Apple's IPad: The Shape of Things To Come?

Wednesday was a big day in the tech world, particularly, if you’re into Apple. After months of speculation, guessing posturing, and predicting by pundits and everyone else the Questions were finely answered.

Its called the Apple IPad. What it is essentially is a scaled up version of the hugely popular Apple Ipod Touch media player. Which means it syncs with your apple I-Tunes and can play music, videos and run all of the applications that you can run on a I-touch or I Phone now. This gives it a huge leg up on most new products. Using it is the same as using the I touch.

While Apple did not invent the MP3 player, and the Smart Phone, they did set the standard by which all others are judged in those lines. The same goes for Portable Media Players. While Apple didn't invent the Portable Media player they just may have set the stranded.. again..

Obliviously, its way too early to tell for sure. as they have just announced it today, and they won't ship for 60 days . But the bigger questions will take a while to answer. They have been critiquing something that very few of them have really seen, much less actually held yet. So essentially what they are doing is guessing. Until it ships and get out to the public and they use it no one will completely know what the impact it will have.

With the ability to get models with 3G and a no contract option for buying 3G from AT&T it becomes a platfrom for use in situations where one probably wouldn't do Internet and letting you do things you couldn't do on your IPhone because the screen is too small.

But the bigger question is will the public buy into it? Will they use it like they do the IPhone, and Ipod models, particularly the I touch ?

The IPad has already been called the Kindle Killer. The ablilty to buy and download e-books and audio books and play them on here as well as music and video, and aps defiantly even the playing field. Will aps makers buy into it? How soon will aps written specify for the IPad, and how many aps will be ported up to the IPad, so they can work natively on the larger 9 inch screen, and other features of the IPad?

Theses are many of the questions that will be answered over the course of this spring and summer.

I followed the news of the Apple announcement not on the TV so much as it was covered and commented on on the big new stations, But on my laptop, watching live streaming coverage by a number of websites, and web news venues, cheifly My favorite, Leo Leporte and his gang at TWIT.TV. Leo was actually in the convention center and saw the Steve Jobs presentation and afterwards was able to go and see and play with the demo units they had set up for the press. They then did live discussions with many of the people who were there for quite a while before Leo headed home. All of this was streamed and shown live . I don't remember the exact number they had watching at one time but it was huge, 2-3 times more then they had figured on. This not the first time they have done live remote streaming of events. In fact they were at CES in Los Vegas earlier this month, for 4 days straight and streamed and did live overage, and did several of the regular TWIT network shows live from the CES floor. What he had done on a relatively small budget is bring as good in some cases better coverage of events like CES and The Apple doings today to an audience who care what is happening, and given them the news they wanted when they wanted it.

So this was a news day in several ways, while Leo was covering Apple, He was interviewed by a reporter from I believe it was Fox , which was streamed to us right along with everything else.

So now all of the pundits can stop guessing and betting on whats it got,, they can now guess about the future of the Apple IPad.

Ken Lawson

The future of TV and Media is Evolving

Lets see now,,, Where to Start,,,?

Interesting news crossed my desk this morning,;

Apple is now working with record labels to try to push the sale of complete albums. From what I grather they are working on putting together a more interactive, value added experience for the album buyer in hope of entising more complete album sales. and cut down on the single track sales. Unfortunately, too little too late. If they had done something like this several years ago, they might have influenced the buying patterns of consumers. However, now except for rare occosions or special issues of classic albums no one buys a whole ablum, They pick and choose what tracks they like.

I personally have very little interest in buying a whole album, except for replacing material that I already have. For example, I have the 2 disc lp of Elvis Hawaiian concert, Only been played a few tines to make cassette copies many years ago, in other words practically new. Buying a new remastered copy might interst me. However, I prefer to have a CD and not just a digital copy. So a digital copy would have to offer material that I can't get now, and and I doubt they very much they could ad to a 30+ year old concert of a guy whose been dead for almost all of those 30 years.

However, other models of marketing and packaging do interest me. I have seen lately where Disney was offering its movies on Blu-ray, and including a regular Dvd in the same package. THAT makes sense .. As may folks will have only one HD player while regular dvd players are dirt cheap and the kids probably have at least one device that plays dvd, be it a laptop, or a portable dvd player, Let the kids have the regular dvd, and save the HD version for the main HD set-up at home, if they loose or ruin the dvd it not the end of the world, so to speak. In order to combat piricay. Media producers are going to to have add value to get consumer to spend money on material, they could just as easy download form bit-torrents and the like. Adding the regular dvd to the HD set, just makes sense, and is only the beginning. The new crop of Blu-ray players is offering a host of networked interactive features. Of course how many people actually use them remains to be seen..

The television as we know it has evolved over the last 20 years, particularly over the last 5-10 years. The digital transition went off in June, and he world didn't stop turning. However, the broadcasting world did change. The tvs have become almost entirely flat panels, either LCD or Plasmas, or in some expensive models, OLEDS, and other new technologies. The old old 4x3 form factor is now entirely gone. Every unit form the little 7 inch monitor up to the massive 65 inch Plasma are in the wide format, 16x9 format. While the number of inputs that one can feed into a tv has jumped to a panel in the back and side that resembles the back of a high end surround sound receiver. There is usually a set of legacy ports, RCA, S-video, and of course the new HD connections, HDMI, and digital audio in and out, carrying all 5 channels of surround sound both in and out to receivers, and Blu-ray players. Next genration game consols, and even laptops with HDMI out on them, allowing one to connect the laptop to the Tv. This allows one to surf the web on the big tv, add a wireless keyboard, and mouse and you have a nice set-up. Ideal for streaming Hulu and the like. One concept that I've seen a lot lately is the idea of the connected tv. What they are touting as connected is the ability of the tv to natively download and play movies of the likes of Netflicks, Amazon,. While I'm sold on the idea of the connected tv,

I'm not sold on the idea of buying my media only in a pure downloaded format, trusting them to keep my media that I've bought on their servers and remembering is mine when I change tvs or even the next time I just want to watch it. My idea of a connected tv would be native wireless connectivity, ie , it sees the local network and ask me for permission to jump on the network, and then I go the to menu and find a built in web browser, Firefox, or Chrome. A included wireless keyboard would make running the whole tv much easier, Possibility include special buttons to access the tv menus and setting for tweaking and set-up. A trackball on the keyboard would eliminate the need for a wireless mouse.

A small fash memory built in would hold the browser programing along with bookmarks and flash and other web necessary programs and could be reset to factory default if needed. Thats a connected tv...

Cable companys are desperate to try to bing in customers and keep the ones they have are trying several new models, the the so called "TV anywhere", which essentially allows subscriber to log in and watch their regular programing on a computer and they are verified as a subscriber. Their is allready a soluation for this, called slingbox, which onced connected to your cable box lets you watch whatever you have connected to it on any computer in the world. Dish network, which is a investor and part owner of Slingmedia, already has a new reciver coming out later this year which has the sling capabilities built right in. That is the technology that the cable companies are fighting. As soon as the new Dish receiver is made publicly available, they will have lost the battle. And they know it.

The cable company's "Tv Everywhere" is doomed to fail, no one will pay extra to get the same content, they can get much of for free, via, Hulu and other streaming sites. There is going to have to be a real valued-aded component to this and a very compelling one at that.

As for music cd's; How about including a set of MP3 on the disc themselves that can be legaly downloaded to a computer for use in mp3 playes and the like, or even a code to get a set of very high quality audio files off a certain site. Or better yet, behind the scenes content an the making of the music and the artist, and possibility even the ability to download enhanced tracks or stream material not yet released, but not able to save new material locally until its released. In general, offering maore ways to interact with the artist other then just his regular fan site.

In order to continue to sell hardware and media in a ecomay where people are becoming more careful about where they put their money, and what they invest in, be it a HDTV or a media player or even the media they actually play producers are going to have to be more creative in their marketing more importantly they need to give consumer more value for their money. be it adding a regular dvd version to a HD copy of a movie, or adding extras to music cds .If consumers don't feel they're getting what they paid for they will either stop buying, or in the case of media go to "Alternative Resources" to acquire what they want. By giving consumer extra content they can't get by downloading a copy off Bit-Torrents, they help give the consumer a reason to spend the money for the product.

Today's Media and The Future..

Early Adapters, pay through the nose... That said.....all the formats we have now, Mp3. wave, Apple's AAC, ect, Dvd, HD, & Blu-ray will eventually be superseded by whatever new technology is developed over the next years, However, as the film/movie preservationists have pointed out many times, as we move forward much is lost,, I am thinking both of lost films themselves and the the people who actually were there, and, almost as importantly , the equipment to play edit and do anything with the old media. This premise can be extended to many other things such as old computer hardware, there are millions of computer reels of data siting that no one can access because the machines to play the magnetic memory data tapes are not around any more. Soon there will be millions of VHS tapes laying all over the world with no vcrs to play them on, like the fate of 78rpm records, eventually cd and optical disc will suffer a similar fate... Although it will probably take longer.. All this is not counting what is eventually done with DRM and what effect it has on the hardware. All this is is to say, there is something ,to be said, for the printed page. One can still read a 100+ year old book and one may be able to read the same material digitally 1 year or even a week later after it was digitalized..

DRM is Digital Rights management, What it Essentially boils down to is the copyrights holder, be it the studio, author or production co, whoever, controlling what we can do with the content, whether we can record a show/movie to a pvr, or record something to a dvd burner like I have the big deal in all of this is that its digital, which means every copy is as good as the original, and theres no degradation over the copies like we had on the old analog tapes, What they don't want is perfect digital copies getting out in the world uncontrolled so they can't make any money off them The music industry tried DRM in their MP3s they sold and soon found it was a losing battle, People were still decoding the mp3 or most of them just ripped the music off their legal cds and put them up on file swapping sites anyways. So finely they are giving in and stripping all DRM off the MP3s they sell, Heres a link that will give you a general idea of what were talking about with the music. http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/01/amazon-adds-son.html As for movies Broadcasters can put in flags that tell receivers what they can and can't do with certain material, most of this is getting into the HD realm, Essentially, dumbing down and crippling sat and cable receivers, and making content harder to enjoy. However, the Saga is not dead, for proof, I refer you to the following link, http://wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2008/01/sony_music
The new battle cry will be watermarking so copyright holders can track a piece of material back to the original buyer and hold them responsible for letting the material getting into the wild.. Of course, privacy experts are having their say about the idea. The whole DRM/privacy issue will continue to boil over for many years to come, and probably will never be completly settled one way or the other, There will alway be a contingent of the population the change the status quo and fight for the rights of the average person, in this case, the right of the average person to play his own media as he see fits on what he sees fit.