Mark Evans asks:
That said, satellite radio does offer tremendous variety and there will be niches where it will thrive [...] but how big will the market be if the iPod becomes really car-friendly? I could be badly under-estimating the appeal of satellite-radio and/or over-estimating the appeal of the iPod but I can see the iPod becoming a far more popular on the road tool.
It's a pattern we see over and over, where each distribution mechanism is going to have to focus in on its advantages. (It's a kind of Telco 2.0 thing: in a modular, layered world, you aren't going to have any choice but to only do what you do well.) Real-time news and sport needs to be blended into your diet of Shpongle and Glass. (If my kids grow up weird, you know who to blame.) So a cellco trying to break into the music market wouldn't make a crap iPod emulation, but would produce a player that would grab the 60-second news and sport headlines, tailored to your preferences, and insert them between tracks once an hour. Compete on a different plane.
A newspaper would focus on situation where paper beats scissors and stone (or at least LCD and silicon): trains, airplanes, "to go" type media, crosswords and sudoku, etc.
A telco wouldn't build streaming IPTV, but would partner with satellite providers and content delivery networks to blend the low cost of continent-wide broadcast with the lower haulage costs of file sharing technology.
As for the car + iPod combo, the iPod is good at storage, but has a lousy UI for operation whilst driving. iPod for storage, bluetooth or WiFi for connection, native UI on the car for audio. Except someone will think this needs to be "secure" and that'll screw the ecosystem up. (Will the music stop when you open the windows to prevent anybody else hearing?)
Conclusion: the iPod will lose the mass market because of DRM. Only an open system will have the modularity needed, and the car makers aren't planning on being any consumer electronics maker's poodle. Nobody made Apple do DRM, so I won't weep. Anyhow, I've got a better MP3 player with zero DRM'd music anyway :)
Posted by Martin Geddes at 8:24 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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