Great post! I agree. But note that in the U.S. reception is a bigger issue because 1> we are newer to mobile phones 2> we have multiple networks due to lack of standardization thus no one network is as comprehensive as it should be 3> larger country 4> more diverse geography, particularly in urban areas.
In my experience Nokia phones are not part of the problem because they get very good receipt. The problem is the carriers here, who have competing incomplete networks which they do not invest enough in. However many consumers tend to blame the phonemakers for this, because the technical issues are confusing and because some phonemakers (other than Nokie) deserve to be criticisized for reception issues.
Anyone who follows them mobile phone market knows Nokia was among the LAST to put cameras and other doo-dads in phones, if anything they waited too long. Because Nokia is so good at small interfaces I would LOVE to see them compete with Apple and offer MP3 players, both in phones and standalone. I also think they could make great PDAs and little televisions and Internet phones.
I think you are correct that it is important not to overestimate Apple. The price of MP3 players will fall tremendously over the next couple of years as RAM gets cheaper and cheaper. This will reduce the value of the iPod lock-in that Apple has and make it easier for, say, Google to launch a successful competing music store with an alternative DRM.
After all, if you can pick up a nice MP3 player for $50 or free on your phone, it is a lot easier to switch to another music store.
But until that happens I think there are too many people with $300 iPods for WMA to be a commercially viable DRM. Yes there are some people like me who do not take their music to go, but this is a small slice of an already relatively small market. The music labels cannot find a meanginful revenue stream there. They still might cut off Apple but only with the understanding they won't be making money selling music online for a couple more years.
Oh, also -- people are compiling libraries of Apple-protected music -- more lock-in, no matter what happens to MP3 prices.
By the way, I don't think the music industry is any more eager to be locked in Microsoft's trunk. As slow as they are, I think they have learned to insist on some kind of open DRM, or at least one they can control.
Wrong. If I'm an iPod owner I can't use MSN Music easily at all. That's something like 80% of the MP3 player market.
Why on earth would Apple sell anything other than Apple-protected music on their music store?
If you are suggesting people can switch to another music store and then burn a CD and then rip to MP3, no one is going to do that. It is too much trouble. Might as well just buy the CD!
Ya. And if they are going to act irrationally, now is the time to do it. The more iPods and songs Apple sells, the more the labels come to depend on the Apple music store for revenue, the harder it will be for the music industry to jump ship. So, sure, maybe they'll pull something crazy now, when they still make the vast majority of their money on CD sales.
Which actually wouldn't be that crazy, it would be logical in the sense they don't want to give Apple any more lock-in. Hmmm, logic... So maybe they _won't_ do it? My head hurts.
I am sure this is a casual comment by Jobs, because he is in the catbird seat and has no reason to worry. He has the power here.
What are the labels going to do if they don't like the terms of iTunes music store? Go to another store? No.
1. No other store has near the volume or reach of Apple's. No one else has the brand recognition or ease of use.
2. By far the number one music player is the iPod, and only the Apple music store can sell protected music files that work on that player. The labels could try and sell unprotected MP3 files but this seems unlikely.
So going above 99 cents per track means either convinving Jobs (not likely) or moving music off the Apple music store -- which means lost sales and possibly more piracy. Not going to happen. Jobs is in a great position.
I've been happy so far with my very simple, pretty cheap Palm Zire 31. The one thing I'd really like is to replace the Palm Desktop software with a Web-based application suite.
I don't mind having to download/install the sync software on my local PCs. But I'd love if all my off-Palm data were automatically in sync, so I could access from work/home/office/friend's laptop without a weird four-way sync setup. Every time I synced, it would be to the Web, so I only have two datasets (Palm, Web). Also, if I leave my Palm at home I can make an emergency data check (e.g. calendar) at an Internet cafe.
Besides, the Palm Desktop is so incredibly basic it could be implemented in XHTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX without breaking a sweat.
PS I know there is Internet sync software available from third parties but it is hacky and tends to sync poorly.
Wow Greg, that's a really insightful comment. I'm glad there's someone else out there thinking about this constructively.
You're right -- if newspapers can adapt to the Web, if there's any time left for that, they can empower citizens and actually change how government works. There's once concept I picked up from all my political science courses that keeps coming back up: any political item with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs is tough to oppose. Any political item with concentrated costs and diffuse benefits is tough to sell.
This is a source of some of the widespread angst about politics in the citizenry. And it is largely a function of friction in communication channels. The Web allows deeper stories on more topics by more authors.
Some newspapers see this as a threat, or a minor development, and frankly I do not think they will make it more than 25 more years. The others will succeed to the extent they make they Web central to their operations.
A communication channel is two way, and as you point out newspapers need to come up with ways to give more people their own voices. More significantly, they need to listen to these voices and reflect them prominently. Your idea for pulling Web content into physical newspapers is a good one. Also good would be actually paying and hiring people, both to do weblogs and when approprpiate to become full fledged reporters for both online and print.
Many bloggers simply don't have the time or inclination to bring much to the table beyond their own opinion. But every town or economic sector or sports team or bar has its gadfly, its crank and its retired wise old veteran, all with either too much time or too much obsessive energy to churn out ordinary blogs or letters to the editors. Get them behind a free hosted blog and half a mandate from a newspaper and watch them fly. Pay the best of them, even if it's on the cheap. Nick Denton has run rings around the best U.S. newspapers online and he pays notoriously poorly.
One thing that seemed to be looming between the lines of your comments, or maybe I just wish it was -- there so much potential in the editorial sections of American newspaper. Michael Moore, Al Franken on the left, the WSJ editorial page and maybe John Stossel on the right show the public appetite out there for heavily reported opinion. It is real and significant, and the Internet is already the epicenter for it.
So the economic potential of American editorial pages is actually huge. And yet newspapers, including LAT, view these pages as cost centers.
They need dogged reporters, creative editors, ENERGY. They need humor, photos, sharp writing (by people not by boards). They need authentic voices and crusades and passionate values. What I'm describing sounds a lot like the Blogosphere and nothing like a typical editorial page but it doesn't have to be that way. Not only could editorial pages invest some money in good reporters and sharp standalone websites, but they could build farm leagues of reporters out of the blogs and out of the readership.
The ultimate goal is not just money for newspapers but as you say an improvement of the political system through heightened accountability, heightened awareness, increased connectedness.
Newspapers need to embrace the Web, but not like this.
When we reporters go out and gather information and write a story, there needs to be a way for readers who know the topic to say, "hey, this is wrong," or "hey, you forgot this key point." After all, the reporter is almost always less knowledgable on any given article that he writes than his sources and certain readers.
I could see a wiki or wiki-like technology being useful in correcting news errors (*cough* avoid jayson blair *cough*) or adding new perspectives (*cough* slashdot writ large *cough*) or even gathering story ideas. What's more, such technology would turn newspaper websites from electronic reprints into something even better than the print edition.
But an editorial is supposed to be the voice of the newspaper itself. It is supposed to be an opinion with special significance, informed by all the reporting and editing the newspaper does over time, backed by an awesome institutional storehouse of knowledge.
In short, the whole point of an editorial is that it represents one particular viewpoint, whether you agree with it or not. If the Wall Street Journal as a collective entity repeatedly slams Congressional Republicans for pork-barrel politics and fiscal irresponsibility, as it has in recent weeks, that carries particular weight, because the WSJ backs the Republicans more often than not and because it arguably keeps closer watch on the intersection between the economy and government than anyone else.
Likewise, there is reason to care when the LA Times forms a new opinion about California government, the entertainment industry or myraid other subjects at which its expertise is authoritative. If you disagree, fine. You can write an op-ed opinion piece, or letter to the editor. You should certainly be empowered to post a comment on the LA Times website or a trackback to your own weblog post.
But why on earth would I, LA Times reader, want you monkeying with the actual text of the LA Times' editorial? Why would I want to read a version of the editorial you defaced? If I care about your opinion -- maybe you're a film director who disagreed with the LAT on an entertainment industry editorial -- I would much rather read something you wrote from scratch than your own "version" of the LAT editorial.
This seems misguided and frankly I am baffled why opinion editor Michael Kinsley, who used to helm Slate.com -- does not know better.
Advertising revenues by Google and Yahoo are predicted to rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC
Predicted by whom? The Economist says they have less than 4 percent of global advertising.
Very true. But I doubt someone who knows how to benchmark code and is handling thousands or more transactions per second is grabbing a regex recipe out of a book.
Anyone who drops in regularly on a Perl discussion forum (like perlmonks.org) knows that programmers tend to over-use regular expressions.
Regexes are actually a pretty poor way to extract information from comma-delimited or tab-delimited files, for example. By the time you're done dealing with escaped commas, escaped tabs, quoting characters (which many CSV and TDT exporters use in addition to commas and tabs), escaped quote characters, escaped newlines, and escaped escape chars, you end up with a super-complicated regex.
HTML is even more complicated. You have HTML comments and nested tags on top of everything else.
To validate a simple email address, Jeffrey Friedl in his Mastering Regular Expressions book for O'Reilly writes an *11-page* regex.
Most of the time the correct answer is not "here is a regex recipe" but rather "here is a simple library to do the job property with a parser", like Text::CSV or HTML::Parser in perl.
I think most production companies are thrilled to release DVDs direct to the public rather than giving up money to channels and/or cable systems in distribution deals.
Comcast tried to hide their most recent 6 percent fee hike by announcing the day before Thanksgiving. Shady.
At that point, I decided to switch to Netflix. Comcast then offered to roll me back to the original rates and then take $10/month off of THAT. I went ahead and canceled anyway and have never looked back.
I watch all my shows on Netflix DVDs now. I get to watch whenever I want and pause whenever I want without having to pay for cable or a DVR. All the HBO shows I used to watch are available, I just can't watch the latest season. Which is no problem because I'm catching up on everything I missed.
It's been a little over three months and Netflix is still working very well. My monthly bill went from $80+ (with HBO but without DVR) to less than $20.
For news I turn to the Web. I even watch Daily Show segments online.
Guess I sound like a Netflix fanatic, but just wanted to point out there are good alternatives to Comcast.
So that would be $54 per sub per quarter. Minus two week free trial, minus lower number of subs at start of quarter (which _ended_ with 2.6 million subs), plus people on higher than basic plans, then you get to 55.3 per sub.
Your 35-40 percent figure sounds really high. Check the 8-K under "operating expenses" (which includes fulfillment) and "cost of revenues" (not broken out but I suspect includes DVD costs). Fulfillment is roughly 10 percent of the combined total, and about a quarter of just operating expenses.
Have you tried Netflix? My movies arrive in one day, as well. And if you look at the Netflix site, they claim this is true for something like 80 percent of their customers. I have never had a movie unavailable from Netflix -- can't say whether it's an issue for others but have not heard of it being one.
It's impossible to rent one movie per month on Netflix, because the lowest plan offers two movies, but I see what you're saying. Myself, I doubt there will be many people who will buy a $500 box to watch just one or two movies a month. There will be some, but not enough to "kill" Netflix.
Netflix does buy DVDs. I know because I watch lots of NetFlix DVDs not put out by Warner or Columbia. And I'm not sure how current a five year old press release is;-->
The DVD was the single fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history. It went from nothing to household status in something like four years. It's not hard to operate.
Nor is the U.S. mail. I am going to have to check my mail, Netflix or none. And many people seem to have access (cough).
I am on a Mac right now and use iTunes constantly, but I'm not looking for Apple to be my "friend" (not should anyone).
In this article, the columnist gets into a discussion of the Mac mini as "the Netflix killer," writing, "Apple has eliminated the most costly part of the NetFlix model while maintaining all of the good pieces."
First of all, this is factually wrong. I just pulled up the Netflix 8-K annual report, which clearly shows annual DVD costs of either $103 million or $80 million (depending on whether amortized) and annual "fulfillment" (postage and packing) cost of $56 million.
Second, while I agree the mini Mac is a promising digital video dellivery device, it is not a NetFlix killer. The smartest thing about NetFlix is not the great delivery and rental model, but the way it exploits copyright law. Once Netflix has purchased a DVD, assuming it does so at full price outside of a special contract it enters, it is allowed to rent/loan that DVD out an infinite number of times. That battle was fought and won on its behalf by the VHS rental industry long ago.
What this means is that Netflix is happy for you to cycle through loads of different DVD titles every month, so long as postage doesn't eat too deeply into its profit margin. Essentially, its product is postage bound, not copyright bound, which is a fantastic position to be in.
Any digitally streamed movie product from Apple, however, will almost certainly be copyright bound. Unlike Netflix, Apple will need special agreements to cover every movie it delivers. The easiest sell to movie studios is an a-la-carte movie purchase system like the music on iTunes. They then need to keep the cost per movie underneath Average_Netflix_Monthly_Fee/Average_Netflix_Monthl y_DVD_mailings to be competitive, but that's not all. They have to be cheap or fast or cool enough to ALSO justify the purchase of a new computer and/or the hassle of hooking a digital video stream up to a consumer television.
The other model for Apple is a monthly subscription with all-you-can-watch streams, possibly combined with the a-la-carte model to attract the greatest number of users. But this will be, in my estimation, a very tough sell to the studios, and even if you get it up and running, it would need to be first price compeitive with Netflix and second sufficiently cooler to justify the cost and headache of connecting the TV to a computer and possibly buying a new computer.
These systems all demo well because the developer gets to decide what functionality to demo, and it not coincidentally happens to be the functionality the framework was designed to easily support. The real test of the system comes when you want to do something the designer did not anticipate, and you find out how flexible the system is and how sensible the designer's instincts are.
With these environments I think time will tell, with most developers watching the few willing to take the risk of investing the time needed to learn the framework and how to customize it extensively.
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience Nokia phones are not part of the problem because they get very good receipt. The problem is the carriers here, who have competing incomplete networks which they do not invest enough in. However many consumers tend to blame the phonemakers for this, because the technical issues are confusing and because some phonemakers (other than Nokie) deserve to be criticisized for reception issues.
Anyone who follows them mobile phone market knows Nokia was among the LAST to put cameras and other doo-dads in phones, if anything they waited too long. Because Nokia is so good at small interfaces I would LOVE to see them compete with Apple and offer MP3 players, both in phones and standalone. I also think they could make great PDAs and little televisions and Internet phones.
I think you are correct that it is important not to overestimate Apple. The price of MP3 players will fall tremendously over the next couple of years as RAM gets cheaper and cheaper. This will reduce the value of the iPod lock-in that Apple has and make it easier for, say, Google to launch a successful competing music store with an alternative DRM.
After all, if you can pick up a nice MP3 player for $50 or free on your phone, it is a lot easier to switch to another music store.
But until that happens I think there are too many people with $300 iPods for WMA to be a commercially viable DRM. Yes there are some people like me who do not take their music to go, but this is a small slice of an already relatively small market. The music labels cannot find a meanginful revenue stream there. They still might cut off Apple but only with the understanding they won't be making money selling music online for a couple more years.
Oh, also -- people are compiling libraries of Apple-protected music -- more lock-in, no matter what happens to MP3 prices.
By the way, I don't think the music industry is any more eager to be locked in Microsoft's trunk. As slow as they are, I think they have learned to insist on some kind of open DRM, or at least one they can control.
Wrong. If I'm an iPod owner I can't use MSN Music easily at all. That's something like 80% of the MP3 player market.
Why on earth would Apple sell anything other than Apple-protected music on their music store?
If you are suggesting people can switch to another music store and then burn a CD and then rip to MP3, no one is going to do that. It is too much trouble. Might as well just buy the CD!
Ya. And if they are going to act irrationally, now is the time to do it. The more iPods and songs Apple sells, the more the labels come to depend on the Apple music store for revenue, the harder it will be for the music industry to jump ship. So, sure, maybe they'll pull something crazy now, when they still make the vast majority of their money on CD sales.
... So maybe they _won't_ do it? My head hurts.
Which actually wouldn't be that crazy, it would be logical in the sense they don't want to give Apple any more lock-in. Hmmm, logic
I am sure this is a casual comment by Jobs, because he is in the catbird seat and has no reason to worry. He has the power here.
What are the labels going to do if they don't like the terms of iTunes music store? Go to another store? No.
1. No other store has near the volume or reach of Apple's. No one else has the brand recognition or ease of use.
2. By far the number one music player is the iPod, and only the Apple music store can sell protected music files that work on that player. The labels could try and sell unprotected MP3 files but this seems unlikely.
So going above 99 cents per track means either convinving Jobs (not likely) or moving music off the Apple music store -- which means lost sales and possibly more piracy. Not going to happen. Jobs is in a great position.
I've been happy so far with my very simple, pretty cheap Palm Zire 31. The one thing I'd really like is to replace the Palm Desktop software with a Web-based application suite.
I don't mind having to download/install the sync software on my local PCs. But I'd love if all my off-Palm data were automatically in sync, so I could access from work/home/office/friend's laptop without a weird four-way sync setup. Every time I synced, it would be to the Web, so I only have two datasets (Palm, Web). Also, if I leave my Palm at home I can make an emergency data check (e.g. calendar) at an Internet cafe.
Besides, the Palm Desktop is so incredibly basic it could be implemented in XHTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX without breaking a sweat.
PS I know there is Internet sync software available from third parties but it is hacky and tends to sync poorly.
Wow Greg, that's a really insightful comment. I'm glad there's someone else out there thinking about this constructively.
You're right -- if newspapers can adapt to the Web, if there's any time left for that, they can empower citizens and actually change how government works. There's once concept I picked up from all my political science courses that keeps coming back up: any political item with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs is tough to oppose. Any political item with concentrated costs and diffuse benefits is tough to sell.
This is a source of some of the widespread angst about politics in the citizenry. And it is largely a function of friction in communication channels. The Web allows deeper stories on more topics by more authors.
Some newspapers see this as a threat, or a minor development, and frankly I do not think they will make it more than 25 more years. The others will succeed to the extent they make they Web central to their operations.
A communication channel is two way, and as you point out newspapers need to come up with ways to give more people their own voices. More significantly, they need to listen to these voices and reflect them prominently. Your idea for pulling Web content into physical newspapers is a good one. Also good would be actually paying and hiring people, both to do weblogs and when approprpiate to become full fledged reporters for both online and print.
Many bloggers simply don't have the time or inclination to bring much to the table beyond their own opinion. But every town or economic sector or sports team or bar has its gadfly, its crank and its retired wise old veteran, all with either too much time or too much obsessive energy to churn out ordinary blogs or letters to the editors. Get them behind a free hosted blog and half a mandate from a newspaper and watch them fly. Pay the best of them, even if it's on the cheap. Nick Denton has run rings around the best U.S. newspapers online and he pays notoriously poorly.
One thing that seemed to be looming between the lines of your comments, or maybe I just wish it was -- there so much potential in the editorial sections of American newspaper. Michael Moore, Al Franken on the left, the WSJ editorial page and maybe John Stossel on the right show the public appetite out there for heavily reported opinion. It is real and significant, and the Internet is already the epicenter for it.
So the economic potential of American editorial pages is actually huge. And yet newspapers, including LAT, view these pages as cost centers.
They need dogged reporters, creative editors, ENERGY. They need humor, photos, sharp writing (by people not by boards). They need authentic voices and crusades and passionate values. What I'm describing sounds a lot like the Blogosphere and nothing like a typical editorial page but it doesn't have to be that way. Not only could editorial pages invest some money in good reporters and sharp standalone websites, but they could build farm leagues of reporters out of the blogs and out of the readership.
The ultimate goal is not just money for newspapers but as you say an improvement of the political system through heightened accountability, heightened awareness, increased connectedness.
Newspapers need to embrace the Web, but not like this.
When we reporters go out and gather information and write a story, there needs to be a way for readers who know the topic to say, "hey, this is wrong," or "hey, you forgot this key point." After all, the reporter is almost always less knowledgable on any given article that he writes than his sources and certain readers.
I could see a wiki or wiki-like technology being useful in correcting news errors (*cough* avoid jayson blair *cough*) or adding new perspectives (*cough* slashdot writ large *cough*) or even gathering story ideas. What's more, such technology would turn newspaper websites from electronic reprints into something even better than the print edition.
But an editorial is supposed to be the voice of the newspaper itself. It is supposed to be an opinion with special significance, informed by all the reporting and editing the newspaper does over time, backed by an awesome institutional storehouse of knowledge.
In short, the whole point of an editorial is that it represents one particular viewpoint, whether you agree with it or not. If the Wall Street Journal as a collective entity repeatedly slams Congressional Republicans for pork-barrel politics and fiscal irresponsibility, as it has in recent weeks, that carries particular weight, because the WSJ backs the Republicans more often than not and because it arguably keeps closer watch on the intersection between the economy and government than anyone else.
Likewise, there is reason to care when the LA Times forms a new opinion about California government, the entertainment industry or myraid other subjects at which its expertise is authoritative. If you disagree, fine. You can write an op-ed opinion piece, or letter to the editor. You should certainly be empowered to post a comment on the LA Times website or a trackback to your own weblog post.
But why on earth would I, LA Times reader, want you monkeying with the actual text of the LA Times' editorial? Why would I want to read a version of the editorial you defaced? If I care about your opinion -- maybe you're a film director who disagreed with the LAT on an entertainment industry editorial -- I would much rather read something you wrote from scratch than your own "version" of the LAT editorial.
This seems misguided and frankly I am baffled why opinion editor Michael Kinsley, who used to helm Slate.com -- does not know better.
You would just think that the news media would be all over this but Noooooo!
So true. It's a good thing there are obscure websites like CNN.com to distribute this hidden information.
Advertising revenues by Google and Yahoo are predicted to rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC
Predicted by whom? The Economist says they have less than 4 percent of global advertising.
Right on.
The only downside is, you have to live in Texas.
Signed,
Former Texan
Calling the cops three times on your cellphone: 68 cents.
Driving to Denny's at 96 miles per hour: $1.10 in gas.
Seeing identity-thieving bastards hauled off in handcuffs before your very eyes: priceless.
There are some things money can buy. For everything else, there's adrenaline and instincts.
Very true. But I doubt someone who knows how to benchmark code and is handling thousands or more transactions per second is grabbing a regex recipe out of a book.
Anyone who drops in regularly on a Perl discussion forum (like perlmonks.org) knows that programmers tend to over-use regular expressions.
Regexes are actually a pretty poor way to extract information from comma-delimited or tab-delimited files, for example. By the time you're done dealing with escaped commas, escaped tabs, quoting characters (which many CSV and TDT exporters use in addition to commas and tabs), escaped quote characters, escaped newlines, and escaped escape chars, you end up with a super-complicated regex.
HTML is even more complicated. You have HTML comments and nested tags on top of everything else.
To validate a simple email address, Jeffrey Friedl in his Mastering Regular Expressions book for O'Reilly writes an *11-page* regex.
Most of the time the correct answer is not "here is a regex recipe" but rather "here is a simple library to do the job property with a parser", like Text::CSV or HTML::Parser in perl.
Yahoo can't decide what's it's doing -- it contradicted itself. Slashdot is supposed to stop this how? Hiring fact checkers?
Ha! You're right!
I think most production companies are thrilled to release DVDs direct to the public rather than giving up money to channels and/or cable systems in distribution deals.
Comcast tried to hide their most recent 6 percent fee hike by announcing the day before Thanksgiving. Shady.
At that point, I decided to switch to Netflix. Comcast then offered to roll me back to the original rates and then take $10/month off of THAT. I went ahead and canceled anyway and have never looked back.
I watch all my shows on Netflix DVDs now. I get to watch whenever I want and pause whenever I want without having to pay for cable or a DVR. All the HBO shows I used to watch are available, I just can't watch the latest season. Which is no problem because I'm catching up on everything I missed.
It's been a little over three months and Netflix is still working very well. My monthly bill went from $80+ (with HBO but without DVR) to less than $20.
For news I turn to the Web. I even watch Daily Show segments online.
Guess I sound like a Netflix fanatic, but just wanted to point out there are good alternatives to Comcast.
Three months in a quarter, not four ;-->
So that would be $54 per sub per quarter. Minus two week free trial, minus lower number of subs at start of quarter (which _ended_ with 2.6 million subs), plus people on higher than basic plans, then you get to 55.3 per sub.
Actually, you've got a good point. Had no idea. mod parent up ...
Your 35-40 percent figure sounds really high. Check the 8-K under "operating expenses" (which includes fulfillment) and "cost of revenues" (not broken out but I suspect includes DVD costs). Fulfillment is roughly 10 percent of the combined total, and about a quarter of just operating expenses.
Have you tried Netflix? My movies arrive in one day, as well. And if you look at the Netflix site, they claim this is true for something like 80 percent of their customers. I have never had a movie unavailable from Netflix -- can't say whether it's an issue for others but have not heard of it being one.
It's impossible to rent one movie per month on Netflix, because the lowest plan offers two movies, but I see what you're saying. Myself, I doubt there will be many people who will buy a $500 box to watch just one or two movies a month. There will be some, but not enough to "kill" Netflix.
Netflix does buy DVDs. I know because I watch lots of NetFlix DVDs not put out by Warner or Columbia. And I'm not sure how current a five year old press release is ;-->
The DVD was the single fastest-selling consumer electronics product in history. It went from nothing to household status in something like four years. It's not hard to operate.
Nor is the U.S. mail. I am going to have to check my mail, Netflix or none. And many people seem to have access (cough).
I am on a Mac right now and use iTunes constantly, but I'm not looking for Apple to be my "friend" (not should anyone).
In this article, the columnist gets into a discussion of the Mac mini as "the Netflix killer," writing, "Apple has eliminated the most costly part of the NetFlix model while maintaining all of the good pieces."
l y_DVD_mailings to be competitive, but that's not all. They have to be cheap or fast or cool enough to ALSO justify the purchase of a new computer and/or the hassle of hooking a digital video stream up to a consumer television.
First of all, this is factually wrong. I just pulled up the Netflix 8-K annual report, which clearly shows annual DVD costs of either $103 million or $80 million (depending on whether amortized) and annual "fulfillment" (postage and packing) cost of $56 million.
Second, while I agree the mini Mac is a promising digital video dellivery device, it is not a NetFlix killer. The smartest thing about NetFlix is not the great delivery and rental model, but the way it exploits copyright law. Once Netflix has purchased a DVD, assuming it does so at full price outside of a special contract it enters, it is allowed to rent/loan that DVD out an infinite number of times. That battle was fought and won on its behalf by the VHS rental industry long ago.
What this means is that Netflix is happy for you to cycle through loads of different DVD titles every month, so long as postage doesn't eat too deeply into its profit margin. Essentially, its product is postage bound, not copyright bound, which is a fantastic position to be in.
Any digitally streamed movie product from Apple, however, will almost certainly be copyright bound. Unlike Netflix, Apple will need special agreements to cover every movie it delivers. The easiest sell to movie studios is an a-la-carte movie purchase system like the music on iTunes. They then need to keep the cost per movie underneath Average_Netflix_Monthly_Fee/Average_Netflix_Month
The other model for Apple is a monthly subscription with all-you-can-watch streams, possibly combined with the a-la-carte model to attract the greatest number of users. But this will be, in my estimation, a very tough sell to the studios, and even if you get it up and running, it would need to be first price compeitive with Netflix and second sufficiently cooler to justify the cost and headache of connecting the TV to a computer and possibly buying a new computer.
Perl has its own rapid application development framework, Maypole. Here are some screenshots from a Perl.com article where Simon Cozens sets up an online sales catalog in 11 lines of code. (Here's a followup article, and the Maypole home page.)
These systems all demo well because the developer gets to decide what functionality to demo, and it not coincidentally happens to be the functionality the framework was designed to easily support. The real test of the system comes when you want to do something the designer did not anticipate, and you find out how flexible the system is and how sensible the designer's instincts are.
With these environments I think time will tell, with most developers watching the few willing to take the risk of investing the time needed to learn the framework and how to customize it extensively.