In a recent post called “A fly in Steve’s soup (Apple’s path to online video)” I wrote about how Apple is bringing together a digital media ecosystem that could become a total end to end solution for playing all you media. Buy once and play everywhere, but with a DRM systems. Apple’s DRM system of course.
As mentioned, in the previous post, the obvious disregard for Flash technology, even in some obvious areas, shows more then stated reasons behind Apple propaganda engine to have it banished from every browser.
Philip Hodgetts, a good friend of which I argue these points daily, is very good with numbers. (It is part of his job) He recently Emailed me with a very telling analysis of how Apple is changing the way the web producer builds his websites. Anyway, I’ll let him do the talking here..
Let’s assume Apple keeps them (Flash, Silverlight) off the iPhone for the momentSo,
if a site has to be compatible with iPhone simply because there are too
many to ignore, and iPhone does not support Flash or Silverlight but
has great support for Canvas, Video, Audio and html 5 vector object the
iPhone ecosystem start driving the development of web standards over
“proprietary, but useful” standards.
(I’m not making an argument, just raising some interesting thinking).
Currently there are (both models) over 10 million iPhones in service and by
year’s end it’s expected to be 18 million worldwide, but let’s say 15
million by end 2008. By end 2009 that’ll be in the range of 20 – 25
million, with a couple of million iPod Touch running the same browser.
That’s getting close to the entire existing OS X market share and most
people can’t afford to throw out that entire demographic for their
website. Even most banks (at least in the US where there’s real
competition between banks and real choice – Westpac and St George!!!)
have redesigned Mac compatibility into their website.
Do I think this is likely? Balance of probability, not really. Could it
happen? It definitely is within the realm of believability and such
sudden disruptions of entrenched players has happened in the past.
Real who?
Interesting thought.
Yes very. Philip is great with statistics to make a point.
The point Philip makes here follows on exactly from my previous post in that. Having the technology to make a end to end digital media system that (Apple believes, I don’t, but the producers may) can be the answer to the buy once and play everywhere needs of the consumer.
This is an extremely hot topic within the majors corporations as many start to move the importance of proprietary DRM’s in which complete control (And the plunders that would have followed) is simply not going to fly. See my post “The industry is growing up. DRM is Dead. Long Live DRM.” which points our how Sony, Best buy, CISOC, Comcast, HP are looking at a industry based DRM system. Another example of this is Microsoft’s Silverlight going H.264. Microsoft will no longer force Silverlight technology developers to use Microsoft VC-1. Ie, Microsoft has given up on VC-1 becoming the “One Codec To rule them All”. That’s H.264, lets get on with it. (Microsoft is changing some what)
Still, Apple is doing an amazing job, and out of those corporations who have tried for DRM dominance, Apple is probably going to get the closest to this goal. Unfortunately, I consider this goal unobtainable.
The alternative, and what I consider to be the real objective by Apple, is not to actually reach the un-reachable, but to keep the producers distracted long enough to overcome the resistance as seen currently with Apple and the music industry. For example, Apple became to dominent to fast. To hinder this, the music industry have given the right to sell DRM free content to most other online stores except Apple. The Video industry is very aware of this as well. If Apple can distract them for long enough. Game over.
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