned by all sorts of publishers. If Apple is going to get AppleTV going in a competitive way, it's going to have to deal with rightsholders for all kinds of video content. Apple already does this with iTunes, but to integrate it even further will be really tricky. Consumers want a DVR with access to both free and pay-for content, and AppleTV currently doesn't do free content that well. Amazon seems to be in a better position because it can charge users for Amazon prime shipping and then offer Amazon Videos for free.... Apple needs to find a subscription offering or some other service to offer that people will pay for and then throw in a subsidized video offering so that it can compete with OTA TV and Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and YouTube...
Good question on Apple, mhhfive! They present what I think is the core challenge for OTT video players who want to produce content. The challenge is that even with network TV commercials to help fund content, it's not easy to produce it. Given the much lower revenue streams associated with PPV or streaming-ad sponsorship, how do you make money with original content? The answer may come from Apple; they will either do something and thus prove it can work, or they may not even try, which will prove the smartest consumer player in the industry doesn't think it can EVER work.
Netflix is starting to create its own original shows (or remakes of older shows), so it's not just going to deliver content and pay royalties to content owners, it's becoming a content creator itself. Hulu is doing something similar, but Hulu is owned by some legacy content players, so its future is uncertain. Amazon and Google are also getting into the content creation game, so pretty soon we'll have a diverse field of content, but no unified way to view it all... I imagine some content will only be available on Android devices via Amazon/GooglePlay, and some content will only be available on iOS devices.. When will Apple get into the content creation market....?
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Many enterprises view high-speed broadband connections as ubiquitous. Yet in about 20 percent of the country, businesses and their employees do not have access to even DSL connections. This shortcoming diminishes enterprises' ability to support their employees.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
Apple may want to do a TV offering, but to meet its goal it would have to address three specific issues that have been exposed by earlier attempts to make Internet TV work.
The new UltraViolet online DRM model has people upset, but the question we should ask ourselves is whether we want a flexible model to harmonize content owner and content consumer rights, or a one-takes-all model that probably results in less online content.
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
Some say that exposure to violence in gaming, online video, etc., is creating a violent culture. Tom says it's not that straightforward. Rather than regulate violence, we should understand it better.
MySpace is reinventing itself by focusing on content, but it's too late, and other social networks should learn from its example by looking toward a telco payment model if they want to sustain user commitment and their own revenue.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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