The iPad is a tablet computer developed by Apple Inc. It features multi-touch interaction with print, video, photo, and audio multimedia, internet browsing, and runs most iPhone OS apps. The device has an LED-backlit 9.7-inch (25 cm)color LCD display and uses a virtual keyboard for text input.
This week’s iPad launch brought publishing’s future back to many media minds; we asked two agency thinkers to argue the pros and cons of the device’s potential for reviving a sagging industry. Arguing pro is Hill Holiday’s Greg Winter; con is Hill Holiday’s Ilya Vedrashko.
Pro: It might take time and some tweaks along the way, but yes, the iPad is going to save the publishing industry.
1. Do or die time
Magazines and newspapers have been giving their product away for far too long. Over the past few years we’ve seen newsrooms shrink and magazines and newspapers disappear. And it’s not necessarily because of declining numbers. More people than ever before are reading news, they just don’t pay for it. Consumers get news content online for free. Good journalism should and will cost something. Or it will disappear. And we need good journalism — it’s part of our democracy (but that’s a completely different story). Also, there are tens of thousands of publishing and news jobs at stake today, and there’s nothing like the survival instinct to spur innovation and action.
2. A new business model
In the same way that Apple helped to create a fair and reasonable pricing and distribution structure for the sale of music, they will help figure out how printed content can be sold. With very small distribution costs (eliminating printing and shipping), the iPad offers a new way for publishers to deliver their content to consumers at greatly reduced costs. The New York Times’ metered payment model planned for 2011, announced last week, was no coincidence.
3. Consumer behavior can, will and does change
The way that consumers purchase and interact with music and video has radically changed over the past few years. ITunes revolutionized music and saved the industry from virtual collapse. It also made Napster obsolete. YouTube and Hulu provide viewers with the opportunity to watch content when, where and how they want. It may be a shift for consumers to pay for and download the Wall Street Journal or an issue of Sports Illustrated to the iPad, but it’s completely realistic.
4. Targeted advertising
Here is an outstanding business angle. The iPad offers the opportunity for a metered payment model for newspaper and magazine content. Would a reader pay 25 cents for a Paul Krugman column? It’s not a stretch. It also offers the opportunity for targeted content based on reader profiles and locations. The built-in GPS capability allows for location-specific advertising messages and offers. All politics is local. And maybe all advertising messages will be on the iPad.
5. Enhanced experience
Today, there are basically two ways that we read a newspaper or magazine article. We can read a printed newspaper or magazine hardcopy or we can lean forward into a laptop or desktop and scan. Laptop reading is an active and often clumsy experience if one is laying on the sofa or in bed. At 1.5 lbs, the iPad offers the potential for a more laid-back, passive and natural reading and viewing experience. The actual content — book, newspaper or magazine — can be delivered in an enhanced and more visually compelling way. For example, a book on botany can be visually constrained by the cost of printing a specific number of high-quality pictures. This constraint virtually disappears with an iPad.
6. It’s Apple
If anyone can figure this out, it’s Apple. Apple has attracted some of the world’s top engineers and creative technologists. They have a track record of solving content distribution and payment model problems (iTunes) and creating leap-frog innovations in existing categories (iPhone). With sleek and simple design and the ultimate in usability, Apple can create an entirely new way for people to consume “print” media. We have seen consumer behavior transform very quickly, in a short period of time. And it’s about to happen again.
Con: The iPad is a life-raft at best and isn’t going to save the publishing industry.
For a long time, lifesavers in Russia used to be adorned with a cheerful slogan that could be roughly translated as “saving the drowning man is nobody’s business but his own.”
This sums up about how I feel about the argument that iPad will single-handedly save traditional periodicals. It’s not enough for the publishers to be thrown a life raft; they will also have to figure out how to last for days without water and how to avoid getting eaten by the sharks (or by each other, for that matter). The iPad, with all of the undeniable advantages that Greg mentions, is just a raft. The rest is nobody’s business but the publishers’.
Conventional wisdom has it that the 125 million credit-card carrying iTunes customers who are used to paying money for small bits of content — music, videos, games, apps and, soon, e-books — are an equally willing customer base for newspaper and magazine content delivered electronically. I don’t think they are. I don’t think people will be willing to pay for newspaper articles the same way they pay for everything else in the iTunes Store for two reasons.
One is that unlike music, videos or even apps, there is no existing price anchor for individual articles. With music, if a CD album costs $15, one fifteenth of it should cost about a buck, and it does, and the sales go briskly. If the second season of “Californication” costs about $20 for DVDs on Amazon and $20 for iTunes downloads, then the only the choice consumers have to make is which format fits their lifestyle better.
No such system of reference exists for buying mainstream newspaper content piecemeal. If an entire newspaper costs 50 cents on the newsstand and has 100 articles in it, what is a single article worth to you? Half a cent? Ten cents? A dollar? So each time you want to buy a newspaper article on iTunes, you will have to make this mental calculation.
The other problem with getting people to pay for individual articles is that, unlike music, books, videos, games or even imaginary animals on Farmville, articles have little perceived replay value. You pay a buck for the latest Lady Gaga hit to enjoy it over and over. How often do you expect you will need to refer back to the latest op-ed piece to justify its price?
And if publishers are hoping to find in the iPad a channel to sell new subscriptions, then the story of the music industry should serve as a cautionary tale. The iTunes Store hasn’t really eliminated illegal downloading — even by the most optimistic estimates, there are still as many pirates as there are upright citizens. What really happened, though, is those people who used to pay for and hoard CDs are now paying for and hoarding MP3s, with CD sales predictably on a steep downward slope. Likewise, the most enthusiastic paying subscribers to the iPad version of the New York Times will be the ones who are now getting the actual paper plopped on their front steps every morning.
The real solution to publishers’ woes lies in rethinking the nature of their now largely commoditized product. I don’t know what the successful formula will look like. Maybe what will get people to pay is a curated stream of all important articles on a single topic, regardless of their source. Maybe it will be something else. But whatever it is, it’s up to the publishers to figure out, not Apple.
| ABOUT THE AUTHORS | |
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Greg Winter is vice president and director of corporate communications at Hill Holliday. He has more than 13 years of communications and public relations experience at agencies including Waggener Edstrom, Ketchum and Porter Novelli.
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Ilya Vedrashko, VP of media design at Hill Holliday, studies the relationships people build with different traditional and emerging media. He went to grad school at MIT’s comparative media studies program, where he wrote a thesis on advertising in video games. Mr. Vedrashko has also worked at the Convergence Culture Consortium, and he started the Advertising Lab blog.
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Source: http://adage.com/digitalnext/article?article_id=141817
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I want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. You want live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone. Everyone wants live streaming video recording apps on the iPhone – except for Apple. Though such applications have been available through unofficial means for over a year now, Apple remains mum on the matter. There they sit in Apple’s review queue, rotting away beneath an “In Review” label.
Looking to find some way onto the platform, developers have begun to scale back their applications until they reach a point Apple is willing to greenlight. We saw it earlier this month with Ustream’s streamless app, and now Qik has followed suit. Beginning today, Qik’s own sans-streaming app is available for the iPhone 3GS.
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[Via PC World]
Continue reading CourseSmart releases eTextbook reader for iPhone
Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio, Portable Video
CourseSmart releases eTextbook reader for iPhone originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Brian Lam has received an enigmatic call from someone who claims to be an iPhone insider. After a lengthy discussion that lasted over one hour, Brian believes to “a high level of certainty” that the information is legitimate. Here are the highlights:
- The Tablet is basically a 10″ iPod Touch that comes with or without webcam (education version).
- It can be used as a touchpad for Macs
- It will most likely be launched for the holiday season
- The price will be around 700 to $900 (!!)
If that’s true, the Tablet would instantly benefit from a flurry of applications, provided that developers handled multiple screen resolution properly. If it is not really compatible, we can at least expect apps to arrive very quickly, as it will use the same SDK than the iPhone. I would also expect the overall performance to be higher because Apple now has more options for cooling (even active cooling). Obviously, this is unconfirmed speculation, but it’s really fun to discuss it.
Permalink: The inside scoop about the Apple Tablet (well, maybe)
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TomTom has released their iPhone car kit that will retail for around $193 after conversion, featuring an EasyPort mount that is similar to the one from TomTom ONE and XL, a built-in speaker for voice directions alongside handsfree call support and an external GPS receiver, volume controls, a microphone for you to concentrate better on the road, USB connectivity and an audio jack that allows you to use your vehicle’s audio system. It will also play nice with the iPod touch, and best of all is, there are no monthly fees to worry about while you use it to stream audio and get around via GPS.
Permalink: TomTom iPhone car kit from Ubergizmo | Hot: Wii, PS3 and Natal Motion Sensing
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You know kids are just plain spoilt in this day and age when you purchase a phone for them and they all think (and hope) that it is an iPhone 3G S awaiting them underneath those layers of wrapping paper. Well, should they ever end up with this Benz Phone, chances are pretty good you’ll be nursing a swell on your forehead as the disappointed tyke takes aim at you and hurl it with David-like accuracy against the Goliath. Seriously, a Benz Phone has the sex appeal of a cold tombstone, and it really boggles the mind as to who will actually pick up such a phone.
Permalink: Benz Phone Targets The Gullible from Ubergizmo | Hot: Wii, PS3 and Natal Motion Sensing
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Can’t make up your mind between an iPhone or a Touchwiz? Are you not too proud to sport a knockoff? Do you really, really like smooth jazz? Bring on the Iorgane F9, an update to the knock-off so sour that it just kept popping up again and again, soon available for purchase in 2, 4, and 8GB flavors. The orange-emblazoned F9 (it looks like a fat apple to us) is lovingly demonstrated below with the soothing strains of Kenny Gorelick — a man better known to elevators around the world under a different name. Take it away, Kenny G…
Continue reading Iorgane’s KIRFy F9 soon available, but our hearts will go on
Filed under: Cellphones
Iorgane’s KIRFy F9 soon available, but our hearts will go on originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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