I haven’t quite thought about it this way but assuming Apple becomes a monopoly and iTunes is a new encompassing DRM manager, as opposed to a media manager. How many people would realize before it’s too late that Apple dominates your life?
Would you? Would I?
If the service provided is competitive and “just works”, would we care?
iTV, Apple’s future Apple TV replacement should be announced any day now. And while Apple talks to cable networks and their Hollywood affiliates about the new rates, let’s examine the fascinating future of cloud computing for a brief second.
Netflix has been around in the US since 1997. They are looking at launching services in Canada this fall and provides DVD rentals on top of video on-demand streaming. In Canada they are not offering physical media at ALL. It will be an entire streaming service. Priced for $8.99/month in the US, I don’t foresee much higher of a price in Canada.
Hulu is looking at an international launch in the short future. It may have an easier time of doing this than any other service because Hulu itself is a joint venture between the big cable networks (ABC, NBC and Fox). In the US, its revenue is generated purely from advertising spaces and subscribers. While the free service provide the few latest episodes of your favorite shows (minus CBS), the paid service is $9.99/month for entire seasons of the same shows at your disposal.
Apple is ever so late to the party. While Apple is almost always late to the party, they usually get it right–Hello? iPod? This rumoured $0.99/per episode deal may be the final draw to finally kill the need to have physical media. Apple has an advantage here. Steve Jobs owns a good chunk of Disney, who is the parent company of ABC. They also have all of the network content already, just at a higher price. Current episodes on iTunes sell for $1.99 for SD and $2.99 for HD. The difference is that at these price points you own the episodes. But do you REALLY need to own your TV show forever? TV is designed to be a medium enjoyed once, and then you move on to the next episodes. Netflix will supplement your need to own content nicely, so Apple’s $0.99/episode 48-hr rental may actually be more affordable than you think!
Netflix is a wonderful service but it concentrates on retail releases. You will have to wait until your show is releasing the full season Blu-ray/DVD before you can watch it via Netflix. You will also suffer a 2-week penalty due to Netflix’s agreement with various networks and studios.
Hulu is lacking the presence of CBS. You would do fine using this service in conjunction with its Plus subscription to watch any other networks’ shows except for CBS. CBS: I think it’s time now to invest in Hulu and stop wasting your own bandwidth and storage. The exposure may be greater in the long run.
Lastly the new Apple deal, if true, should encompass every network as they currently offer every network’s content at a higher price. We will have to wait and see the results from these supposed negotiations. I have a feeling Steve and gang will change a lot of things about the TV as we know it.
Maybe this is another reason why programming on the OS X platform is easier. If you’re sick of using Apple Mail, which supports Gmail IMAP fully, or iCal, which supports Google Calendar fully, you can use just use Webmailer and use your browser to do everything. It seems to be a much more minimalistic solution as it integrates into the Preference Pane as a new category and changes just the association of mailto: to whatever it is you want to use.
I have discovered the holy grail of e-mail when Google started their Google Apps hosting services. But incorporating all of this stuff onto your desktop was always a pain. Not to mention the regular joes who just uses Gmail in its pure form (www.gmail.com). Well forget desktop e-mail client software and embrace your browser.
Here’s how to completely dump the need for Outlook, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, or whatever it is that you run on your desktop to get your e-mail fix.
First we need to solve the nasty mailto: protocol default. In Windows it is only limited to an actual app. You cannot link it to Gmail or any other website. Until Affixa that is. Affixa will allow you to associate mailto: protocol to Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Google Apps hosted sites are also supported. And after you install it and set it up (make sure you enable HTTPs), you don’t even need the tray icon to be active. I disabled it from running on Windows startup as well. Don’t need the tray icon unless you need to change a preference.
Any <a href=”mailto:”> links will now direct you to a created Draft in Gmail. As well as any of the default Windows mailto: protocol calls. This include the Send To -> Mail Recipient option on your desktop, and the e-mail function in individual programs such as Word, Excel, Adobe Reader, etc.
Then I downloaded a couple of Sidebar gadgets to alert me of new e-mail arrival and Google Calendar notices. Google Calendar Agenda brings onto your Sidebar all of your calendar events, and Gmail Counter lets you know of any unread e-mails in your Inbox.
The two gadgets are set on refresh on interval. Google Calendar Agenda is preset and you can’t change it, but it’s frequent enough that I don’t really miss any updates. Gmail Counter can be set to update as frequently as every minute.
This setup works really well for me, even in Windows Live Messenger, I can press on the check mail button and it would launch browser for Gmail as opposed to trying to open an app.
But wait a minute, there’s the problem with offline viewing you say. Well you can use Google Gears to enable offline viewing, but if you can’t get online to send a message, what’s the point of using your e-mails?
Check link below to download Affixa.
Well updating on this cloud business. NuevaSync never synced my Google Contacts properly for City, Province and Postal Code fields. This resulted Google Maps on the iPhone to always use United States as the country when I look up someone’s location from the Contacts. So I gave up on that and just synced Google Contacts from iTunes like I did before.
Thunderbird’s Google integration is not perfect but much better than Outlook though. It loads much faster on IMAP folders. I’m using Providers for calendar sync and Zindus for contacts. While calendar works flawlessly. Contacts are only a partial sync.
There is no addresses being synced from Google to Thunderbird at all. Even when I turn on the Zindus option to do so. What happens instead is that when the address option is turned on and I input something into Thunderbird, Zindus would then update my Google Contacts with this new information. It would also move the existing address on Google into the notes section.
Granted this is not perfect but I have successfully replaced the need for Outlook.
NuevaSync would probably fix the current Google Contacts syncing with proper address formatting. As iTunes currently do this just fine with the exact same set of entries.