View Single Post
Old 07-17-2007, 04:48 AM   #14
drc54
Enthusiast
drc54 began at the beginning.
 
drc54's Avatar
 
Posts: 41
Karma: 10
Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Singapore
Device: Palm m515, now TX
If you live outside the US and a country that's "irrelevant" by US standards, the technology and digital content, can really be interesting. It's no surprise that iPods are being sold at record numbers even though there isn't any iTunes store yet available here. Okay, some say there's a fair amount of "magically obtained" tunes on these devices, but I digressed. I visit the local HMV, Borders, and some the local CD shops almost weekly, buy a couple of CD's, rip and load to my Palm TX SD card. I wouldn't be surprise this is how most other people here get their music fix on their iPods, Zen, fake iPods (hey, it's Asia after all, home of the knock-off-copy-cat industries).

You are correct to say that the state of the hand phone technology today, is indistinguishable from a dedicated PMP (iPods, Zen, etc.). Some of the higher end product may also include video playing capabilities. So you can always carry a good collections of tunes, video and my favorite, podcasts on any trip. A point about podcast. I like to think of them of as the "editorial" section of current affairs. Three sources that I follow are: NY Times World View, Pri's The World Technology, and Slate Political Gabfest. If you are into language, listen to one episode of Grammar Girl. I'll guarantee that you will subscribe to this wit fully lesson.

Anyway, the argument that the brick and mortar CD shops are dying still has not been proven correct. Okay, there was one, "Tower Records" which closed shop about a year ago, but that one is a worldwide company problem. The point is that it is still a viable business, I mean, HMV for example, still has a vast collection of musics, CD, DVD and recently, they're selling HD/Bluray video titles. When iTunes eventually opens their virtual shop here, I'm not at all convince it will take a big slice of the music/video business here.

But to the central question on whether digital content will be piped by the carriers and hence, they'll control both the content and distribution channel, I don't think so. This notion of on-demand, i.e., I want to listen to this music now, or I want to view this news video clip now, is not going to happen with over the air technology any time soon. Look how long it took Apple to "load up" their music store. I can't imagine any telco to have a complete library of music like HMV so people can just shout in their phone: "Bob James," "Take me to the Mardy Grass" and instantly, the jazzy tune streams to my phone. Nice, but a very unlikely scenario.
drc54 is offline   Reply With Quote