January 2006
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Video Content: Simple or Free?
Faultline, TV to iPod, PSP conversion tools spill onto the market:
The upshot of this is that any business models that rely on selling copies of previously televised TV shows, such as Apple’s sale of Lost and Desperate Housewives, is doomed to failure. Why pay for that content when it can be extracted for free?
This interesting article in The Register makes the point that Apple’s current iTunes-based distribution model is ‘doomed to failure’ as tools now exist to transfer recorded video content to the iPod.
However, this statement misses one very important point: That of the balance between simplicity and cost.
Apple has always been a forerunner of the principle of simplicity in technology. In short, this would seem to mean that they recognize that technology should do what it is designed to do in the most user-friendly and simple way possible, and that it should simplify our lives rather than complicating them with more bells and whistles.