| Tom Coates on Google become the latest to distribute TV... : The most interesting part of the whole enterprise is the debate about Google DRM. The fly in this ointment is indeed DRM. A lot of us had this vague feeling that the tech industry would stick two fingers up at the content industry and keep everything open. But now the tech industry seems to want to become the content industry. Amazon, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Real and now Google have all jumped the fence and landed on the other side as content intermediaries no different from the old media businesses. So now they're part of the problem not a potential solution. And sitting in the middle of all this is Intel who's close ties with all these players mean that they're more than happy to build in the hardware controls to support it. Bye, bye, open computing. What's really puzzling about all this is that the old media businesses are struggling with falling or flat sales. Why on earth would these tech companies *want* to get into a business with falling profits, a dead business model and little future, attacked on all sides by disruptive tech? Even though iTMS is a great lock in that supports hardware profits, it's a loss leader that barely breaks even in it's own right. So that's Apple's excuse. What's the excuse for all the others? |
[ << Google Pack (via scripting news) ] [ Preoccupations: What DRM argument? >> ]
[ 08-Jan-06 11:08am ] [ Google
, DRM ] 