Instant Gratification v.s. Rich Experience

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 not want to give up the abil­ity to record TV shows, their annoy­ing chil­dren, etc. The pun­dits mak­ing that claim made the mis­take of not real­iz­ing that VHS was actu­ally serv­ing two needs, and that DVD was only aim­ing to sup­plant one of those needs. The two needs being deliv­ery of pre-produced con­tent and serv­ing as a stor­age medium for time/place shift­ing and self-produced con­tent. DVD, in it’s ini­tial form, was only really seek­ing to serve the first need, the deliv­ery of pre-produced con­tent. And in that mar­ket DVD went on to dom­i­nate in short order. In the other areas that VHS served, it took other tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tions to knock VHS off the map (a lit­tle com­pany called TiVo comes to mind).

Instant Gratification v.s. Rich Experience

I would posit that, in a sim­i­lar way that some pun­dits failed to real­ize that VHS was serv­ing two needs, some of today’s pun­dits are fail­ing to real­ize that there are two dis­tinct needs being lumped together under “video entertainment.”

Rich Experience One need is the desire for what I’m call­ing “rich expre­ri­ence.” This is what, for the most part, is being met cur­rently by DVD/Blue-Ray. This is the expec­ta­tion that most con­sumers now have that when they buy a movie on phys­i­cal media it will come with a host of addi­tional con­tent. This is an expec­ta­tion that the con­tent pro­duc­ers have encour­aged, mainly beca­sue it makes them a crap-load of money. Want to make a quick cou­ple mil­lion, take Star Trek, slap on some new com­men­tary or doc­u­men­taries, release as a “spe­cial edi­tion,” watch the nerds whip out the credit cards.

Instant Gratification The other need that exists in the video enter­tain­ment world is what I’m call­ing “instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion.” The best cur­rent exam­ple of ser­vices meet­ing this need cur­rently is tele­vi­son itself, along with the On-Demand ser­vices being offered by the cable com­pa­nies and sat­telite providers. The essence of this model is, “I’m bored, what’s on now.” No one expects that the movie show­ing on HBO right now will come with extra features.

I’m argu­ing that, for the time being at least, iTunes, Netflix-streaming and Amazon Unbox are much bet­ter suited to the instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion model than the rich expe­ri­ence model. Now when I’m bored, instead of chan­nel surf­ing to find some­thing to amuse me I can fire up the AppleTV and rent a movie in a few min­utes tops. If I like a movie enough to care about addi­tional con­tent, I can buy the disc or add it to my Netflix queue.

This dif­fer­ence is where I think that argu­ments com­par­ing iTunes et all to phys­i­cal media are bound to fail. The two mod­els meet dif­fer­ent needs, and they’re both ide­ally suited to those needs. Attempts to force iTunes and com­pany into the rich expe­ri­ence model are only des­tined to fail. Will this change in the future? Quite pos­si­bly. As band­with and stor­age capa­bil­i­ties increase for the aver­age con­sumer, we may one day see a world where phys­i­cal media has been sup­planted by net­worked down­loads. But, in the words of my old friend Maximus Decimus Meridius, “Not today.”