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The Apple Broadcast Network
Hodejo1 writes "In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild. That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through small wireless hubs and the Internet. Call it the Apple Broadcast Network. iAd is how Apple plans to pay for it."
They've already "paid for it" with the bucketloads of cash they've made from selling all the devices.
Apple has nothing to say that I find worth hearing. Apple has nothing to show that I find worth seeing.
Not anymore!
s of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.
The 3G connectivity is not sufficient for watching video in volume comparable to TV. TV bandwidth is essentially free (a true one-to-many broadcast,) whereas 3G is not (it's limited and shared.)
Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.
I told the firehose this link-bait was stupid, not sure why it did not listen. TFA article does not make any sense. There is no meat to it. It does not offer any information. The entire thing is pointless.
BTW there is nothing in the article that is not in the summary, so feel free to comment away without clicking. Not clicking is actually preferable in this case. I would dispute the point of the article, but since it makes no point, it is difficult to dispute. It is also, umm, pointless....
As often happens when someone is trying to support their position, these numbers are exaggerated. A lot of people have bought two iPhones, so there really aren't that many iPhones out in the wild. The phones are not all in the US, either, and an iPod touch with nothing but wifi may not be the best media delivery system.
In other words, if your business plan (or anything real, other than a slashdot story) depends on these numbers, you better dig deeper so you know what you are really dealing with.
Qxe4
..."America is still devoted to worthlessness."
How do you get from "people own devices made by X" to "X has a network"? Dumbest. Story. Idea. Ever.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Once again another apple story with no point. The climate in 1959 was much different than it is today. They only had radio and uhhm, tv. There was no internet, no video games. It was either watch tv at home or go to the movies. Today we have so many more options.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Of course, since there was a story on Microsoft on the front page, we had to see this baseless speculation of a random guy on the net. I suppose everyone wants this stories, because they keep coming...
As for the subject I understand they have a content distribution network called iTunes and it works quite well. They will produce the iFridge before ever creating two competing products. Is there any point at all in this speculation?
I don't understand what this is trying to prove. Yes, mobile phone sales by Apple are greater than the TV sales in the 1950s. They both have advertising. Okay, good analogy so far. But the video people want to watch isn't coming from Apple, it's coming from Youtube and a number of other independent sites. The bandwith is coming from AT&T. I don't think Apple is interested in providing either the content or the bandwith themselves at this point, unless you mean iTunes sales. And those should be supported by the price of the content itself.
Anyone care to enlighten me to why the ___ it matters how many Apple devices there are compared to how many TVs there were in 1959? Somebody playing madlibs with summaries?
Long live the BSD license
I despise how everything I now want to interact with (TV, Internet, video games, the old paper media) must be all based on ads. Can't somebody think of a better way? And if I have a subscription, can't I receive an ad free version. Thank (your favorite deity) for AdBlock and the mute button. I remember a time when there were only two commercial breaks when watching a TV program, now it's four. It sometimes feels like there is more commercials than actual program. I demand that these media outlets pay me for watching these ads. I might actually pay attention to them if I was paid to watch them.
The whole family (which was larger on average back then compared to now) would gather around a single TV to watch together back in 1959. Iphones and even Ipads aren't really conducive to shared viewing like that.
In 1959, the television broadcast networks were competing with... radio? Today, Apple is competing with an enormous number of Windows- (and Linux-, Android-, WebOS-...) based Internet-connected laptops (and desktops, phones, PDAs, tablets...) capable of showing the same quality video. Oh, and with television (broadcast, cables, satellite...), which has grown a bit since 1959.
-puk
"That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through the internet via medium radio towersand local wireless cells (and cost infinitely more than free)" Fixed
Apple has to compete with every other content delivery option. Pbpbpbpttt.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Nobody wants to pay to download ads, just like nobody wants to pay to download Wired magazine's 500 megabyte iPad edition (which is what happens when you cancel flash support and leave everyone scrambling).
You notice that Firefox has 360 million users, Chrome has 70 million users*, and IE has more than both of those combined.
*http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9177101/Firefox_trumps_Chrome_in_active_user_gains_Mozilla_director_argues
ravenspear: They've already "paid for it" with the bucketloads of cash they've made from selling all the devices.
dmacleod808: Well said... AT&T's new tiered 3G plans will kill this easily... I can watch unlimited Television for free (broadcast networks of course).
It's interesting that you two are overlooking the same thing from different angles.
ravenspear has neglected to take into account that television is not free to broadcast. Even without government regulations and licensing, you have to have a transmitter, and either a live performance (lights, cameras) and/or some recorded performance (playback hardware) to transmit. The electricity alone would be monstrously expensive, and needs to be paid for somehow (say, advertising).
And you're citing AT&T's tiered plans as being a stopper because you think nobody on the receiving end would pay for the service. How do you watch broadcast television without paying for it? Because the broadcaster pays for the transmitter.
So what would happen if a significant chunk of iAd's revenue went into paying an ISP system or carrier for the bandwidth? I could only see it working this way, if you cast the phone's/pad's/computer's user as the audience, Apple itself as the network, and the ISP (or just one primary choice of ISP) as the nigh-inertial cost of doing business.
I can easily imagine reasons why they wouldn't do this—AT&T's 3G coverage and the fact that the iPhone and similar devices are already straining their networks for two. But then again, I thought the hassles of dealing with a mobile phone carrier would be sufficient to keep the iPhone from becoming a reality, so what do I know?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Title says it all.
I wish I could mod this article down a dozen times...
I mean, it is just a bunch of random predictions that are not even supported by real facts. That shouldn't even be on Slashdot, but it still ends up here just because it talks about Apple. That gets old quickly, even to an Apple fanboy.
Yeah, I know, I must be new here, huh?
They may have sold that many, but there aren't that many in use. I'm guessing somewhere near 25% of those 75 million (15-18 million) are out of use. (damaged or retired/upgraded)
Not that it matters really to the story, just making it know that the numbers are overstated.
So we can turn on the news and see a bunch of smug schmucks in black turtlenecks behind a newsdesk reporting Apple-approved pablum 24/7?
Hold on. Where's a leave my set of seppuku knives...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
"In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units."
There are 300 + Million people in the U.S. and you're telling me that only 63.5 million sets have been sold from 1950 to now???
I call Bullshit.
"By 1960, there were 52 million sets in American homes, one in almost nine out of ten households."
Jordan, Winthrop. The Americans. Boston: McDougal Littell, 1996: 798.
"According to data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), there are currently 285 million televisions in use in US households."
North American TV Market and Its Relevance [pdf]. Energy Star Research, 6 January 2006.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
The reason Apple is doing iAds is to improve the experience of in-app ads. User like free and $1-2 apps, and so developers have been putting ads in their apps and the ads are very basic and they take you out to the Web. So iAds are advertising-focused mini HTML5 apps that run inside native C apps, and keep you in your app.
If used in a media app, they may support media, like a free Hulu app. But they work on all kinds of apps.
Besides, $8.99 a month for Netflix on iPad absolutely destroys Hulu. There is no shortage of TV already on Apple devices.
This "story" shows exactly why Slashdot is irrelevant now.
Hyman Roth (Meyer Lansky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Lansky) to Michael Corleone: "Mike, we're bigger than US Steel."
I'm really not sure what that means, or is appropriate for this story, but that is the first thing that came into my head.
Which is, as I will admit, full of holes.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
According to Nielsen, there were 67.5million American households subscribing to basic cable in 1999. If we assume that every American household only owns one television (hah), that they have only bought one television in the entirety of their lives (HAH), that TVs don't exist outside of homes, and that every single television ever sold in the US if still in service (hope you enjoy hooking up the B&W to a digital converter box); why were 4million households subscribing to a service that they could not physically use?
In reality, the FCC claims that 99% of American households own a television (according to the census, the number of households in the US is around 115million), and that the majority of households own more than one TV. Additionally, and I know this is only anecdotal, I don't personally know any adult who hasn't had to buy a new television at some point (whether when they get their first place, or because an old TV has died).
What I'm trying to say is: Only 63million TVs sold in the US since 1950? [Citation needed]
this whole story is just stupid, has /. run out of real stories and resorted to recycling crap from mac rumor forums or something?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That's 90 million people (with a good income) who won't be seeing anything designed in Flash.
If that's not a good reason to stop using Flash on websites, I don't know what is. If you're an advertiser, and you use those annoying Flash ads that we all hate, then it's time to change, or die.
I may not agree with all of Apple's reasons for not using Flash, but I sure as hell love the result.
Apple fanbois = new media bitches
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
People don't buy phones to watch TV. They buy, well, TVs.
I do not get this idea that retards in the press have that TVs and computers are going to go away and be replaced with phones. No, they aren't. It isn't a matter of technology, it is a matter of convenience and features. Yes, modern smartphones have no problem displaying SD video, and you can surf the web on them. No, that doesn't mean you want to use only them.
I just bought a new TV, it is a nice 46" LCD TV. Why did I do that, if my phone could play media? Because I want a 46" TV. When I want TV I want to sack out on my couch and have a nice large screen to watch on. I do not want to have to hold a phone right up to my face to see what is going on. For that matter I don't even want to watch on my computer. My computer has a nice screen, and it is plenty large for using close up, but I don't want to sit in my computer chair all the time. Likewise, it wouldn't work well to move the system out in to the living room and try to use it there. Hence, I have a TV. Even though I have other devices that could technically fulfill its function, they do not have the features, namely the size, that I want.
I certainly think people will continue to consume media on their portable devices. After all, if you are in the doctor's office waiting it is convenient to have a device in your pocket that can entertain you. However that doesn't mean it'll become the primary or major way people get their media.
A big problem, in terms of streaming to mobile phones, is that pesky little thing called Shannon's Law. It states that the amount of information you can get in a given channel equals the bandwidth (in Hz) of the channel times the log of the signal to noise ratio. Well this is a real problem for high speed sustained wireless. The frequencies you are working with aren't that wide. When you are working in the 1900MHz range, you can only have channels that are tens of MHz wide. You can't have 1GHz channels or anything. Also, because of the low signal levels (-80dBm or less generally) your SNR sucks. 20dB at best, and it can be as low as 6dB for GSM. That equals not a whole lot of bandwidth. Now it can be fine when people use it in spurts. You allow someone to use a bunch of channels and get a big transfer, then someone else can use them. However if everyone is trying to sustain downloads, as is the case in streaming media, you simply run out of bandwidth.
Unfortunately, just upping the frequency isn't a solution either. The higher the frequency, the less penetrating power it has, and the more line of sight it is. A 100GHz signal could have great bandwidth, but won't even go through a wall. So in the frequency ranges that are useful, there's just only so much bandwidth you get.
As such, you aren't likely to see anything replace TV and cable/fibre as the main video content delivery for most people. It is simply a nice way to watch. Phones will remain a peripheral device, used occasionally but not the main thing.
With a phone or mp3 player you, by definition, do something completely different. Like jiggle tits, sound off a fart or two, and download yet another 99 cent POS (piece of software) or two or three.
There are some more ways to tweak those two methods. There is patronage, then release as a freebie bit torrent, so no one entity has to eat the whole cost. Patronage say the first episode free, released as a torrent/teaser, you (all of "yous") like it and want more, the creator sets up a pool and takes donations until his minimum price is met for the next one or two episodes, then the next is released as a free torrent. That's not quite subscription, but a variant that could work if the content is good enough. The big thing once you have content to move is bandwith and server costs, with bit torrent that is shared so the price per episode doesn't have to be as high for the content creator to still make money and keep it cheaper to offer. Sure tons of leeches, but who cares, eventually if your price is met, even the leeches can serve as word of mouth advertising for you. If it isn't costing you another penny, and you got your loot, who cares then...
A variation on the ad model is let the consumer pick the ads! At least give some option to look at ads that might be relevant to your tastes and shopping interests, not one size fits all forced ads. Like I watch the TV news sometimes OTA, but have no interest in "little purple pills" I should ask some actor-quack about, I just mentally tune those things out for the most part.
On the net, this could be different. How about a check box with like 20 different types of ads? That and the content issuers vett the ads so they aren't malware or take too much bandwith, etc. I block ads now and also a default javascript block because of security and bandwith issues. I am on a slow connection, pulling ads from five other servers, any one of which could be spewing malware, makes the net *really* slow and is also a legitimate security issue all the time, which all these various sites like to plp;ay make believe doesn't happen/. BS, all of them it seems get nailed with spewing bad ads sometimes, plus, they assume everyone is on some whizzbang ten core machine with a ten meg a second connection. maybe *they* are at big website.com or bigadsite.com, but joe sixpack ain't all the time. They just don't grok this. Like we just saw the best place to get fast cellphone data from ATT is on the Apple campus. So all those devs and execs there get this totally skewed notion of how the net works on their iDevice.
And now, you combine the two tweaks above, for an even different model, as long as there is at most only one or two ads per show/movie/video whatever, not every five/ten minutes. A slight donation in advance, plus somewhat ad supported with the user picking ads they might be interested in, plus the user agrees to upload at least to parity.(I can't do streaming at all except just low bitrate voice, so have to pass on any model for that, I have to download any vid first to view it)
After that right now I got bupkis. The big problem is this expectation of every content creator wants to be a millionaire. Just ain't gonna happen with the way content gets made today, too many people like doing it and it is getting easier and easier to do, it isn't locked in to a few big players anymore.
Raised on TV over the air, so paying directly for shows..I don't do cable or satellite now, think it is a rip, mostly because there do not have a la carte models,(I hate "plans", make it a la carte, I'll think about getting a dish..) so it would have to be good and with an easy micropayment method. I am not interested in signing up in advance for a whole season for some show over the internet. too much stuff out there to look at. Show by show..that's a possibility, but it has to be cheap. Also perfectly willing to seed a torrent to at least parity to help keep costs down for the producer so they can offer their stuff cheaper.
This is an interesting subject because digital content is such a profound game changer in eliminating scarcity, it is our first real replicator technology. The price of copies is so absurdly low to reproduce that legitimate c
Uh, I think you missed a zero at the end there, pal. Wikiawnsers says somewhere around 110 million households in the USA. *I* don't watch broadcast TV, but I still have an ancient 27" TV that a friend of a friend was looking to unload buried in the attic somewhere. The number of households that don't own even one set (even in storage) are vanishingly small. That doesn't even account for the hundreds of millions of TVs bought and broken, or simply given away or trashed over the years. You can't even give away a TV under 27" these days. I can't count the number of TVs I've seen on the curb with signs that say FREE or STILL WORKS! attached. Most households own closer to two sets. I have no idea how they got the 63 million number, that should be 630 million. But 630 million is not a number anywhere near how many products Apple has sold during the entire lifetime of the company combined, so it doesn't make for as interesting of an article.
moox. for a new generation.
Either I missed a major news release and this was a bad article or... this is all merely speculation. Sure, I could see Apple rolling out an advertising system, it's already been mentioned vaguely before, especially since they could lock your system for the ads if they wanted to, it's just... unless it was specifically tied to certain sources of content, forcing adverts on everyone's devices could really start a slow backlash towards Apple on their level of control on the devices.
At least... I think this sort of thing until I look at the control they already have on the devices, and see the possibility of adverts as just another step down the road that everyone will unthinkingly take.
When I heard multicast in 1990s and couldn't try because my ISP (like 99% others) didn't support it, it became a mystery for me.
Why doesn't consumer multicast take off? OK, the original specs are too low for today's needs, why not multicast 2.0? Especially when Google like companies has to pay billions for same video and they are experimenting with "live" broadcast?
Before Youtube I'd say MPAA or TV network conspiracy but it really seems something else as we hear even Microsoft is experimenting with P2P for OS updates, they simply pay too much for old fashion uploads.It should be even possible to multicast the OS updates. There should be millions of MS/Apple operating systems looking for updates at 9:10 AM and downloading terabytes of exact same file at 9:20.
He's turned into Citizen Kane...or even worse: Rupert Murdock.
If you watch this video (which may work without Flash on Safari/Chrome):
http://video.allthingsd.com/video/d8-steve-jobs-on-television/FF922002-FA63-4B68-A326-EA12EC800612
Steve Jobs told the exact problem with "Apple TV" or anything regarding "replacing TV" or "inventing things to plug into TV". He also said he will not let (!) a nation of "bloggers". Perhaps he meant such blogs/news sites (!) who doesn't understand the basic concept of millions of devices pulling some random data at same time and making money over it. Ask Google about the money Youtube makes...
Let me speak on this subject. I am currently receiving 10GB a month of broadband (ADSL2+) internet access, I hope to raise it to 20GB for a whole $10NZD more soon.
.flv news clips from my national news shows.... and a few minute news story can easily be 20-60MB. Choosing to watch the freaking "nightly news" on my computer has real consequences, if I just watched on my TV, for a couple hours a night in the background, I'd be "saving" ....half a GB a night?
Bandwidth zooms by so fast, you just wouldnt believe. 10GB is *NOTHING*...I listen to podcasts while I work, and I mean AUDIO podcasts, MP3 files, probably 64kbps is average. Many of my two hour long shows can be EASILY 80MB+...lets round to 100, shall we? So, even at just one "100MB" podcast a day, a couple hours of audio at a decent quality (not that you get a choice to scale down!), you would have 10 days worth of audio to reach 1GB, right? Well, factor in internet browsing, which, being honest, is bugger all, but YouTube video...wow, hundreds of MB can rack up fast.
And DONT EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE DAILY SHOW! I swear, the videos from The Daily Show much be massive...I check my usage as I go on my Mac using Activity Monitor, the Network section shows what you have uploaded and downloaded. (Countries with internet caps allow you to check on the ISP website). I can watch a few clips of The Daily Show, and check Activity Monitor....and half a GB has vanished!
By myself I effectively chomp through 10GB in a couple of weeks, and thats RESTRAINING myself. I'm not using Bit Torrent (for linux distros of course...just like everyone else...), nor am I actually watching Video in any concerted effort.
Honestly, take it from someone living under the tyrannical rule of Internet Caps! Fight for your freedom to actually *USE* the internet circa 2010! The caps SEEM to get smaller all the time, perhaps every few years your ISP will announce "oh look, we've doubled all the caps!"....meanwhile, Internet Video has blossomed, I remember being on THREE GB a month...and that was tight, as soon as I got 10GB a month....I somehow expanded to fill that allocation...
I honestly shudder to imagine what it would take to replace televisions. For example, I download
Do everything you can to avoid caps! The internet should be "all you can eat", WITHIN REASON, IE not for chronic illegal downloading of movies, music etc.
---
Telling that the summary of this stupid article mentioned DuMont, as DuMont is the only one of the four networks that also manufactured TVs. Shows how well the combined broadcaster/manufacturer business model worked back then.
It sounds to me like the article is suggesting Apple start producing its own shows, and not just a few shows, but enough to replace the dozens of shows that people watch on the networks currently. Being a broadcaster has never been a very profitable business; they make their money from producing shows.
Also, those that say things like "Apple should allow Flash" seem to be ignorant of the fact that Flash is not on a single handheld device, except as a very recent beta for Android.
Not true. Flash Lite is already shipping on some phones, including the HTC Hero and Evo. It's not Flash Player 10.1, which is the beta you mentioned (and that beta is available for Android 2.2 users to try for themselves), but it's enough for many popular sites.
Cocoa Touch on the iPhone OS. As well as HTML5. There are zero cases where Flash is technologically better than both of those.
Flash is more portable than Cocoa Touch. It's more powerful than HTML5 and also has better development/design tools.
It's also far from clear that supporting Flash would be to Apple's benefit, and a watered-down version would be even worse.
Apple's benefit? Of course, they'd rather have you use their proprietary APIs. But isn't their customers' benefit what really matters?
As for the watered-down version: again, you're ignoring Flash Lite, which is certainly better than no Flash at all.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Bearing in mind that most of what Apple sells is bought by kids and teenagers who never venture onto Slashdot, leaving a minority of fanbois who do, why-oh-why do we have to keep putting up with these "zero content" articles every day just so we can be constantly reminded that Apple exist in the first place?
But I'll bite anyway...
1. Comparisons to TV purchases in 1959 are meaningless figures unless you take into account the relative populations of the USA then and now. Also, you probably should look at the relative costs of TVs then and Apple devices now, based on the fact that people, in general, have a lot more disposable income now than they did then.
2. I have a MythTV box at home (here in the UK) that has both satellite and terrestrial capture cards in it, I can receive and record TV from both sources, as well as from the Internet, and I understand you can do pretty much the same thing with PVR software on Windows. In either case, these exist already and give you far more freedom with what you view than just a single provider.
3. Why would any company going into TV broadcasting over the Internet restrict viewing of it to just a single subset of devices? Why would they not create client software for Windows, and possibly Linux, if they could charge each user for the service? Surely it would be commercial suicide not to do it that way? And if broadcasting is available to multiple clients, why is the number of Apple unit sales important, since it would still be a small fraction of the number of users viewing through Windows?
4. This service makes absolutely no sense whatsoever unless you have the facility to watch live-streamed video wherever and whenever you want - otherwise people will just keep doing what they do at the moment which is download stuff and transfer it to a portable device where they can watch it at their leisure (and you don't need anything by Apple to do that). You can't stream live video when you're on an aircraft, if you're traveling anywhere then it depends on having good wi-fi coverage wherever you go (and the ability to hop seamlessly between wi-fi networks as you move) plus the cellular network, whilst having better coverage than wi-fi, is not geared up to stream video and gets very expensive very quickly when you do it.
5. What's the *ACTUAL* news here? So a new TV service provider is going to stream video over the Internet - big deal, wake me up when it's something that hasn't been done before...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Spell it correctly.
DuMont, not Dumont.
DuMont Television Network
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuMont_Television_Network
They invented the idea of TV commercials rather than someone sponsoring a program.
1. US population in 1950 was 151,325,798 and in 1960 179,323,175, An iPhone at $300 today is equal to 40 dollars in 1960, while 40 wasn't disposable then, a color table top was about 500 dollars- '60 RCA: $495 (21") or $3,635.88 today
http://www.tvhistory.tv/tv-prices.htm
http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm
2. You can't do that while mobile, which is what an iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad do, so it's Apples and Oranges
3. Its really the Flash/HTML 5 argument. Until Windows and Linux go mobile with this big of an installed base, theres no point in bringing them into this
5. Yes, its a stupid article. /. keeps posting Apple articles because Cmdr Taco went Apple back...oh...around the time 10.1 or 10.2 came out. And believe or not but alot of techies use Apples, not just fanbois. My entire state agency is Apple.
I am guessing the author never paid a mobile phone/broadband bill. I haven't paid for cable TV in at least 20 years. I object to the notion that I will have to pay to see advertising. If Apple pushes advertising over its devices, it would mean all the more reason to feel justified in never having owned one. (Still, my main reason for not owning one is the non-removable battery issue... I once owned a Sony Clie' -- sweet hi-res Palm OS device... battery couldn't be changed by the user, device discontinued, device completely useless. For that and other reasons I will never buy another Sony anything... or anything else with a non-removable battery)
If Apple wants to push advertisements over their devices, I say "go ahead" because I won't be listening or watching. I suspect that most people are brain-dead enough to accept it; to keep paying their "unlimited"* internet bill and their "unlimited"** mobile data plan and keep on enjoying their iProducts.
Please, no one tell me about Apple's battery replacement service. There are OTHER reasons I want to be able to replace my battery such as being able to ACTUALLY turn it off, to prevent it from bursting into flames and to be able to have a spare battery in case of emergencies.
I think what most people are not realizing is that Apple is Steve Jobs and his life span is decreasing at a rapid rate now. When he reaches his end of life cycle that will also end Apple as a company since the two are one and the same. He left once before and pretty much everyone who can think long term remembers what happened. Yes they have popular products but they are not innovators they did not invent these products, they did not push the technical envelope in the field. They are a marketing company and Steve Jobs is very good at it. However with him gone that will be left to the normally greedy shareholders that have driven many good companies into oblivion. (and guess what I am sure during his funeral i-stuff will support flash as a fond farewell to him).
I am not saying that the number are not impressive, or that iTV is not right around the corner, but I sold more cell phones in 2010 (one) than the entire market in 1959 ;)
Similarly, there are a _lot_ more devices out there that can display video than the mere 100 million iXs. Again, not saying this is not a large install base, but the comparision was useless, imo.
Great, another source of mindless crap to make future generations fatter, lazier, and less intelligent than ever before. I can't wait to never watch it.
Ever since Jobs returned, Apple has been about delivering content. They didn't want to take over enterprise, they wanted to take over Hollywood. I think it would be a great idea if Apple could compete with the cable companies. Most cable companies have no competition within their regions and can gouge us at will. We need Apple or some other entity to challenge them.
photosMy Photostream
Broadcasting of information from a single source over a scarce resource fundamentally puts up gates, gatekeepers and imposes an economic structure over the free flow of information. (It doesn't matter if its a rented town crier, paper, radio or stone tablet, its all scarce and controllable. It describes a monopoly or at best an oligopoly.)
The true power of the internet lies in subsuming the existing oligopolistic business models since N:M includes the ability of 1:N existentially.
The facts that the digital revolution happened and that the transmission of data is being done at a much lower cost point is at the heart of the problems that the existing oligopolies are having.
The media companies are only having problems with the revenue side of the equation, not the expense side. They love that it lowered their costs. They hate that it limited their sales.
It wouldn't be so bad for them if we had no consumer class devices, but we do. Devices like the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad and similar devices are all terminal points on the internet.
We can now connect to the internet and using the web and other open, or semi-open, protocols can access data regardless of its actual rendering.
The mechanical transcription of content over some analog media is dead! Long live the digital file!
McLuhan is dead! Long live post-McLuhan!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Don't tell me you like the fact that if you want to start a radio station you need a certified course, a license, sponsors, a production studio, transmitters, radio towers, etcetera. Basically LOTS of $ for an evanescent footprint in the consciousness of the masses.
Your fiction of "two men with basic electronics knowledge" would land you in jail in every country on this planet.
N:M isn't about what wikileaks tell you but about the fact that there can even be a wikileaks.
I don't imagine ANY commercial sponsor for that kind of content and radio runs first and foremost on money.
With the internet its possible for an individual to make a difference in the world.
Apart from that, as Liebling said "the power of the press belongs to those who OWN one" and have been able to enter into the distribution and promotion deals that will at least grant you access to the masses.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
AT&T's helping me not use up my bandwidth by not having any signal within 5 miles of my house. But they did offer to piggy back their signal on my network connection, for just $150.
Gee, AT&T is nice!
I drank what? -- Socrates