blu-ray, amazon, and our mediated technology dependent lives

A couple of recent technology news items got me thinking about media and proprietary hardware. One was the New York Times report of Sony’s problems with its HD-DVD technology, Blu-Ray, which is causing them to delay the release of their next gaming system, the PS3. The other item was Amazon’s intention of entering the music subscription business in the Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times gives a good overview on the up coming battle of hardware formats for the next generation of high definition DVD players. It is the Betamax VHS war from the 80s all over again. This time around Sony’s more expensive / more capacity standard is pitted against Toshiba’s cheaper but limited HD-DVD standard. It is hard to predict an obvious winner, as Blu-Ray’s front runner position has been weaken by the release delays (implying some technical challenges) and the recent backing of Toshiba’s standard by Microsoft (and with them, ally Intel follows.) Last time around, Sony also bet on the similarly better but more expensive Betamax technology and lost as consumers preferred the cheaper, lesser quality of VHS. Sony is investing a lot in their Blu-Ray technology, as the PS3 will be founded upon Blu-Ray. The standards battle in the move from VHS to DVD was avoided because Sony and Philips decided to scrap their individual plans of releasing a DVD standard and they agreed to share in the revenue of licensing of the Toshiba / Warner Brothers standard. However, Sony feels that creating format standards is an area of consumer electronics where they can and should dominate. Competing standards is nothing new, and date back to at least to the decision of AC versus DC electrical current. (Edison’s preferred DC lost out to Westinghouses’ AC.) Although, it does provide confusion for consumers who must decide which technology to invest in, with the potential danger that it may become obsolete in a few years.
On another front, Amazon also recently announced their plans to release their own music player. In this sphere, Amazon is looking to compete with iTunes and Apple’s dominance in the music downloading sector. Initially, Apple surprised everyone with the foray into the music player and download market. What was even more surprising was they were able to pull it off, shown by their recent celebration of the 1 billionth downloaded song. Apple continues to command the largest market share, while warding off attempts from the likes of Walmart (the largest brick and mortar music retailer in the US.) Amazon is pursuing a subscription based model, sensing that Napster has failed to gain much traction. Because Amazon customers already pay for music, they will avoid Napster’s difficult challenge of convincing their millions of previous users to start paying for a service that they once had for free, albeit illegally. Amazon’s challenge will be to persuade people to rent their music from Amazon, rather than buy it outright. Both Real and Napster only have a fraction of Apple’s customers, however the subscription model does have higher profit margins than the pay per song of iTunes.
It is a logical step for Amazon, who sells large numbers of CDs, DVDs and portable music devices (including iPods.) As more people download music, Amazon realizes that it needs to protect its markets. In Amazon’s scheme, users can download as much music as they want, however, if they cancel their subscription, the music will no longer play on their devices. The model tests to see if people are willing to rent their music, just like they rent DVDs from Netflix or borrow books from the library. I would feel troubled if I didn’t outright own my music, however, I can see the benefits of subscribing to access music and then buying the songs that I liked. However, it appears that if you will not be able to store and play your own MP3s on the Amazon player and the iPod will certainly not be able to use Amazon’s service. Amazon and partner Samsung must create a device compelling enough for consumers drop their iPods. Because the iPod will not be compatible with Amazon’s service, Amazon may be forced to sell the players at heavy discounts or give them to subscribers for free, in a similar fashion to the cell phone business model. The subscription music download services have yet to create a player with any kind of social or technical cachet comparable to the cultural phenomenon of the iPod. Thus, the design bar has been set quite high for Amazon and Samsung. Amazon’s intentions highlight the issue of proprietary content and playback devices.
While all these companies jockey for position in the marketplace, there is little discussion on the relationship between wedding content to a particular player or reader. Print, painting, and photography do not rely on a separate device, in that the content and the displayer of the content, in other words the vessel, are the same thing. In the last century, the vessel and the content of media started to become discreet entities. With the development of transmitted media of recorded sound, film and television, content required a player and different manufacturers could produce vessels to play the content. Further, these new vessels inevitably require electricity. However, standards were formed so that a television could play any channel and the FM radio could play any FM station. Because technology is developing at a much faster rate, the battle for standards occur more frequently. Vinyl records reigned for decades where as CDs dominated for about ten years before MP3s came along. Today, a handful of new music compression formats are vying to replace MP3. Furthermore, companies from Microsoft and Adobe to Sony and Apple appear more willing to create proprietary formats which require their software or hardware to access content.
As more information and media (and in a sense, ourselves) migrate to digital forms, our reliance on often proprietary software and hardware for viewing and storage grows steadily. This fundamental shift on the ownership and control of content radically changes our relationship to media and these change receive little attention. We must be conscious of the implied and explicit contracts we agree to, as information we produce and consume is increasingly mediated through technology. Similarly, as companies develop vertical integration business models, they enter into media production, delivery, storage and playback. These business models create the temptation to start creating to their own content, and perhaps give preferential treatment to their internally produced media. (Amazon also has plans to produce and broadcast an Internet show with Bill Maher and various guests.) Both Amazon and Blu-Ray HD-DVD are just current examples content being tied to proprietary hardware. If information wants to be free, perhaps part of that freedom involves being independent from hardware and software.

4 thoughts on “blu-ray, amazon, and our mediated technology dependent lives

  1. walt crawford

    “(Edison’s preferred AC lost out to Westinghouses’ DC.)”
    You might want to fix that, unless you live in some nation where DC current is delivered over the wires. Around these parts, it’s AC.

  2. Gary Frost

    Re: software mediated writing:
    Unusual religions, dependent on written scriptures, arose in Antiquity. Utilizing new transmission formats of the scroll and codex, the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam engendered cultures known as the “people of the book”. Now the computer has emerged to augment the book and so a question arises if a distinctive culture dependent on screen based reading and computer transmission is in the making.
    If so, we can look to the features of the screen as a new reading mode and the features of the computer and its connectivity as a new transmission medium to anticipate the new culture and its religious concerns. Differences do pop-up. While the established religious cultures keep a bible at hand, a newer culture will be reading from the mirror of scripture. The book will be traded for the blackberry, but the blackberry will not be the book. A culture of the computer will throw away its scripture every five years, as the current screen is discarded for its replacement. Neither will the content persist immutable.
    This new culture and its religious concerns will be known as “people of the mirror”.

  3. bowerbird

    to my mind, it doesn’t matter _how_ the corporations
    want to deliver their stuff to me, as it’ll be overpriced
    and overhomogenized no matter what the vehicle is…
    what _is_ important is that we prevent the corporations
    from introducing themselves as middlemen extracting
    a fee from the process by which i will get content from
    the independent artists that i will focus on in the future.
    for instance, it scares me plenty that rupert murdoch
    owns myspace.com. and that “broadcast treaty” thing?
    my word! does the greed of these people never stop?
    read the take from the electronic frontier foundation:
    > http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/broadcasting_treaty/
    >
    > If adopted, the WIPO treaty will give broadcasters
    > 50 years of copyright-like control over the content
    > of their broadcasts, even when they have no copyright
    > in what they show. A TV channel broadcasting your
    > Creative Commons-licensed movie could legally demand
    > that no one record or redistribute it — and sue anyone
    > who does. And TV companies could use their new rights
    > to go after TiVo or MythTV for daring to let you skip
    > advertisements or record programs in DRM-free formats.
    >
    > If that wasn’t bad enough, the US contingent at WIPO
    > is pushing to have the treaty expanded to cover the Net.
    > That means that anyone who feeds any combination of
    > “sound and images” through a web server would have
    > a right to meddle with what you do with the webcast
    > simply because they serve as the middleman between you
    > and the creator. If the material is already under copyright,
    > you would be forced to clear rights with multiple sets of
    > rightsholders. Not only would this hurt innovation and
    > threaten citizens’ access to information, it would change
    > the nature of the Internet as a communication medium.
    sheesh! this is some _very_ frightening stuff. truly!
    so tell me, why is “the u.s. contingent at w.i.p.o” doing
    this _pushing_? are they really _our_ “representatives”?
    i know they ain’t mine! are they yours? think about it…
    -bowerbird
    p.s. yay! “preview” finally works on the comments here!

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