App Store Success Won’t Translate To Books, Movies, and Shows

2010.05.22   prev     next

Apple’s App Store for the iPhone and now the iPad is a phenomenal success. But, I fear, that success won’t translate to similar success in selling e-books, movies, and TV shows. Here’s why:

Before the iPhone App Store existed, there was no such thing as third-party, native-to-the-processor apps for the iPhone (a few hacks notwithstanding). All those apps have been created since the App Store came into existence. And typical iPhone owners have no interest in trying to make their own apps. So, except for the bitter grumblings of a small number of tinkerers and tech journalists, no one really cares that Apple controls the sole means of installing apps on a non-hacked phone. The iPhone owners don’t care. And most app developers don’t mind it much because it doesn’t stand in their way — they write a cool app, Apple approves it, and it sells on the App Store. No problem.

But none of these things are true for text documents, audio, and video. Typical users have significant amounts of audio and video content that they bought through some other company’s distribution system. Or acquired for free (legitimately) on the internet. And many users create their own content — video of their kid’s soccer game, for example. How can Apple block all this content from being played on iPhones and iPads without alienating a large percentage of its potential customers?

Also, typical iPhone owners actually feel more confident of the safety and stability of using third-party apps when they know that those apps have to go through Apple’s vetting process (and could be yanked from the App Store at any time if later discovered to be problematic). Many iPhone owners wouldn’t feel comfortable installing a third-party app directly to their phone even if Apple allowed it. But they have none of those fears about text documents, images, audio, and video, because those are just data files, not executables.

So although Apple may indeed sell significant numbers of e-books, movies, songs, etc., the tremendous fire-hose success of the App Store can’t really be replicated for other types of content. If I write a popular e-book, I can probably expect that most people will be reading it for free. And that doesn’t encourage me to try to write one.

A Solution?

There might be a solution to this issue, but it’s iffy. What if Apple gave their mobile devices some sort of copyrighted content recognition system, not unlike the Shazam app which can recognize specific music recordings from a ten-second sample? If the iPad OS had a system like that built in, it would be able to tell the difference between your soccer video and a free-loaded episode of Survivor, and could decline to play the latter.

The only problem with the idea is that people have a lot of purchased material (e.g. DVDs, e-books) that they’d like to load onto their iPad, and there would be no way for the iPad to know that it was purchased, and that it should be permitted to open. I don’t have a solution to that one.