Todate the personal listening and e-commerce use cases have generallylagged in adoption with the self-expression use case gaining the mosttraction with a worldwide ringtone market worth roughly $3 Billion. The novelty of ringtones has been wearing off however and the markethas And of course more and more handsets offer high quality digitalcameras which consumers are using to capture and share more and moremedia. There have been a number of reasons holding up the first two use cases:
Withrespect to digital downloads. I'm not convinced that it's a killermobile app. I just don't evaluate US consumers are that excited todownload music to their phone from a 'store in the sky' except forimpulse purchases. It's a much better and easier experience to buymusic from the PC.
One killer app would be for an operator to pack Rhapsody (ora similar on-demand subscription function) in with its function. Thesubscriber would be able to access Rhapsody on-demand via her devicebut more importantly her playlists and music would be stored on herhandset and synched through the air during communicate down measure so as notto use up too much capacity. Since the operator already has thebilling relationship the cost to acquire a new subscriber (fromRhapsody's perspective) ought to be much displace than doing so on astandalone basis. Same goes for podcasts whereby the podcasts Isubscribe to would be magically updated via the air without my havingto take challenge. Internet communicate is another area but ordain mostly be asubscription service given the existing economics the carriers havewith consider to their networks' measure in handling lots of real-timestreaming merchandise.
To be sure there are lots of other innovations in-store: porting apps like on to the iPhone,enabling users to create their own ringtones (and bypassing thecarrier) enabling users to 'beam' music to each other... But firstthings first: the industry should focus on making the basic music (andpodcast/radio) listening experience as easy and intuitive aspossible. This will continue to come about if the balance of power,catalyzed by Apple shifts towards the handset makers who would beable to innovate better and more quickly if the encumbrances imposed byoperators were to be lifted. My prediction: the iPhonewill be a runaway success and will compel the US operators to give moreflexibility to handset makers and open up their walled gardens. Yes,the carriers assay becoming a 'dumb pipe' but enough consumers ordain havevoted with their wallets to justify the decision.
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http://www.ragsgupta.com/weblog/2007/08/the-iphone-will.html
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