Pads, Tabs and Apps – Everything Is So Smart

Michael Hedges September 6, 2010 Follow on Twitter

It is a dizzying array of cool stuff. Television sets are now smart TVs. Mobile phones are smarter than smartphones. Eyes are spinning even without the 3D glasses. Everything and everybody is enabled and oh, so smart.

Europe’s biggest consumer electronics fair, the IFA (Internationale Funkausstellung), is under way in a big way.  Organizers report a ten percent increase in exhibitors over last year. It’s crowded. Everybody bumps into everybody because everybody is wearing 3D glasses, which, of course, don’t work in the real world. It gives the entire event a rather unworldly feel. Where would those inventors be without Mr. Spock?

Apple more or less stole the show by presenting a day before the show opened new and revised media products. Of course, Apple is only at the IFA virtually. Its big product announcements were made in San Francisco. There is an iZone at IFA organized by a German trade magazine specializing in Mac products.

Television has come to the web. With typical marketing aplomb, Apple TV is being reintroduced as an IPTV device to enable iTunes-like distribution of video – TV shows and movies. There’s a deal with Fox Network, owned by News Corporation, and Disney, Apple being a major shareholder, for 99 US cent downloads of TV show episodes. Apple TV will offer movies through Netflex for US$4.99. Other producers will certainly follow as soon as the shock of having Apple control pricing wears off. It worked with the music industry, eventually.

Apple also introduced Ping, a social network portal attached to iTunes. People can comment on and recommend music to their friends, family and colleagues. Ping is meant to challenge Facebook for music fans, its advantage being the zillion or so iTunes customers. The advertising possibilities boggle the imagination even though the primary revenue stream for Apple remains direct sales. Apple reported one million sign-ups for Ping within 48 hours.

Steve “Just one more thing” Jobs, Apple CEO, mentioned a new operating system “coming soon” for iPads and iPods. They will be better, faster, smarter and totally wired.  In effect, the iPad tablet – ‘tabs’ they’re now called by techies – is reaching into new territory, coming close to a blur between the smartphone and laptops.

Some say Steve Jobs will “save” publishing with the iPad just like he “saved” the music industry with iTunes.  As with the music industry way back when, publishers are divided. At the IFA, all the experts are betting on tablets.

The rest of the pack, names you know and some you don’t, were more or less prepared for the Apple challenge. Aside from all the inexplicable techie stuff, this edition of the IFA is about manufacturers positioning themselves vis-à-vis Apple: bigger, smaller, faster, more clever, more stylish (and less stylish) and, of course, cheaper.

Other manufacturers – dozens, if fact – unveiled new or improved tablets, none more discussed than Samsung’s Galaxy Tab. “We have become the creator, not the follower” said company president Choi Gee-sung to the press gaggle (September 4), “which is what we were in the past.” Samsung is South Korea’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer, making everything from smartphones and television receivers to LED displays and refrigerators. The company also introduced at the IFA new notebooks and netbooks, clearly tipping toward high-design.

The Galaxy Tab is smaller and lighter than the iPad, has cameras front and back and is expected to retail a good 15% more than iPad. WiFi and 3G enabled, you can make phone calls. It’s designed for “media content, like books, newspapers and movies as well as social networking services, in a real, convenient and independent way,” said Choi.

Toshiba introduced its Folio 100 tablet, which will retail lower than the iPad. Dell has one less expensive than the iPad. Indeed, analysts and observers at IFA expect a race to the bottom of pricing lasting another year or two. Those with predicting skills see 100 million units sold by 2013.

Sony, too, plans on leveraging current customers for a new product introduction. Qriocity is a video and music streaming service linking to Sony’s PlayStation. Sony CEO Howard Stringer also showed off a prototype Vaio laptop capable of showing 3D video.

Broadcasters couldn’t be more ecstatic. Consumer electronics manufacturers are “drivers of the digital media world,” said German private broadcasters association president Jürgen Doetz. “These offerings provide…an important stimulus for product market development.”  All this stimulation will surely keep consumers from getting bored, says the conventional wisdom. And premium products have always been drivers of the gizmo business.

The wisdom from the IFA is the changed relationship between the media sector, broadcasters and publishers, and consumers. Delivery of the media goods and services is now completely in the hands of device makers. All of these “smart” devices and their related services decouple consumers from media brands and collect a fee for doing it. Device makers need content to sell their services, to be sure, but to keep being profitable they need cheap content and lots of it.

So far, 3D TV content is, well, limited. The blockbuster movie Avatar gave 3D a push and several television broadcasters, almost entirely pay-TV outlets, are planning for the day a sufficient number of consumers stump up for €2,000 or more for yet something else to decorate the living room. 3D TV looks to attract movie and sports fans in addition to video gamers.

“Pay-TV must offer its customers added value, so these broadcasters will offer 3D,” said Deloitte Consulting head of Media Practice Klaus Böhm. Deloitte has forecast 75 million 3D TV players by 2015 world-wide. Böhm also said the future of television in Germany is free-TV, advertising making a certain come-back.

For every need, somebody at the IFA has a solution. 3D video content may be momentarily sparse but Panasonic has the DIY answer. Its 3D camcorder will hit the retailers in October at about €1,000. It will, said Panasonic’s Makoto Nagura, “keep your precious moments in 3D.”

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