All Articles Tagged Media

Busy week for TiPb in the media! Smartphone Experts Editor-in-Chief Dieter Bohn joined CNN’s Richard Quest on Quest Means Business yesterday to talk about the Latest smartphones

iPhone 3G S, Palm Pre, and “any of the others” are discussed. Give it a watch!

Maybe, in that news of Disney joining up with Hulu to offer even more free, advertising supported television and movie content via the web, could reduce the amount of people in the US who choose to pay for that same content, ad-free for rental or purchase via iTunes. However, there are some other factors involved that Business Week isn’t addressing:

• Hulu is only currently available in the US. iTunes TV and movies are available in Canada, the UK, Australia, and most recently Germany.
• Streaming content such as Hulu is a great option, but not always the best option for every situation. Being able to download, store locally, and watch or take content on the go to watch is still important. (And will remain so until the Internet is as ubiquitous and transparent as electricity).

Most importantly, however:

• Apple has repeatedly stated that they operate the iTunes store at break-even levels just to get people to buy more iPods and now iPhones. Whether that’s semi-disingenuous or not, the iPhone will eventually be able to play Hulu content as well — either directly off the web like YouTube or via a 3rd party Hulu offering in the App Store. More reason to buy iPhones and iPod touches.

If nothing else, Apple has proven to have some small insight into where the “fat middle” of consumerism. They don’t blaze trails, they don’t bleed edges, but they wait and see and when they feel a market is mature, they offer their take on it.

Our bet is we see that Hulu app… whether AT&T allows it or not is another matter…

For the last few months I’ve been conducting an experiment, trying to figure out whether it better suited my needs to sync my iPhone 3G to my desktop computer, to my laptop, or to embrace the (potential) future and try to sync only over-the-air with the cloud (online services and storage).

First, a little about the contenders.

• My MacBook is purposefully kept light. Aside from whatever temporary I’m working on at the time, it has almost nothing on it, including no media unless I’m actively watching it. It’s speed on-the-go with limited capacity.
• My iMac is heavy duty and also serves as my media machine. It’s connected on one end to a Drobo and serves an Apple TV in the living room on the other. It’s pure power and content, but absolutely no portability.
• My cloud is, well, the cloud — everything I keep on my MobileMe, iDisk and Apple keeps ready for me on their massive iTunes servers.

A month with each of them (Round Robin interuptus notwithstanding) and what were my results? Which have I stuck with (for now)? Read on to find out!

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Joost, from the P2P masters who brought us Skype and Kasaa, went from hyper-anticipated start-up to barely whispered almost-forgotten in what seemed like the blink of an eye.

Well, according to Gizmodo, they’re back baby, and with free WiFi streaming movies and media to sweeten the deal — if only slightly:

It’s kind of crashy, could use a better navigation UI and takes too long for movie streams to get going (and then when they do it’s kind of finicky) but we definitely appreciate being to stream The Fifth Element over Wi-Fi in decent quality, when it actually gets going. More than anything though, it just makes us soak our pillow with even more drool dreaming of a Hulu app.

So, is the free-ness worth the — what might just be growing — pain? Think Joost has something here? If you try it out, let us know!

(Thanks Matthew for the tip!)

Rumor gets reported there will be Flash on the iPhone. Rumor gets smashed. Rumor gets reported there will be unlimited music on the iPhone. Rumor gets smashed. Rinse and repeat.

What’s going on? Why aren’t we getting these stories straight?

Turns out maybe these stories weren’t meant to be gotten. Turns out maybe these stories were meant to get us.

There was a time when media really was the fourth estate, when it reported the news. In something akin to the scientific method, media observed what was going on in the grand experiment that is society, looked for pattern and flaw, then contextualized it, gave it form and flavor, and broadcast it by mule and truck and cable and fiber to those who wanted or needed to know.

Now media is entertainment and is competing with itself and other forms of entertainment for your attention and your dollar. One of the ways to compete is to get mysterious “un-named sources” to give you the highly prized “sensational headline”. And instead of digging for these sources and convincing them to come forward, the anonymous sources now trip and push past each other to get to the reporters first. Why? Because controlling the story is important. Information is power and spin is leverage.

Okay, soap-box, what does this have to do with the iPhone? Two interesting and very similar blog posts emerged recently shedding new light on both the Flash and unlimited music stories that have been all over the web lately. Let’s take a look:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Flash drama continues, with more twists and turns than a California highway. It looks as though iPhone may be getting native Flash support after all, if dragged kicking and screaming. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke to reporters during a conference call…

“Well, you really believe that Flash is synonymous with the Internet, and frankly, anybody who wants to browse the Web and experience the Web’s glory really needs Flash support. We were very excited about the announcement from Windows Mobile–adoption of Flash on their devices–and the fact that we’ve shipped 0.5 billion devices now, non-PC devices. So we are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone, and we will work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK. We can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves, and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.”

Do let’s pretend that Steve Jobs earlier comments were some kind of smokescreen intended to mask Apple’s true motives, while backdoor negotiations with Adobe unfolded. That makes sense, doesn’t it? No, I didn’t think so either.

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Steve Jobs might want to look in his rearview mirror, because there’s a hulking eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway, belching thick black smoke, and crushing every vehicle in its path.

The software giant is working with long time rival Adobe to bring Flash player Lite (yes, THAT Flash player) to Windows Mobile devices, while simultaneously incorporating support for its own SilverLight technology. The move will give Microsoft a leg up over Apple, making its mobile platform more web 2.0 friendly in supporting these ubiquitous web animation and runtime environments.

Apple has valid reasons for eschewing Flash lite, so it claims, like poor performance and a not-so-much like a desktop experience. Even if valid, it’s never a checkmark in your favor when competing products support features yours does not.

Wake up, Apple. You’re in Micrsoft’s crosshairs now.

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Avi Greengart, Research Director for market research firm Current Analysis, says Adobe’s Flash player performs poorly on iPhone, in its current incarnation, proving more trouble than it’s worth.

“There is no question the iPhone delivers a compelling Web experience and there are good reasons to want Flash in there, but Flash Lite wouldn’t give you the Web experience you’re looking for.”

The jixt of this statement, as we’ve known for some time, is that Adobe’s Flash Lite player comes with a high resource overhead, taxing the processor as well as battery life. Or so Apple claims. Forces are at work behind the scenes to develop a more optimized solution to bring native Flash content to iPhone users.

Much as I sometimes lament the absence of Flash, I don’t see it as a crucial feature. So long as some method exists for scraping content from YouTube, as it does now. That said, having no Flash support is yet one more missing feature that Apple haters will use as fodder for flinging rotten fruit at the device.

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Time has declared the iPhone their Invention of the Year.

“Yes, there’s been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. So much so that it seems weird to add more, after Danny Fanboy and Bobby McBlogger have had their day.”

Nice! In one fell swoop, they’ve insulted me and any readers. Not too shabby, and they still get the link. Anyway, they give five reasons and then justify it all in the essence of their article:

1. the iPhone is pretty
2. it’s touchy-feely
3. it will make other phones better
4. it’s not a phone, it’s a platform
5. it is but the ghost of iPhones to come

I’d add a few more reasons the iPhone was tops, but I think I’ll save it for a later article.

The cost of a show was not enough for NBC Universal. No, NBC Universal wanted a cut of the hardware sales for iPods and iPhones. I really don’t get this. Would they bother Apple for a cut of computer sales? Do they get a cut of television sales? Would they bother TiVo for a cut of hardware sales? No, no, and no. I think they were just looking for publicity for their two new video sharing sites in taking their Apple spat public. I think one of them is called Whatever and maybe the other one is IDon’tCare.