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2004 Digital Media Winners and Losers
An anonymous reader writes "MP3 Newswire has just released Richard Menta's annual digital media winners and losers list. Apple tops the winners list for the second year in a row as does eDonkey and last spring's Grey Album protest. Losers include the term iPod Killers, Winamp, and the WMA format. BitTorrent made both lists. Menta also released a 2005 wishlist. Topping that list is an iPod in-dash unit similar to the old Rio Car. You can see Menta's previous years winners and losers lists."
In the winner side may be kind to name ARM, IBM, AMD and VIA designs; at the loser side, Intel, MIPS and Hitachi (CPU division) for being less paranoid than expected (that was the key secret for previous uP series: be paranoid in extremis to survive).
This guy seriously needs to be more digital Media saavy...
are unfortunately the customers
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How about this then from Dension here in the UK, just add a 2.5" HDD of your choice and go: http://www.dension.com/main.php?pageid=49&topid=42
Ive not had the pleasure of an iPod or 'iPod Killer', but most of my music is MP3-based and I use a car more than walk (not that I'd walk around with an iPod in my pocket these days). End of this month, I'll be hopefully getting hold of one - I think they retail for around £270 - £300 (what that is in $ is anyones guess atm).
Based on recent computer history (for example, when Word ousted WordPerfect), to outdo the leader, you need to offer "more for less". WP, for all its power, didn't look as nice or seem as easy to use as Word (note the word "seem" - advanced Word features can be just as arcane to find as advanced WP ones), while "buy Word and Excel - get PowerPoint free" seemed like a good idea at the time. OK, so hindsight shows that looks aren't everything.
So, for a company to outdo Apple in either player or media ditribution, they need to offer something that seems to be "better" than an easy to use player, or something that gives "more" than an easy to purchase download site. Yes, there are players with more capacity / cost less / more features than an iPod, but the public aren't convinced that these make the player "better". Most competitors use tech style naming - look at the name of Sony's MP3 player as an example - when the public is still going fo rthe simple name (iPod + capacity / size). As for the download sites, what people appeciate is consistency. Tracks that are different prices, because record label A wants more money than record label B don't translate well to consumers, who may not be aware (or care) what label an artist is with. Similarly, being able to burn some bought tracks to CD, but not others, or only being able to listen to the music while you continue to subscribe to the service, does not make sense to people who can understand the concept of buying a CD. So, it looks as though the "iTunes killer" has to be something that is as consistent as iTMS for price and burn to CD, and as easy to go from download to "listen" as the iTunes / iTMS integration. The problem is that the bar is already pretty high, so a new player would have to be very very good to make people want to download it and use instead of Media Player / iTunes (those who use something like WinAmp would already consider the option, but may not be a large enough group for the "new" player to make money).
So, maybe a combined p2p / torrent / general media player, that has a link to an online store with a larger catalogue than the current leaders will become dominant. Because anything less will not be "more for less".
"She's furniture with a pulse"