| WereKitten said: Indeed, that's my stance. Basically, the web has been winning on all fronts as the universal distribution mean, and open platforms such as Android are the fastest expanding on all kinds of device. Conceding that it's time to capitalize on the services, content and hardware rather than the platform is only realistic. Apple's position is great, but it's not sustainable in the long term and can't be the model for new entrants. They stormed a stagnant market with an offer of products and services that were just miles better than the competition, but they will be relegated to the boutique high market as Android devices grow to be just good enough. As to broadening the audience: pushing for Android means pushing for a standard, free platform. Take the PSN video store and imagine being able to sell that same content for any Android device via an Android App. Plus, in my opinion there's not as much cannibalizing of the blu-ray market as you seem to think: digital downloading of music is to keep and ate into into the CD market, but legal video digital distribution is basically substituing renting. |
I have to disagree somewhat on the description 'open'. Android itself is not significantly different to iOS in terms of its openness outside of Flash. Whether the source code itself is free or the operating system is given away, the way Android and iOS operate are near identical. Whilst both devices can work through the open internet they mainly use the internet as a network through which internal downloaded applications access the internet. Because of this similarity I doubt that Apple will be relegated to a small segment of the market. Applications will continue to be ported to various different platforms as theres as much difference between Android phones as there is between Android and Apple. This isn't the PC market where one Windows can rule them all.
Just because the video market hasn't been canibalised yet, doesn't mean it isn't happening. It was simply significantly cheaper to solve the distribution issues for files which are six orders of magnitude smaller than video files first. It doesn't mean that the same won't apply to video distribution as well. You can store 5,000 songs on an Iphone 8GB but you can only store between 2-10 movies. So the difference is that the movies have to be able to be streamed on demand and we're simply not there yet. By 2015 my house is slated to have 100mbps fibre so we will be there soon.
Tease.
