“The trouble with one business model that works for one area of digital media, is that it will rarely work, unchanged, for another area,” Faultline writes for The Register. “That’s the thing that has been bugging Steve Jobs at Apple and which stops his company from coming out with something analogous to a video iPod. But it doesn’t seem to be stopping any other company, and everyone this week seems ready to announce their shot at taking digital video to the world legally, hoping to become the iTunes of the movie and TV world.”
“Sony has announced it will launch a service next year, Microsoft has launched MSN Video Downloads in the US, Intel and Bertelsmann plan to collaborate on devices and a service for downloading music, movies and games, while Akimbo Systems, is adding more content to its download-to-DVR service, from the Food Network, Home & Garden Television and DIY Network,” Faultline writes. “It’s not that any one of them on its own is likely to revolutionize video file delivery to the home, but it shows how many companies are already on the track of the Holy Grail of internet film delivery services.”
“iTunes has managed to create an environment which can serve as a buying place for both old and new content. If you wish to have digital versions of all your old vinyl records, and put them on an iPod, it is possible. If you want to keep in touch with one specific genre, it is possible, if you want to own everything an artist has ever done, it is nearly possible,” Faultline writes. “The same needs to be possible in any successful version of an online film business. Simple search criteria for finding types of films, films with certain actors in, the entire works of a particular director, films which have the same or similar plot lines, or specific scenes in them. All this is a given and a standard way of indexing films and creating key metadata, still needs to be arrived at (it was the job of MPEG 7 but where is it?).”
“The Apple [iTunes Music Store] approach was to make the experience better than piracy, and that shouldn’t be too difficult, just achieve everything listed above. The wide variety of choice, the right platform/s to play the films on, the right price, and the right first time, simple ease of use. But there is a feeling that if all that was possible right now then Steve Jobs and Apple would have already launched it,” Faultline writes. “In the end, despite Job’s continual protestations that Apple is focused on music, we now expect that studios will go with any platform that Apple offers them, on the basis that if the company has solved music piracy by inventing a better service, then it’s the only company that is likely to have the chutzpah to do the job a second time, this time for films.”
Full article, an interesting read, with much more here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple picks chips for ‘vPod’ a ‘future multimedia mobile device?’ – April 06, 2005
