“I learned of Steve Jobs’ death while checking for the baseball scores on my iPhone,” Mark Kreidler reports for ESPN.com. “And that’s it — that’s the one-byte summation. While Jobs’ astounding legacy of creativity and innovation will never be foremost connected with the sports industry, his impact on our little corner of the world is profound all the same.”
“That Super Bowl advertising extravaganza, the four-hour ‘best-of’ commercial parade that some people watch as closely as they do the sacred game itself? That started with Jobs,” Kreidler reports. “Those earbuds you see dangling from most of the athletes as they walk off the bus or step onto the court for a shootaround? Jobs.”
“Coaches now routinely use iPads to draw up game plans and critiques and send them along to their players. A significant chunk of the most interesting parts of TV broadcasts are composed on Apple products, which have been the creative choice of artists, writers and editors almost from their inception,” Kreidler reports. “The iPhone is a default repository for the best sports apps and immediate access to game info. Supermodel Marisa Miller used the strategic placement of an iPod upon her as part of one of the more iconic swimsuit photos in memory. (You’re welcome, America.)”
Kreidler reports, “And, not to put too fine a point on it, Jobs was the single largest shareholder of the Disney Company, which owns ESPN and, thus, this very page. It’s a small world, after all.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “MrMcLargeHuge” for the heads up.]
I work the classical music field. Just imagine Steve Jobs’ impact to our little corner…
10 years ago, one had to have very good connections to get a contract with a label they would produce a CD recording. Today my students just publish their stuff on iTunes, and they are not exploited by a record company.
Of course, some people (the ones who had all the money and power but actually didn’t provide much input) lost their position, and they hate Apple for this. Probably you can see that in other fields; IT has always hated Apple for making the computer accessible to anyone – they were the first “victim”. As this “democratization” through technology goes on, more Apple haters are generated. 10 years ago it was the music industry, today it’s the newspaper/tv/media who feels threatened by change and starts to write bad articles about Apple.
For us others, it’s great. Want to publish a book? iTunes. Get some education lectures? iTunes U. It’s funny to see how well the ideals of the hippies at Apple could be realized through technology (and capitalism). Actually it needed that technology to free up markets like the music industry. Before iTunes it was corporations ruling over the musicians, exploiting our work. Now we’re starting to see a free market, with true competition. Not everybody is a winner here, but everybody has the chance to be lucky, not only the ones with good connections/money.
Great post. 1