Clicking & Streaming
Today, Spotify filled a huge gap in its offerings by releasing a dedicated iPad app, available for free in the App Store.
I’m not naive enough to believe that if given options, consumers would abandon Amazon and Apple en masse and rush to independent e-bookshops. But the publishing industry certainly isn’t making it any easier for smaller companies to compete.
Netflix may be trying to radically reshape its future by positioning itself as an honest-to-goodness cable channel to square off against the likes of HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and Starz.
How much is a song worth? It’s a question that’s often been discussed since the internet got involved in the music industry. Is it 99 cents, as iTunes, Amazon and other digital retailers believe? Is it some minuscule percentage of a monthly subscription fee, a la Spotify and online radio stations? Or is it free? One new label has made free music the center of its business model.
Here’s a question: When you buy digital media, what are you actually getting for your money? Actual ownership over a copy of the media — a la analog media purchases — or just permission to watch/read/listen to something whenever you want? That’s the question currently at the heart of a lawsuit about digital music files.
We’re still some distance from a world where online streaming of content can truly challenge the dominance of television, but recent figures suggest that the number of households in the U.S. with at least one television actually fell in 2011. Are we finally seeing the long-awaited beginning of “cord-cutting”? And if so, what are people cutting their cords in favor of?
What if Hollywood tried to create its own content cloud, but the Internet didn’t want to use it? That’s the problem emerging with news that Netflix has dropped out of the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, a move that could doom the UltraViolet digital locker once and for all and leave the Internet open to multiple competing content clouds. Are we repeating the mistakes of media storage from the past?
With Netflix now having multiple series of original content in various levels of production, including shows that it beat out HBO and other cable channels for the rights to, you might be forgiven for thinking that 2012 was going to be the year when the internet stepped up and became a genuine force in television production. But the reality is a little more complicated.
Ah, that final week between Christmas and New Year, when we look backward at all that happened and forward at the year to come. And what a year to come—one that could bring not only the so-called Mayan apocalypse, but also John Cusack racing across the globe to save humanity. What am I looking forward to? Someone to finally crack the “ownership of media” mentality, of course.
If you believe the hype, the new Xbox 360 update represents the future of television. But if that’s the case, why does it all seem so familiar?
If you received an email recently telling you that you would be receiving a Walmart gift card or cash equivalent as part of the corporation’s settlement in a class action lawsuit alleging that Walmart and Netflix illegally worked together to fix DVD rental or purchase prices, then I’m afraid there’s some bad news.
