Many speculated that Apple might use its September event to roll out a fully cloud-based music service. Indeed, I’ve noted previously that the iTunes interface took on a decidedly more Web-like appearance with iTunes 9, and the acquisition of Lala by Apple hinted that Apple might move further in that direction.
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Tags: Apple, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch, itunes, Lala, Ping, Zune
Consumer Technology, Entertainment | Ross Rubin, Executive Director, Industry Analysis | 
September 2, 2010 3:09 pm | 
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This week NPD reported on Q2’s smartphone OS market share. It was a big quarter for Android, which is now installed on one of every three smartphones sold in the U.S. Android’s gains clearly came at the expense of RIM, which dropped nine percentage points quarter over quarter, and has seen an even more precipitous drop from a year ago. And yet, even with smartphones now growing to account for 42 percent of the U.S. market, Samsung and LG continued to lead the overall U.S. handset market without a significant smartphone presence, certainly in relation to their feature phones.
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As I’ve noted when discussing the e-reader market, Amazon and Barnes & Noble have an inherent advantage in garnering overall revenue given that they can call upon databases of millions of active book-buyers. When I wrote about the in-store Nook angle that Barnes & Noble was taking, I mentioned how electronics retailers could benefit from this level of integration. Last week, prior to the Google TV announcement, Best Buy announced it will offer its version of Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow video program under its original CinemaNow brand, which Best Buy has acquired.
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Visit Amazon.com’s home page and you’ll learn that the Kindle is the retailer’s best-selling product (even beating out 50″+ rear-projection televisions). That’s not too surprising given the momentum of the category as well as its shipping-friendly dimensions. But the Kindle’s success at Amazon has also been helped by the device being sold exclusively there, whereas Amazon must compete with other retailers for nearly all of its other products.
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At the DisplaySearch blog, my colleague Paul Gagnon examines the proposed Hulu subscription service and expresses concern that the service could be jeopardized by fearful cable stakeholders. Indeed, cable companies, such as Comcast, have likely been pressuring broadcasters such as NBC, which have in turn pressured Hulu to vigilantly block access to any device or software that is designed to display content on the television, as arbitrary as this “line in the sand” may be. A recent example of this was Hillcrest Labs’ Kylo TV browser that debuted at this year’s spring DEMO Conference, but which landed on its face because Hulu suddenly decided to block it.
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On its earnings call last week amidst the backdrop of CTIA, Best Buy noted its intention to open 75 to 100 “small-format” stores, the lion’s share of which will be Best Buy Mobile stores. The retailer, which is a dominant seller of televisions and PCs, sees great potential in the “third screen” of the cell phone, even though it has limited control of device pricing (and even less control over subscription pricing). First, it believes that its impartiality, selection, and customer service can offer advantages that the carrier stores cannot. And handsets offer supplemental revenue streams of accessories, Geek Squad setup, and ongoing maintenance and data management services.
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TiVo has long been the poster child for how difficult it is to sell subscription products at retail. While its monthly service plans may have initially been conceived to be friendly to cable providers, they overwhelmingly balked and instead devised their own generic solutions. These often had inferior user interfaces, but were tightly integrated with cable services such as VOD that TiVo could not accommodate, even by using CableCARD. TiVo didn’t help its cause by offering the popular lifetime subscription lump sum, then discontinuing it, then reinstating it after facing competition from Digeo’s Moxi.
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At DisplaySearch’s USFPD conference, the sun-drenched beachfront of San Diego was an appropriate setting for my panel that included representatives from two companies working on energy-efficient displays that excel at outdoor readability.
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This week brought news that Walmart has purchased Vudu, a one-time on-demand video device company that transformed its business to servicing connected TVs and Blu-ray players. As the largest seller of packaged home video in the country and one of the largest sellers of consumer electronics, Walmart clearly has an interest in maintaining its position as more video is consumed digitally, but also in establishing ties to the televisions and Blu-ray players that are featuring the Vudu service.
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One of the open questions surrounding the iPad that has quickly come to the fore in light of the recent Amazon-Macmillan brinksmanship is to what extent the device will jeopardize sales of e-readers. This is particularly true of the market-leading Kindle, upon the metaphorical shoulders of which Steve Jobs said Apple stood.
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