| WereKitten said: Two answers to the bolded. 1) The source code being released under Apache license, and the software platform being available for free means that everyone can use it and tailor it to their device.The underlying hardware differences are relegated to abstraction layers of the SDK, thus the porting between Android devices is trivial compared to porting from iPhone to Android and viceversa. It's the PC versus Mac again, only this time the OS is free... do you really think that Apple will be able to contain the tide of Android devices when everyone will want a smartphone, but not at that price? 2) It's not about the bandwidth alone. Music and videos are simply consumed according to very different patterns. People pay for music, but listens to it again and again, so they want to buy their music. At the same time many people will rent most movies and just watch them once at a lower cost, and only buy very few selected titles. I own a substantial movie collection because I'm a cinephile, but I'm in the minority. Do you know anyone today who likes to see their movies again and again -as I do- and is happy to download them in the hundreds and nurse the multi-terabyte hard disk arrays on which they are stored? Or alternatively that is happy to have hundreds of movies stored somewhere in a server for streaming and needing a permanent and reliable connection? Digital distribution will cannibalize physical media for video content outside the renting market only when technology will provide a reliable and easy to handle client-side storage solution, unless perfect bandwidth conditions are attained everywhere you might want to consume your data. P.S. I think the Qualcomm Snapdragon is the most awesome processor ever. I dream about it every night. |
1. I was also talking about the differences between the android devices themselves. An abstraction layer is one thing when you have platforms with vastly different capabilities and sometimes interfaces and all running different versions of that operating system at that. A closer analogy is PC vs console.
Furthermore its not PC vs Apple, its Android vs Symbian vs WebOS vs Windows Mobile vs iOS. Its a 5 player market not a two player market. In this situation its a lot easier for a player like Apple to succeed with their business model than it was in a two player market which developed in the personal computer space.
2. Its also about how the media is consumed. Music is played in all sorts of different environments whereas movie watching is restricted to times when a person is seated such as at home or whilst traveling in a car in most instances. Lastly the rental model for music is completely different. People either go to a free music site such as youtube or equivalent to rent music on demand or they listen to the radio.
People are more limited by practical reasons such as the price, availability, accessibility of movies than they are by any attachment to physical media. Renting movies on demand is simply more practical because it eliminates the trip to aquire a movie specifically for rental and the requirement to return the property within a set period or face penalties. Since most movies are consumed in the place with the most reliable and fastest internet connections, the home it won't be a significant issue within a few years as many countries roll out fibre to the door for people to have access to the entirety of their collection on all media devices within the home.
Btw, I dream about the Snapdragon every night too! 
Tease.
