March 31, 2005

advantage microsoft?

According to lots of articles, Microsoft has launched a subscription download site for daily videos - essentially an alternate distribution network for cable and television shows. Remember when they did the MSNBC partnership and everybody thought, "huh?" Maybe this is finally the dividend: content for portable media players. This is a take-off of podcasting, only (obviously) with video, and paid.

Steve Jobs says that there's no market. Sounds like Microsoft is going to create one. Look out AAPL!

I find it interesting how the video and audio content delivery space is getting sliced with combinations of download, subscription and purchase models. Microsoft's content is largely "disposable" (who wants to watch a news report from two weeks ago?) so the usual concerns about preservation of digital media are moot - the content becomes obsolete quickly.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

To paraphrase the Mighty Steve Taylor: "I Predict 2007"

Look for this all to change when:
-Apple buys/merges with TiVo
-Apple develops the ultimate user-friendly way to transport TiVo.

There will never be an iPod video, but I bet you dollars to donuts that Apple, just as they did with MP3 players, will sit back and learn from the portable-video player mistakes of the others. They will then come out with the sleeker, easier to use, envied-and-desired-by all, iTiVo.

Katherine