redstater

foggyhill said:

rogifan_new said:

I don't get what one has to do with the other. I have a hard time believing there were all these people holding out on signing up for a streaming music service because Apple wasn't in the game yet. But I think this signals that Music isn't compelling enough yet to get people to ditch existing options.

Apple's heavy marketing expanded the market, just like they expanded the smart phone market when they came in (and Android profited from places Apple would not go).
Spotify's getting a lot from that because they were already a known entitity in this space and thus were a more mature solution.
Contrary to Android though, in this area, Apple can, and will eventually compete in all areas Spotify is or will be. They better enjoy the collateral growth they're getting now because it will get rough in the next few years as Google and Apple step into their spot.

FYI, Google Play Music has been around since 2011 and is available in 58 countries. And Android sells plenty - including expensive devices - in areas that Apple does plenty of business i.e. South Korea, Japan, North America and Europe, where plenty of LG G and Galaxy S type devices sell annually. Spotify's big problem isn't competition from Apple and Google (and Amazon Music). Their problem is that music streaming will never be profitable by itself. It can only make money if it is able to piggyback on an existing infrastructure that is primarily used to generate revenue for something else, such as Amazon's shopping, Google's advertising or of course Apple's hardware.

foggyhill said:

The problem is that the smartphone market is mostly down market (except for Apple), while they're most lucrative products are up market.

3% is pretty small, so not even sure why this is news.

If by "down market" you mean devices that cost as much as an iPhone's 6 price of $599, that is not true and not even close. LG, HTC, Huawei, Xiaomi, Samsung and others combined sell many tens - well into the hundreds - of millions of their various flagship devices. Except that iPhones do not exclusively cost $599 anymore: the iPhone SE costs $399, similar to the Moto X and the Nexus 5X. So when you consider that the average selling price of an Android phone was $180 last year - and this average was brought down by a flood of cheap devices that sold in Asia, Africa and Latin America - then several hundreds of millions of devices that were $399 and up were among the 1.2 billion Android devices sold last year. Quite naturally, if the iPhone SE has this GPU, then any Android device that is anywhere near its price range - I would say $250 on up - would be a candidate to include this GPU also.

But in any case, the new Android Vulkan API performs just fine on Mali GPUs, so long as they are 600 series or higher (the Mali 880 is the latest and is in the crop of flagship Android phones just released) and Google made a point of ensuring Vulkan performance on both high end and midrange Mali GPUs. So I doubt that Imagination will find very many takers for their products in the Android world, though making attempts to market them probably wouldn't hurt as you never know.

First off, Marco's own post is spin. He indulges in the usual tactic of "responding" to points that no one made or disputed in the first place and passing off selective criticism as analysis. Marco represents someone who isn't trying to monetize his content and wants podcasting to remain the way it is - simple, free and easy to promote if you have name recognition or have learned and are very savvy at exploiting the existing system - for that purpose. For podcasting to be shaped and driven by market forces with their concern for profit and efficiency would ruin the current ad hoc, eclectic setup that he benefits from. The problem is that what is good for HIM absolutely stinks for people who are actually trying to make a living, supplement their income or crack into a market or career by distributing content via podcasting - and many such people have already abandoned podcasting for social networking and video logging - and it also isn't in the interest of Apple anymore, as podcasting no longer drives sales for iPods, yet Apple must still maintain expensive back-end services.

Look, the podcasting community wants revenue-generating tools similar to what exists for YouTube, Facebook, Wordpress and other platforms for content creators. They've actually wanted these things for years, as these tools aren't exactly new. It is just that Apple is finally taking requests seriously after years of ignoring them because podcasts are finally taking off, and as a result competitors like Spotify and Google have popped up offering podcasters the same tools that video loggers, bloggers and social creators on their platforms already enjoy, and Apple is losing market share as a result. And keep in mind: Apple had plenty of time to be the innovator and market leader in this area and have everyone else be an imitator or reactionary, the way that they did with the MP3 player, smart phone and app store. Instead, Apple allowed Google, Facebook and the rest to fill that void in the market, and they are going to have to either copy what the cloud software and services companies innovated or come up with something innovative AND is better - or as least as good - at helping content creators generate revenue than what currently exists.

The good news: Apple is lucky that it is only Google and Spotify, who offer services that aren't profitable, and precious few people actually use or both. So Spotify can still add podcasting and not be anywhere near profitable, and for Google podcasting will be just something else that the 1 billion owners of Android phones and Chrome web browsers will generally ignore, just as they do with nearly everything else except search and Gmail. So for now the market share loss is small and meaningless. Google, for instance, once again screwed up something that might have actually worked by pairing podcasts with their failing Google Play Music product that no one uses instead of pairing it with one of their two platforms that actually consistently makes money in YouTube. So Apple dodged a bullet there thanks to the incompetence of the competition and not due to anything of their own, and as a result they still have time, plus the clout that goes with being the #1 company in the world, so big and profitable that a $51 billion quarter is somehow viewed as a negative.

But what if something that is actually popular, enjoys heavy user engagement/loyalty,makes tons of money and is actually competent, like Facebook, offers a podcasting service? That would not be good for Apple at all. Just as Facebook crushed MySpace and just as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp have surpassed SMS, you would have all those people that have installed Facebook and Whatsapp on their iPhones install FaceCast (or whatever)? Apple would be crushed and have no recourse. Someone mentioned locking competitors out? Nope. Try that and the podcasters would just jump ship en masse.

For Apple, meeting this need in the short term is easy: migrate their podcasting operation to Google Cloud Services. Before you blow your stack, realize that Apple has already done this for some of their iCloud services and done it for the same reason: they lack their own cloud infrastructure and they need Google Analytics. Spotify moved some of their platform to Google Cloud Services for the same reason: analytics, even though they compete with Google Play Music (not really because Google Play Music is an even bigger failure than Spotify) and now with podcasts. It really is no different from Google competing with Apple for Android market share on one hand and getting a ton of search revenue on iOS on the other, or Apple competing with Samsung for device sales while buying memory and SOCs from them for their own devices.

That will buy Apple some time to create a new, better way of helping podcasters - and themselves - make revenue on the platform that they created without betraying Apple's values on user privacy and such. But the bottom line is that if Apple doesn't step up and do this, someone else - again, likely Facebook - will.

Not to quibble but the "Gameboy Portable" was replaced by the Nintendo DS/3DS which is still selling pretty well. It is the Wii U that is the failure that everyone attributes to smartphones and tablets, but DS/3DS sales didn't crater nearly as much as the console sales did. The Wii U failed because Nintendo priced it the same as the XBox and Playstation where before their consoles cost half as much.

As far as fitness bands being "a fad" you have to remember that the devices have been around for a long time, but were "dumb" devices called pedometers. I remember when fast food companies were giving the cheaper versions away with meals. The market for the "dumb" versions wasn't that big, but it wasn't insubstantial either; you could always see the things for sale at athletics stores, and manufacturers even built the things into shoes and such.

So calling their "smart" (or smarter) equivalents a fad when their antecedents pre-existed the iPod - and iPods used to include them! - is a bit presumptive. As is expecting a $299 device - which needs to be paired with a $599 device - to replace it. It would be one thing if Apple and their competitors designed and advertised their watches to compete with and be better versions of the fitness trackers the way that the iPhone was both a better version of the Blackberry and Microsoft style smartphones AND feature phones. They aren't. Instead, they are separate devices with fitness features thrown in as a bonus. Except that the iPhone - and smartphones generally - have those same features. So ... no reason to buy a separate device when you can just purchase a $10 exercise band, strap your iPhone in and get going. Do that and you have all of the abilities that the smartwatch has - including the ability to check the time and listen to music - and plenty that the Apple Watch doesn't i.e a GPS and the ability to receive calls.

Fitbit and its competitors are for people who for whatever reason want a better pedometer. That market isn't very big, but neither was the pedometer market that it mostly replaced. The Apple Watch, Android Wear and the rest are for people who for whatever reason want a phone - or more accurately a tablet unless you own one of the few Samsung Tizen or Android Wear devices that have 3G service - on their wrist. So before it obsoletes fitness trackers, the non-fitness tracker uses for the Apple Watch - and smart watches in general - need to be more compelling. Not least because most people who own Fitbit type devices do not own or wear watches of any sort and have no desire to.

We are going to quickly reach the point where people are going to simply lose track of where to find TV shows and movies. You already have to juggle network TV, basic cable, premium cable, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu. Now the various networks and studios are pulling their content off Netflix, Amazon and Hulu to create their own streaming channels (such as Sony's Crackle, plus CW and BBC are planning on starting theirs) in addition to Hulu, which is primarily owned by Fox, Comcast (who owns NBC) and Disney. There is also a ton of specialty streaming services catering to a niche audience out there. Sony even has two: Crackle and their Playstation network.

If Apple creates their own, expect the dominos to fall. Sony will probably merge (ad-supported) Crackle with their premium Playstation network. Microsoft would expand their XBox network to people who do not own an XBox. Google, which already tried and failed with subscription YouTube channels and is said to be already looking into ways to license content, would likely merge Google Play Movies/TV with YouTube.

And a wildcard: the FCC ruling forcing cable companies to support third-party cable boxes. Being a third-party cable box with app support was the original intent of Google TV, but it was blocked by a combination of the cable companies and the networks (the same which blocked Apple's original plans for an Apple TV refresh). You can imagine that Sony, Samsung, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and possibly Roku will all follow suit with their own cable boxes. We know that Roku, Google and Microsoft would introduce multi-platform devices. Would Apple, Sony, Amazon and Samsung? Even if Apple, Sony, Amazon and Samsung release multi-platform devices, would they release their apps and content to devices to other manufacturers?

The advantage would be to whoever is able to make "one device to rule them all": the company that is able to have apps and content from all suppliers, or at least all but one. That tends to favor Roku, the one company that is not in competition with anyone else in hardware or software, as they do not make phones, tablets, PCs, operating systems etc. Of course, Roku is the one competitor that has the shallowest pockets too ...

Eh. This may actually be one area where FCC regulation would actually benefit the customer. The free market will thin some of the herd - as Yahoo is no longer in the original TV content business - but there are more than enough big "software and services companies" to lead to a spider's web of channels and content.