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I knew
that the hype surrounding the Apple tablet had reached
extraordinary proportions when I got an e-mail from
Juan Antonio Giner
a few weeks ago.
Giner
told me he had been hired by a news site in
Spain
to do nothing but blog about the tablet for the 20 days
leading up to its launch — even before Apple confirmed
the event itself. A news site in
Spain
!
Giner
also has something interesting to say about that hype
because of his day job as president and co-founder of
the
Innovation International Media Consulting Group
.
He says
the newsrooms around the world that Giner advises have
high hopes that the tablet will be their salvation,
allowing them to charge for digital content. And in
these hopes, newsrooms are not alone.
A wide
spectrum of industries has placed extraordinary hope in
a device that has never been seen in public. In recent
weeks, I've heard people pondering the potential of the
Apple tablet to boost, or even reinvent, markets such as
education, video games, television and books.
In an
e-mail, Giner said he thinks Apple may have let
expectations get too high. "There is too much
hype," Giner wrote. "They will not be able to
match all this expectation."
This
anticipation stems from the growing rumblings that Apple
has been discussing a new system to sell and consume
digital content of all kinds: video, text and games. And
that has led to optimistic musings about whether Apple
can do for (insert your industry here) what it did for
the music business:
Electronics
Arts is said to be creating games for the tablet.
Conde Nast
has reportedly been asked to develop tablet content.
Same for
The New York Times
for newspapers.
And
HarperCollins for books.
Educators
wonder if the tablet will make classrooms more
interactive.
Coursesmart,
a consortium of five textbook publishers who create
e-books for e-readers and the iPhone, went so far as to
produce a video showing how interactive textbooks would
work on a tablet.
Such
faith and hope may be the ultimate testament to the
uncanny ability of
Steve Jobs
to tap into the dreams of so many.
Throw in
indications that Apple is also going to launch a
music-streaming service after its recent acquisition of
Lala, and we begin to see that Apple's ambitions extend
well beyond the launch of just some gadget. While much
of the guessing around the device has focused on its
features and specifications, the potential creation of a
new marketplace for selling and consuming content
strikes me as potentially far more important.
First, it
gets at a question I've asked for a while now: What
problem will the tablet solve for me? When just thinking
about the device, that's been hard to answer. I use my
MacBook at home to watch TV shows and movies, surf the
Web and shop. At first blush, I'm not persuaded I need
another device for these things. And I think that's
really why tablets haven't taken off so far.
But
knowing how Apple approaches these things, I had a hunch
they were thinking a lot about that use question. And
creating a whole new distribution system for media would
certainly represent a big opportunity.
It's also
one that would likely extend across all devices, from
MacBooks to Apple TV to iPhones.
It's hard
to judge the impact of such a shift, if Apple succeeds.
You can make good arguments about whether iTunes has
helped or hurt the music industry. (I think it's helped.
Things would be worse without it.) But a lot of
television networks and movie studios have chafed at
Apple's terms for selling their content through iTunes.
For the
record, Giner thinks those hopes from people in his
world are misplaced:
"Newsrooms
believe that Apple will save them," Giner wrote.
"They are wrong."
The big
questions in any new content arrangement include who
would own the relationship with the customer: Apple or
the publisher? How much would Apple charge? And how
would the revenue be split?
Depending
on the answers, we may look back on Wednesday's
announcement and see that the tablet itself was much
less important than the creation of this new ecosystem.
Will that be good for just Apple, or for the content
creators, too?
Stay
tuned.
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