Aanarav Sareen

After much hype, supposed leaks and predictions, Apple announced the iPhone 4S. No iPhone 5, just the iPhone 4s. Many people are disappointed that the company didn’t rename the 4S to a 5. Frankly, for Apple, that’s not much of a surprise. They did the same thing when they went from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS. The device looked the same, but the internals were brand new.

While most of the upgrades in the iPhone 4S are standard — newer camera, faster processor, etc., the biggest improvement of the device is Siri.

Apple purchased Siri a while ago. Between that time and yesterday, not much had been done with the product. However, Apple revamped the application and made it part of the core functionality.

And, frankly, it is impressive.

It recognizes accents and it learns who you are.

For those claiming it’s voice recognition technology — they couldn’t be more wrong. It is much more than that. And it will continue to evolve over time. Voice recognition technology is good for dictation and not much else. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (Siri) is a complete game changer.

As far as rest of the enhancements go — meh. Not big enough.

Media has drastically changed over the past few years. Decades ago, people bought albums. Then came CDs. Finally, it came down to singles and MP3s.

The same applies to video properties. Few years ago, people paid for what they wanted to watch. Blockbuster thrived on that model, but failed to innovate. Other video stores suffered due to their lack of scale.

However, with introduction of online media, individuality has gone out the door. Services like Pandora, Spotify and Rdio have started a trend towards unlimited access. Netflix has been leveraging the same model — unlimited access to a vast catalog. Not necessarily the choice you want. But the only choice you have.

Amazon has taken the same approach with their Prime offering. Unlimited access to a small library of content. Just like any media property, a catalog grows slowly. And you can bet that Amazon will leverage its bargaining power to make their MP3 service unlimited and fight aggressively to grow its video library as well. In the next few years, it won’t be surprising if Amazon’s media offering is larger than the entire Netflix catalog.

Overall, this trend towards unlimited media is only going to benefit distributors and not customers. There will be a point where consumers and passionate fans are no longer going to accept fragmented offerings. Knowing the media licensing model, there will never be content parity across platforms. And sadly, that is one thing that will continue to hold digital distribution back.

Amazon has been one of my absolute favorite companies. They made buying books easier. They made e-books popular. And their customer-service is stellar. What company gives you money back when their shipping vendor delays a package for 1 day?

A few years ago, they introduced the Kindle. It was priced high for market penetration. However, with their announcements last week — the Kindle is now a mainstream device. Starting at just $79 and all the way up to $199, e-books will be mainstream. As an author, that is great news. No other digital reader or media playback device can even remotely compete in this market.

Another big thing that Amazon has done with the Kindle Fire is firmly established itself in the media space — music and video.

Amazon was the first major player to offer DRM-free MP3s. Apple — the big behemoth had to follow suit. Amazon now has a competitive Prime video offering, which allows users to stream TV shows and other movies on the device itself.

As someone who recently canceled his Netflix subscription, I’m looking forward to exploring Amazon’s media offerings. It’s going to be an interesting experiment.

Last, but certainly not least, the Kindle Fire is very big news and just the beginning.

By far, this year has been one of the most interesting ones. From traveling to Italy for dinner and having wine under the Eiffel Tower, it has been a lot of fun.

On the work side, the group has worked with companies and agencies to launch new cars, new phones and a whole lot of great products.

I also launched my second book — Digital Media for Business — on September 6th. If you’d like a copy, send me an email and I’ll send over a free one for your reading pleasure.

I’m also changing the tone of this blog. Everything from here on will be direct; with harsher criticisms.

So — stay tuned as we reboot!

Last year, I wrote a fairly lengthy post about the state of the entertainment industry. Fortunately (for me), most of the predictions in the post held true. And, they will continue to hold true for the rest of 2011. Digital media has taken an interesting step over the past couple of months — for the worse. The volume of independently produced content is through the roof and the competition in this space is aggressive.

As someone who now works on the financial side of content — advertising — it’s hard to justify spending a considerable amount of money on online video. Why? It’s too expensive and not engaging. Here’s what’ll matter in 2011:

• Social: Facebook and Twitter are obvious first steps, but they’re also the only reliable platforms in the social media space.
• Mobile: It’s a challenge to find non-smart phones. With a phone coming out every few weeks, the market is now mobile heavy with an aggressive push on mobile content and services.
• Tablet: Unlike mobile, tablet is still very new. However, with very few reliable players in the market — it’s a good place to be involved from a content creation or syndication standpoint.

Here’s what won’t matter in 2011:

• Online video: It hurts for me to say this, but it’s true. Content discovery on the web is just way too difficult and there is a lot of content being produced. The chances of finding an audience and then monetizing it is nearly impossible.
• Loyalty: In this case, loyalty means something very different. It means not sticking to one mobile platform. Android is growing faster than ever and Apple is countering nearly every move. Sticking with one platform only is a recipe for disaster.
• Fluff: A lot of people are saying that the bubble is back. It may be, but there’s a reason why some initiatives get funded while others do not. Fluff. Investors and users are very restrictive when it comes to spending money. In this market, there is no room for fluff. Sadly, most companies created in the past few years do just that — create and sell fluff.

At one point, Blockbuster used to be the go to place for renting videos. Although their collection was fairly limited, it was the only big player in town. The transition from VHS to DVD was easy. Same content on a different physical medium. Recently, despite desperate attempts, the company has failed miserably to transform from the physical generation to the online generation.

Of all the physical media businesses (books, music CDs, etc.), Blockbuster should have seen it coming a long time ago.

iTunes became popular.

eBooks came onto the market.

People started renting DVDs online.

So why did a company the size and negotiating power of Blockbuster not do anything? They continued to rent DVDs at almost double the price of their nearest competitor, had ridiculous late fees and failed to form partnerships at a time where every medium was going digital.

They should have predicted it by looking at CD sales. They did not. They should have learned from Netflix’s model. They did not. They should have come up with a streaming model. They did not.

When Hulu, a startup has come so far in the past 3 years, it’s baffling why a multi-billion dollar organization failed to sign any deals with their long-term content partners.

Out of everyone remaining in the current playing field, Blockbuster had the best leverage — content. Comparatively, Netflix and Hulu are newcomers.

As someone who used to visit Blockbuster quite frequently a few years ago, it’s still shocking to see that the company hasn’t learned. Their retail stores are packed with junk and there’s no ability to request content that isn’t in store. Even free public libraries have that feature.

As one of the leading forces of content less than a decade ago, why didn’t Blockbuster partner up with hardware manufacturers to leverage a full-fledged streaming service?

Nearly every new device today has Netflix. Hulu is also striking deals at a rapid pace. So, why didn’t Blockbuster?

Over the past 3 years, there has been no improvement in how Blockbuster operates and what it offers. In the digital space, that’s an entire generation.

As much as Blockbuster enjoyed its past, it’s time to pack up. A company that can’t innovate or experiment is a company that consumers don’t want.

Advertising has come a long way. Something that was once a true luxury is now affordable, thanks to Google, Yahoo!, Bing and many others.

Small businesses can create an account at either of the fore mentioned sites and start creating highly targeted ads. And, it works.

A new addition to that category is social media advertising, the largest being Facebook. As a site with hundreds of millions of visitors that relies on personal information, it’s a good tool to measure brand loyalty and awareness.

However, when annual reports about advertising spend are made public, social media advocates are usually the first ones to say that big brands aren’t spending enough on these new platforms.

They’re wrong.

One of the reasons traditional advertising is expensive is because it’s exclusive. There’s a process to get an ad on TV or in print.

That process and barrier of entry doesn’t exist online. Facebook advertising can be as low as $0.05 CPM. TV advertising is at the very least 100 times more expensive.

Given the significant cost difference, there’s no reason for advertisers to spend the same amount of money. Allocating 50% of spend towards digital and 50% of spend towards analog is foolish and doesn’t accomplish any business goal.

Advertising is bigger than platforms. It’s about reaching the end user. And you reach a user with a combination of different mediums. Not by listening to a social media advocate.

iPhone. iPad. Laptop. Desktop. Home Computer. Work Computer.

As the number of capable and connected devices have grown, it has become even more important to keep data across all these devices in sync. Rather than having a primary computer, all these devices have become complimentary for day-to-day use. However, managing these devices and making sure that no content gets lost in translation is a significant issue that very few companies have managed to address. Here are a select few ones that are doing it well:

• Dropbox: Dropbox has been around for a while and their introduction video makes it clear as to what the service is capable of. Dropbox can be installed on a number of devices and any content added to the Dropbox folder will automatically get synced across all devices.
• Simplenote: As a relative newcomer in the sync space, Simplenote is a great way to sync text files across various devices. Supports a number of different devices.
• Jungledisk: Perhaps the most complex and robust option is Jungledisk. Primarily designed to be a backup tool, once configured correctly, it could be ideal for large files with great reliability (I currently back up over 100GB+ of data via Jungledisk).

2011 should see a lot more sync services that bridge the gap between different devices.