“Gatekeepers don’t make much sense.”

by ellenm1

Why Does The Entertainment Industry Seek To Kill Any Innovation That’s Helping It Adapt?
[Via Techdirt]

The LA Times recently had a good article about Hulu’s struggles with its corporate parents, the various TV companies. While Hulu itself has been massively successful, the TV companies are suddenly claiming it’s a threat (even though they own it) and are seeking to cripple the service in a misguided and shortsighted bid to “protect” their legacy offerings.

Combine that with our recent story about the record labels crippling Spotify and the Hollywood studios seeking to cripple Netflix, and you’ve got a pattern. Any time a new service comes along that helps drag the content industries into the present, the industry’s hit back by trying to kill off or cripple the golden goose.

The simplistic answer is that the entertainment industry is all about control, and they freak out about these success stories (that make them money) because they realize they’re losing control. I think it’s a little more complex than that, but not too much. The established entertainment business, for many, many years, has operated under the principle of being the gatekeeper to their industry. They’ve (incorrectly) believed that their value and the key to their business is in being the gatekeeper. But the amazing thing about the internet is that it knocks down fences and walls with ease.

Gatekeepers don’t make much sense.

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The TV studios and TV companies fail to realize that their purpose is not to constrain access and make money but to enable access to make money. If they cut off Netflix, then Netflix must adapt or die. So what to do? How about become its own enabler? They outbid HBO!

The actions of the studios has been to empower Netflix to perform what had previously been done by the studios. They have now created a competitor.

A competitor who is more connected with what the market wants and has the agility to get it to them. Not too smart.

If they have worked to enable Netflix to do a better job streaming, they would never done that. Now they look to do the same with Hulu.

They are actually weakening their positions by trying to stay gatekeepers. If they simply enabled Netflix, Hulu and others to serve as conduits, they might have had a chance and might have prevented the creation of high powered competitors.

Gatekeepers want to get paid a fee just for keeping the gate. They reduce access.

People want easy access to content. Netflix and others enable that. The studios seldom do. What succeeds today are the business plans that do the best job getting customers what they want and need.

Hard to see the studios accomplishing that.

Is the iPad king because it is not necessary?

by pasukaru76 (out of town)

Will the iPad be as Unbeatable as the iPod? – Yahoo! News
[Via PC World]

When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPad, many observers (including me) called it a big iPod Touch. We were talking about the similarities in design and functionality. But as time has gone on, I’ve started to think the iPad and the iPod may share another trait: Invincibility.

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This is a really interesting point. Could the invincibility of the iPad be similar to the iPod for the same reason – neither is a necessity?

People need a computer and will make a compromise on quality to get one at an affordable price. The same with a phone.

But with an iPad, people can wait, they do not need it now. They can wait. If they want to buy one they can buy the best. Why get a cheaper knockoff?

And it will be hard to make the price more affordable for competitors as APple has the component market pretty well wrapped up, garnering a price few can match.

As the article puts it:

Both personally and professionally, I hope this analysis is wrong. As the editor of PCWorld, it’s better for my business to have a spirited, interesting tablet competition to cover. It’s more fun to report on and brings in more readers. And as an average technology citizen, I think Apple’s got enough power already without completely dominating an important new product category.

But as I look at the tablet market, I feel more and more like I’ve seen this movie before. It starred the iPod … and a bunch of other actors I’ve long since forgotten.

10 years after iTunes, Google still trying and moving backwards

by Theoddnote

Google’s talks with music labels are ‘broken’, have ‘gone backwards’
[Via MacDailyNews]

“Google has spent a year trying to build a music service that could compete with Apple’s iTunes,” Peter Kafka reports for AllThingsD. “But those efforts seem to have stalled again.”

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iTunes itself came out 10 years ago, even before the iPod. Google still does not have anything for dealing with a music library.

The iTunes store opened 8 years ago. Nothing from Google and it looks like nothing will be seen for a while.

Where is the Google ecosystem in this arena?

Stock manipulation of Apple in today’s world

The Apple slingshot is primed
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

The pullback in advance of the company’s Q2 earnings report has gone far enough

“If you can keep a good stock down, then you are able to load up for the ride back up. It’s like a slingshot — the harder you pull, the more propulsion you generate.”

That’s how Jason Schwarz, an author and investment adviser, described the game that hedge funds play with Apple (AAPL) in an article entitled “Apple: Seven Reasons Shorts Love It,” — a Dec. 2009 piece we liked enough to feature the next day.

One of the points he made then is worth remembering now, with the stock hovering near a three month low and the company expected to report record second fiscal quarter earnings on Wednesday:

Apple always bounces back. Over the long run, Apple fundamentals will certainly take the stock higher, but hedge funds want to maximize the ride. Keeping a great stock down allows them to profit from quick predetermined trades rather than being fully invested all the time.

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So, Wall Street guys manipulate a stock price for their own reasons. And this is supposed to be a free and open, and RATIONAL,  market?

The future of the PC in an iPad world

How the iPad Is Really Eating the PC
[Via Cult of Mac]

Nearly a year ago, I predicted in my Computerworld column that Apple’s iPad would not only eat into netbook sales, but sales of laptops and even desktop PCs. It was an unpopular prediction.

If you look at the 300+ comments attached to that piece, you’ll see that the majority of commenters at the time thought I was crazy, stupid or both.

One wrote: “Obviously Mike Elgan has gone off the deep end on this one. This article is so naive to the real world, and so far fetched it makes me think this is nothing but, once again, a biased article by an iSheep in its purest form.”

Another said: “This article made me laugh out loud. I thought I was reading The Onion!”

Still others were more direct: “I’m pretty sure this is the stupidest article on the internet.”

You still hear people dissing the iPad these days, of course, but nobody dismisses it. Sales of the iPad have far exceeded the expectations of all but a tiny minority of us who were very bullish from the start. Analysts have had to raise and raise again their unit-sales estimates. Early doubters have been silenced.

Now, you might think I’ve come to brag that I was right and my critics were wrong about iPad replacing PCs. A Gartner report published this week says that PC shipments are down from last year. Overall PC shipments in the United States fell by 6.1 percent. HP was down 3.5 percent. Dell dropped 12 percent. And Acer took a nearly 25 percent hit in unit sales. Meanwhile, Apple’s sales grew nearly 20 percent.

One analyst at Gartner said the PC declines resulted from buyers “turning their attention” to media tablets and other devices. The “media tablet” market is a euphemism for the iPad, which owns 70 percent market share and is expected to sell in the 45 million unit range this year.

But no, I’m not here to brag. The replacement of PCs I predicted hasn’t quite begun in earnest. The replacement will come. And I will brag. But for now, it’s more interesting to see how the iPad is gradually undermining the foundations of PC dominance.

Here’s how Apple’s iPad is setting the stage for the decline of the PC.

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Maybe we are now getting a hint of what Jobs meant by a post-PC world. Computing innovation will be driven by things that are not PCs except in very general sense. What has been called a PC for the last 30 will not have much relevance in such a world.

Pretty scary to a lot of companies. Those that cannot adapt rapidly to the app economy spreading through the industry.

The worst movie out today?

Atlas Shrugged: A movie this demented ought to be against the law [Video]
[Via io9]

Every cult needs its own wacky trainwreck of a movie. Scientology got Battlefield Earth, and now the cult of Ayn Rand gets Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. But how does Atlas stand up to Battlefield Earth?

Quite well, actually. Atlas Shrugged Part 1, which just opened in theaters today, is a grand addition to the roster of movies that are both kooky and clunky. A movie this hideously wonderful really ought to be against the law.

Spoilers ahead…

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Read the whole thing and then realize why it makes perfect sense to review it on a science fiction site.