How The Game Is Played

A market struggling to be born

There is a market out there.

Its one everyone in the consumer electroncis industry has been predicting for 20 years without really clearly understanding what it would look like.

It will change the way we do everything and its called "digital media convergence."

Its also in danger of stranglign on its own cord, stillborn in the fight between some media conglomerates who are afraid of it and others who embarce it and want to have sole control over it. The result is a miasma of mismatched technolgoies all competing for our dollars and our loyalty,

Strange as it may seem for a sun-guy, I am not a big fan of standards and stards comittees. Too many tiems such standards are created in a political whirlpool of conflicting corporate desires and fail to adress the one most important thing any standard should-- the needs of the end user. In this case though I see a danger of our brave new world comign to agrinding halt if we cannot get some cooperation between the players on standards and interoperability.

Right now I subscribe to Yahoo Music Unlimited. Its a great service. I love it. I also have brqnd new PSP. The PSP is an amazing devcie really. Its the first truely usable mobile media center I have ever held in my hands. Music sounds great on it. The screen is big enough to cover my field of vision when held in my hands, giving me a wide-screen theatrical feel when watching a movie on it. And it plays kick ass games.

I am a video collector and own quite a library of DVDs as well.

Now we get into the bad thing-- lack of interoperability.

My Yahoo Music wont play on my Sony PSP because Yahoo uses an exclusive Microsoft DRM technology for its service, while Sony uses an exclusive Sony one for its music control.

My DVDs wont fit in the little PSP. I can understand that, but the disc technolgy Sony DID put in the PSP. the UMD, is used by no one else and there are no writers and writabel discs available fro it so I cannot evcen transfer music and video through my computer. (It does use a memory-stick DUO which is writable on a PC, but thats a pretty expensive medium to start trying to build a library of media on.)

In short, I have multiple media none of which are compatable and its only going to get worse. XBox360 will be using a new non-compatbale High Definition DVD format. The PS3 wont even be using UMD but will use another incompatable high definition DVD format-- blue-ray.

Im the consumer. And I am officially pissed. Sony, Micrsoft, Yahoo, Toshiba, and the rest: listen up. I'm in no mood for another beta v. VHS war, this time on multiple fronts (music and video, media and DRM) simultaneously. And I dont think other consumers are either.

Give up your dreams of world domination and give us standards that work together. There is lots of money in this for everyone if you all work together to make it truely useful for the ones who matter-- your consumers.

If not, you may find yourselves standing alone in the brave new world you want to bring us.

Posted at 09:07PM Jun 12, 2005 by gameguy in Java  |