The Angry Drunk

There was a post on The Apple Blog today that got me think­ing. While I dis­agree with the con­clu­sions that the author draws, I don’t think that this is a case of the usual blo­go­ratti mag­i­cal think­ing. Rather, I think that there is some fun­da­men­tal mis­sun­der­stand­ing of the cur­rent mar­ket in video enter­tain­ment. The author puts forth the premise that iTunes, as well as stream­ing video ser­vices such as Netflix-streaming, and Amazon Unbox have a “glar­ing gap” com­pared with DVD/Blue-Ray when it comes to “addi­tional con­tent,” where by addi­tional con­tent we’re refer­ing to things such as alter­nate end­ings, deleted scenes, etc. My take on this is that there isn’t a “gap” between iTunes et al and DVD/Blue-Ray; rather, iTunes et al and DVD/Blue-Ray are actu­ally serv­ing seper­ate needs.

VHS v.s. DVD, a Historical Perspective

Admittedly, this isn’t a direct anal­ogy, but I think that it helps to illus­trate my point. Odd as it may sound now, when DVD was first intro­duced there were pun­dits who claimed that it would fail to top­ple VHS as a force in the mar­ket. One of the rea­sons pro­vided was that VHS was a read/write media; and peo­ple would

Continue read­ing Instant Gratification v.s. Rich Experience