Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
No DRM and no renting seems to be the new mantra as the charismatic Apple boss, Steve Jobs, continues to snub his nose at the power brokers of the recorded music industry. In the latest such thrust into the solar plexes of the record moguls, Jobs indicated to Reuters that he had no interest in implementing music subscriptions on iTunes.
According to Jobs, there is little consumer
demand for music subscriptions because people like to own their music.
With iTunes holding more than 70% market share of legal music
downloads, it is hard to mount a credible case against Jobs' argument.
This of course is not good news for recording industry executives, who
are looking for ways to boost revenues. Music rentals already provide
record companies with a perpetual source of incremental recurring
revenue. However, with the dominant player in the music downloads space
refusing to play the rental game, they can only sulk and shake their
heads in bitter disappointment at an additional revenue earning
opportunity missed.
For the Jobs-led Apple, however, a few million dollars in incremental
revenue is less important than the populist positioning of coming down
on the side of consumers. Any statement that in effect puts Apple on
the side of consumers and seemingly protects them against the greedy
desires of the recording industry is a clever exercise in marketing
that cements the company's growing loyal fan base.
Similarly, Apple's new found opposition to DRM, arguably a technology
that helped build iPod market share, could easily be viewed as a
cynical attempt to both satisfy the demands of EU regulators and
further ingratiate users to the company.
There is no doubt that providing a superior DRM-free option to users
could widen the iTunes user base. What it will not do is make the iPod
interoperable with other DRM downloads. However, Apple could argue
quite justifiably that sites other than iTunes and record companies
other than EMI should also offer DRM-free music.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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