Back when I worked at Microsoft I was always looking at Google and asking myself “what if they shipped this” or “what if they shipped that?”
Well, I should have been worrying about Amazon instead. They’ve shipped a bunch of stuff that I expected Google to do first (like S3, and now Unbox).
What’s the Unbox video store? Dave Taylor answers the question. Oh, and a few other people on TechMeme too.
If I didn’t have such a busy day today, I’d go play too. Here’s a recap:
8 a.m., breakfast with Francine Hardaway and Buzz Bruggeman.
10 a.m. interview with Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder and CEO of Atlassian (cool software company in Australia) along with Jon Silvers. You can see Mike on this video (not mine).
1:30 p.m. interviewed Jonathan Schwartz. That went very well, can’t wait to show you the video (my show probably will start the week of the 18th).
3 p.m. meeting with Ryanne and Jay, who are editing and encoding my show. They just got engaged, by the way, congrats!
5 p.m. Buzz and I head to David Hornick’s VC firm for a little shindig (nice Vox blog, are all the cool kids going to get those now? I have one too, but it’s lame so far. I am trying to get Maryam to switch to Vox, though). Met lots of famous geeks and entrepreneurs including Rick Smolan, the guy who did the “Day in the Life” series of photo books and Heidi Roizen (former executive at Apple, among other places). She told me she updated her own Wikipedia entry to correct some factual errors. It’ll be interesting to see if that’ll get her in trouble. Oh, I also met Ross Mayfield, founder of Social Text, who, in jest, told me a good business tip: “Pornotube is the future.”
8 p.m. Interview Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail. He’s in India and is planning out a new city. Now THAT isn’t something you hear every day.
9:30 p.m. Buzz picks me up and we head to Valerie Cunningham’s birthday party where I meet up with a bunch of PodTech’ers, including my boss, John Furrier, who tells me about working at Hewlett Packard and how much he loved that company. Said “it was the best company in the world.”
11 p.m. head home.
Midnight. Read blogs, email (72 still to be answered just from yesterday) and write this blog post.
Well, hope you all get some sleep. But it looks like half the Internet is playing with Amazon stuff right now.
I perused Amazon’s unbox, and it looks pretty good for TV shows. Not so good for movies though. For movies, CinemaNow.com and MovieLink.com look better as the movies are half the price for rentals, and most people only watch movies once, so rentals are just fine. For purchases, CinameNow.com and MovieLink.com are still cheaper than Amazon’s movies.
Anyway it’s good to see someone actually take on Apple and beat Google to the punch (well, CinemaNow.com and MovieLink.com have been around for years, so this isn’t anything new, really).
Why Disney is not on Unbox? If the reason is Steve Jobs, then is he not abusing his board position. 90% of Disney stock holders should ask this question. Why Disney is not participating in Unbox for the benefit of Apple?
Why Disney is not on Unbox? If the reason is Steve Jobs, then is he not abusing his board position. 90% of Disney stock holders should ask this question. Why Disney is not participating in Unbox for the benefit of Apple?
If you think its Amazon then its probably no, check this link out
http://www.irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=225
If you think its Amazon then its probably no, check this link out
http://www.irintech.com/x1/blogarchive.php?id=225
I think this blurb about sums it up.
http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/017016.html
NEXT !!!! …..
I’ll wait to see if/what Apple comes up with next week.
I think this blurb about sums it up.
http://weblogs.jupiterresearch.com/analysts/gartenberg/archives/017016.html
NEXT !!!! …..
I’ll wait to see if/what Apple comes up with next week.
In my comment above, I said that CinemaNow.com had Amazon beat for movies, but not TV shows, because I thought CinemaNow didn’t offer TV shows. But I was wrong. I was just making another perusal of CinemaNow.com and see that they do have TV shows. (MovieLink.com also has TV shows, but a much smaller selection.)
And CinemaNow does offer Disney movies, unlike Amazon. We’ll have to see if that continues after Apple opens its Movie store on the 12th.
CinemaNow also has some nice HD offerings, a Download & “Burn to DVD” feature (so you can download entire DVDs, including deletes scenes, menus, etc, playable on any DVD player), and even a “mature” section (for those of you that are into that sort of thing. LOL)
I’m just promoting CinemaNow because I’ve used it in the past, it’s been around for years, offers more features than the competition, and I would hate to see it just get creamed by Johnny-Come-Latelies just because they have the name “Apple”, “Amazon”, or “Google”. But it seems inevitable. I mean, Apple wasn’t first to the mp3 player market but they destroyed all who came before them, so it’s likely CinemaNow will indeed get destroyed by Apple, Amazon, Google.
In my comment above, I said that CinemaNow.com had Amazon beat for movies, but not TV shows, because I thought CinemaNow didn’t offer TV shows. But I was wrong. I was just making another perusal of CinemaNow.com and see that they do have TV shows. (MovieLink.com also has TV shows, but a much smaller selection.)
And CinemaNow does offer Disney movies, unlike Amazon. We’ll have to see if that continues after Apple opens its Movie store on the 12th.
CinemaNow also has some nice HD offerings, a Download & “Burn to DVD” feature (so you can download entire DVDs, including deletes scenes, menus, etc, playable on any DVD player), and even a “mature” section (for those of you that are into that sort of thing. LOL)
I’m just promoting CinemaNow because I’ve used it in the past, it’s been around for years, offers more features than the competition, and I would hate to see it just get creamed by Johnny-Come-Latelies just because they have the name “Apple”, “Amazon”, or “Google”. But it seems inevitable. I mean, Apple wasn’t first to the mp3 player market but they destroyed all who came before them, so it’s likely CinemaNow will indeed get destroyed by Apple, Amazon, Google.
@28. Disney is within their rights as a company to choose to offer or not offer their content to whatever service they choose. You could ask why Apple Corp doesn’t offer the Beatles catalog on iTunes. They own the rights to the library and have a disagreement with Apple over naming rights. Not sure what Disney’s reason may. But, they don’t need to have a reason.
@28. Disney is within their rights as a company to choose to offer or not offer their content to whatever service they choose. You could ask why Apple Corp doesn’t offer the Beatles catalog on iTunes. They own the rights to the library and have a disagreement with Apple over naming rights. Not sure what Disney’s reason may. But, they don’t need to have a reason.
@32. You are wrong. At least on technical grounds. Disney is a public company. Any reason in the interest of Disney or the majority of Disney’s share-holders is okay. But if the reason is that a board member of Disney have interest in another company (Apple in this case), and a decision is being made in the interest of the other company then it is not okay.
Sure Steve Jobs is the largest share holder of Disney, but he still does not own the majority stake. If he as a board member participate in a decision which is not in the interest of Disney then it is unfair to those Disney’s shareholders who do not own Apple.
I do not know what happens in Disney’s board rooms. But in an ideal case, Steve Jobs must not participate in any such decision which has implication for Apple, citing his conflict of interest.
Not participating in Amazon Unbox does not seem a big deal. For an instance, *assume* that Amazon Unbox turns out to be hugely popular and Apple movie download fails. *Suppose* Unbox is able to give billions of dollars of profit to participating studios. Then, *such* conflicting decisions *may* open technical grounds for class action suites.
@32. You are wrong. At least on technical grounds. Disney is a public company. Any reason in the interest of Disney or the majority of Disney’s share-holders is okay. But if the reason is that a board member of Disney have interest in another company (Apple in this case), and a decision is being made in the interest of the other company then it is not okay.
Sure Steve Jobs is the largest share holder of Disney, but he still does not own the majority stake. If he as a board member participate in a decision which is not in the interest of Disney then it is unfair to those Disney’s shareholders who do not own Apple.
I do not know what happens in Disney’s board rooms. But in an ideal case, Steve Jobs must not participate in any such decision which has implication for Apple, citing his conflict of interest.
Not participating in Amazon Unbox does not seem a big deal. For an instance, *assume* that Amazon Unbox turns out to be hugely popular and Apple movie download fails. *Suppose* Unbox is able to give billions of dollars of profit to participating studios. Then, *such* conflicting decisions *may* open technical grounds for class action suites.
Who says Jobs is making the decision? If you know ANYTHING at all about Disney they guard their brand obsessively. If they feel anything will dilute their brand they will not particitpate. For example, it took them years, nee decades to even decide to sell McDonald’s branded food in their parks. So, if this is the case, it’s really no surprise at all they do not want to have downloads available. Do some research first before jumping to conclusions.
As for Jobs, er..um.. he is the majority shareholder in Disney.
Who says Jobs is making the decision? If you know ANYTHING at all about Disney they guard their brand obsessively. If they feel anything will dilute their brand they will not particitpate. For example, it took them years, nee decades to even decide to sell McDonald’s branded food in their parks. So, if this is the case, it’s really no surprise at all they do not want to have downloads available. Do some research first before jumping to conclusions.
As for Jobs, er..um.. he is the majority shareholder in Disney.
LayZ, my response @33 was to point out that you are absolutely wrong @32. A public company has many more restriction in governing itself. Its board members represent the share holders at large and they are supposed to act in the interest of the share-holders. If it is found out that they took actions for their own benefit at the expense of share-holders, (for an extreme example — insider trading), then they are open to law suits.
I gave you the argument by assumptions. And all these conditional words are also emphasized with astrisk.
As far as your knowledge about Disney is, then for your information no single share-holder has majority stake in Disney. Jobs is the largest shareholder owning only few percentage of Disney. (Majority share holders need to have at least $30 Billion, which only two people in the world have — Bill Gates and Warren Buffets and none of these two are the majority stake holders in Disney)
Take some debate classes before starts argueing.
BTW, Jobs is a Disney board member. So some responsibility of decision making falls on his shoulders.
(Expect no further argument from me. I do not like to argue with an anonymous person.)
LayZ, my response @33 was to point out that you are absolutely wrong @32. A public company has many more restriction in governing itself. Its board members represent the share holders at large and they are supposed to act in the interest of the share-holders. If it is found out that they took actions for their own benefit at the expense of share-holders, (for an extreme example — insider trading), then they are open to law suits.
I gave you the argument by assumptions. And all these conditional words are also emphasized with astrisk.
As far as your knowledge about Disney is, then for your information no single share-holder has majority stake in Disney. Jobs is the largest shareholder owning only few percentage of Disney. (Majority share holders need to have at least $30 Billion, which only two people in the world have — Bill Gates and Warren Buffets and none of these two are the majority stake holders in Disney)
Take some debate classes before starts argueing.
BTW, Jobs is a Disney board member. So some responsibility of decision making falls on his shoulders.
(Expect no further argument from me. I do not like to argue with an anonymous person.)
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