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The Portable Me: A New Generation of
Portable Media Redefines Personal Libraries |
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25 May 2006 |
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While flashy iPods hog the billboards and street posters in
may urban centers, the quiet revolution is not in
proprietary mobile devices but in the rise of pervasive
memory sticks that are affordable and increasingly roomy.
Why lock your library of premium content into one expensive
mobile gizmo when you can hook up all of your
favorite devices to one common storage device that travels
with you as you please? Publishers that have gone the old
"license the platform" route for electronic content are
going to have to adjust rapidly to portable storage media
that will be far better at putting publishers in a direct
relationship with their audiences. |
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The device known as a
phonograph was a nifty invention in its early days. It combined
the genius of Thomas Edison's inventive mind with affordable
equipment and what passed in that era as high-performance
portable media. Pop in a tin foil cylinder impressed with an
analog recording into Edison's phonograph, crank it up to spin
the cylinder underneath a stylus, and out burbled "Mary Had a
Little Lamb" and other early recording hits from the attached
megaphone. The device carried Edison patents,
of course, which limited the growth of recorded sound
in its early days. Once disk-based media for portable music became
standardized and open to other producers, though, the recording
industry as we know it today was born.
Today's iPods are direct descendants of this pioneering
experiment in portable media, shoehorning state-of-the-art
storage into a proprietary platform. While the iPod's growth
has been impressive by all accounts, what's beginning to be at
least as impressive is the growth of portable media unattached
to any platform. 500 megabytes of storage on a
solid-state USB memory stick goes goes for under ten U.S. dollars
in many outlets and 2GB on a stick now goes for USD 60 or
less. If you're worried about backup, just park
Seagate's
affordable new 750GB drive to your home network and store the
content from your sticks along with a few PCs and a TiVo's
worth of video
to boot.
All this and more points to portable storage becoming the
new platform of choice for content products. With the
explosion of portable devices available in the marketplace
today, the memory stick is becoming the medium of choice to
keep consumers from getting their content libraries locked into
one gizmo or another.
Lexar has taken this one step further and
created a device that loads a memory stick with a piece of
software that can be run on any PC to allow one to look at the
device as if it were one's own PC desktop. This is billed as a
nifty tool for users of cybercafes who don't want to load
personal content onto a public machine - a major plus in Asian
markets - but the implications of
this product are clear: personal storage devices are becoming
personal content and software application servers.
While there's a lot of life yet to be extracted from
innovative all-in-one platforms such as iPods and other
handhelds, the content industry is now faced with the
opportunity to build relationships with their clientele through
personal storage devices in a way that is likely to have an
explosive force similar to the migration of recorded content
from proprietary phonograph cylinders to more universally adaptable
discs. This of course would imply that content
companies were ready to license content effectively independent
of specific devices.
Unfortunately, there's the rub for many. Content licensors
keep themselves very busy these days trying to lock down deals
for specific mobile platforms when they could take that same
energy and build relationships directly with their audiences by
enabling users to manage their content independent of any
single given platform. The media is there, the methods are
maturing, and the motives are clear: why deal with portable
device manufacturers when you could be dealing with the
portable "me?" Here are a few quick reasons why this is likely
to be coming to a memory stick near you sooner rather than
later:
- Smart memory manufacturers. For much of the
digital era storage devices have been the dutiful servants of
operating systems and device manufacturers, providing
affordable background support for computer sales. But in both
consumer and enterprise markets storage specialists have been
developing increasingly sophisticated products that compete
directly with computer systems suppliers and mobile device
manufacturers. If software can provide portable desktops on a
memory stick, it's not a far stretch to see a wide range of
specialized applications that can work easily with standard
portable media on a wide variety of devices. Toss in wireless
personal area networks that can link personal devices on
or near you and you have personal libraries can sit in our
pockets or local luggage and connect with any of our personal
mobile devices.
- Improved rights management. Digital rights
management software still leaves a bad taste in many
consumers' mouths, but a new generation of solutions is being
deployed that offers hope for people wanting
device-independent personal libraries. An interesting example
is
Navio's new AV Commerce 2.0 system, which offers
not only cross-platform functionality but as well the ability
to offer "super bundles" of various kinds of content to
enable sophisticated packaging of content and a rights
management system that separates rights management from media
files. With consumer entertainment suppliers figuring out how
to manage rights effectively the pressure will be on
suppliers of other types of content to transition from
dealing with platforms to dealing with highly portable media
suppliers.
- A broader emphasis on personalized search. Having
tons of content floating around on personal media could be a
hassle if it weren't for the development of personal-scaled
search software sophisticated enough to satisfy a generation
raised on Google and other major search engines. With
effective search tools acquiring major personal libraries
becomes less of a hassle - especially as content gets labeled
with effective metadata via
Google
Co-op, social tagging services and proprietary services.
Today's announcement that
Dell is now loading Google's personal search software onto
its PCs along with other Google applications underscores
the importance of search-centric platforms connecting users
with personal content on a myriad of devices.
As is so often the case many new technologies fight the
battles that earlier technologies fought years ago in new
forms. Such is the case with portable media and the issues that
are fomenting around content licensing in today's tangled
fabric of portable devices. Focusing licensing efforts away
from device platforms and towards all-purpose portable media
will enable publishers of all kinds to move towards a much more
productive relationship with today's content purchasers and
users. The portable "me" is upon us; will your content be
ready?
-
John Blossom
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