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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."
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!!!
Mom, Scareduck won't stop using periods too often!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
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.
That's not Flash, it's a subset of Flash.
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.
And neither of those are cases "where Flash is technologically better than both of those".
As a solution for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, the combination of Cocoa Touch and HTML5 thoroughly outclasses Flash.
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?
The customer's benefit is Apple's benefit. If Apple does a good job of seeing to the needs of their customers, they will sell more products, and as it turns out, they do sell very, very well. It's only in monopoly-like situations where a company can blatantly work against their customers' needs, like Microsoft (not so much of a monopoly anymore, and surprise, surprise, Windows 7 doesn't completely suck, and IE is becoming more secure and standards-compliant!), or Comcast.
Apple has no monopoly, so they have to actually create products that are innately attractive to consumers.
As for the watered-down version: again, you're ignoring Flash Lite, which is certainly better than no Flash at all.
How am I ignoring it? I addressed it right there. And no, it's not clear at all that it's better than nothing. No Flash means no Flash. Flash Lite means some Flash works and some doesn't. And that doesn't even address the issue of most Flash being entirely unsuitable for multitouch.
Better to just have none of it than to have a broken, incompatible variant. And the proper, official variant is by no means compelling at this point. If Adobe can make a version that runs nicely on mobile hardware and integrates properly with multitouch, the case for Apple to include it would be more reasonable. But right now, the existing Flash 10.1 for Android does not make a compelling case for it.