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Battle of the Media Ecosystems: Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft
bsk_cw writes "This article takes a long look at four major consumer tech ecosystems — Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft — and examine how well (or badly) they're serving up their media. The authors talk about how each company approaches gaming, music, video, books, etc., and how each integrates all its parts into some kind of whole. The conclusion? That none of the four can be said to be the best in all things, but they're certainly trying."
What's an ecosystem? Another marketing term to having one company providing you a set of services?
"However, while Amazon has its Amazon account and Google has Google Wallet, Apple has no central place you can go to put in your identity and credit card information,"
Apple has iTunes. Perhaps you've heard of it?
You enter a card one time and you then can buy any media or apps you like with it, anywhere.
The whole list struck me a really vapid and lazily assembled, that was just one example. It would have been far more interesting to compare QUALITY of libraries, and to include companies like Netflix in the mix. Yes Amazon has a growing video library for example, but it sucks horribly compared to Netflix (I have prime and Netflix stream so I can use either).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A desktop is a large tablet that you often touch.
A tablet is a device that runs an operating system and apps developed with desktops in mind
Windows RT is a Windows operating system that does not run programs built for Windows; even those developed on Windows by Microsoft
On a desktop operating system you can close the desktop and that is the normal mode of operating the desktop computer
As clear and delineated as Ballmer's press mutterings and utterings.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I cut our cable cord a while back to go to netflix. This saved around $60 per month (I had about the cheapest cable possible). This was a massive savings with a huge boost in quality. While Netflix does not have everything neither did my cable package. Not one of the 4 people in my household have complained even once about losing cable.
But using an apple TV I was looking at the prices and saw that access to some TV season would cost me $34. That is bonkers. The whole idea of cutting the cord was not only to stop paying my cable company but to break the ridiculous model that Hollywood has been forcing on us for years. If you watch a TV show on some form of broadcast or cable the producer makes around $0.10 to $0.25 per household for the first showing from the advertisers. So a TV series for download (which effectively is a rerun) is somehow expecting to make double or triple that? Even renting an entire series physically was cheaper than that.
So I don't know why the article focused on the 4 systems that seem set on bringing back a variation of a model that has had its neck snapped by Netflix. About the only feature they offer that is newish is the "Downloading is so convenient." A short while ago I was talking with a mid-level movie exec who said a model people were getting excited about was to have new releases available for download for a huge huge price. The idea was that some people had lots of money and huge screens. So they would have their friends over and it would all be exciting. The exec was gleeful about the idea of screwing not only the viewer but the theatres too.
My guess is that all these execs forget about piracy as an ever present competitor. So they dream up spreadsheets that compare their prices to the prices paid to traditional media. Many people are paying well in excess of $100 per month in Cable. So they say "If we can get them to come to our service we could nail them for at least $80!" What they are forgetting is that people are resistant to change. They will hold on and on to their existing package and then when they make the leap it will be a big one.
Quite simply people are getting more and more really cheap and really good options. Also with iTunes I don't know how much I am going to be paying. At $2 minimum per show it would take a lazy rainy Saturday in this house to blow by my monthly fee for Netflix. I could see a household that didn't really monitor its iTunes to blow past $1000 in a month.
A great line I read recently went something like this. "I'm not sure who will change faster, Netflix becoming more like HBO or HBO becoming more like Netflix." I don't think anyone sane will be saying, "How long before Netflix becomes more like Warner?"
I am not saying that Netflix is the be all and end all; it is just that it crosses a critical threshold in that it makes piracy not worth anyone's time. So maybe Netflix won't be the winner. But the winner will be more like Netflix than iTunes.
Like probably most people, I started with iTunes (originally, I was even using it with a non-iPod mp3 player, burning tracks to a CD-RW 20 at a time, then ripping them back). I stuck with it for a good long while, even going to the trouble of maintaining an old iMac G4 (beautiful art piece of a computer, btw) just to run it and to allow me to sync my iPod, even after switching all my Windows computers to Linux (this was back in the day when iTunes support in Wine was a fevered dream).
Then Google Music came along. At first, I thought the idea of storing all my music in the cloud was ludicrous (Google will seriously let you store tens of GB of music NOT purchased from them FOR FREE? Gotta be a catch), but when the headphone jack in my Gen 1 iPod Touch gave out, I decided to give it a shot and make my Android phone my primary audio device. It was brilliant--namely the ability to cache music offline; they really won me over, and since then, my poor iMac has been relegated to the role of multimedia server (got a bunch of external Firewire HDs hooked up to it), and I don't think I've spent a dime on iTunes in years.
So now what I'm wondering is whether there will ever be a service that does for video what Google did for music, in the sense that you can take your DVDs and other video content and upload them to the cloud, for access anywhere, any time. Of course, DVD encryption means that *in theory* you shouldn't be able to rip a DVD like you can a CD, and I actually know of not one legal source of non-DRM purchasable video content, so I suspect the answer is that there will NEVER be a service that allows you to store your existing, "physical" video library in the cloud. But if such a service existed, and it allowed me to cache offline, I think they'd "win."