Video entertainment was “the one that got away” from Apple, but recent moves reveal the company is taking a second stab at the category, and that streaming video will play a major role.
The addition of video cameras to Apple’s latest iPhone and iPod Nano were just the first hints of the company’s new personal-media strategy. The company is also building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which could provide the massive bandwidth required for ubiquitous streaming video. And Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala suggests it’s interested in rebooting iTunes into a streaming service, according to Wall Street Journal. That means music, in Lala’s case, but the same infrastructure could be shared with streaming video.
The final piece of the puzzle was Apple’s approval this week of iPhone apps with live video-streaming capability. The company previously forbade this functionality, reserving live video as a private API. But a letter from an iPhone developer convinced Steve Jobs to release Apple’s restrictions, and now live video-streaming apps Ustream and Knocking Live Video are available for download in the App Store.
All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences. YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.
That means in the next few years, we’re likely to see video cameras with live-streaming software built into future iPods and iPhones (and the rumored touchscreen tablet, if it ever exists). These features will likely be integrated into iTunes, which Apple would convert into a social experience with real-time sharing services, in addition to being a storage tool.
It’s no wonder Jobs gave the green light on live video-broadcasting apps for the iPhone: He could use app developers to help Apple get started.
In a September iPod event, Jobs made it clear Apple was entering the consumer video market.
“We want to get in on this,” Jobs said when he presented the video-equipped iPod Nano’s main competitor: the Flip camcorder.
Building a data center, putting a video camera on the iPhone and approving iPhone apps with live video-streaming functionality are all precursor steps necessary for Apple to build for an always-connected, share-everything future.
“I would look at it and say, ‘You’re Apple. You can’t just refresh your existing line. What’s your game changer?’” said James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst who focuses on consumer video. “It’s getting into personal broadcasting, which is essentially what this is.”
Live video in its current state is mostly a bunch of niche applications. Satellite trucks enable broadcast journalists to televise live scoops. In the business space, professionals use live video conferencing to communicate remotely. Consumers use live video broadcasting with webcams to video-chat with each other, and a few exhibitionists broadcast themselves over websites like Ustream and Justin.tv.
So what’s the big deal if you put live-video capability in a phone? You can carry it everywhere and broadcast live from anywhere, and that opens a whole new world of applications for the technology. John Ham, co-founder of video-streaming startup Ustream, predicts live video will give birth to a new world of citizen journalists.
“People always have a cellphone on them,” said John Ham, co-founder of Ustream. “You can’t always predict life, and there are going to be moments where you want to share…. We’ve seen people take out devices and streaming earthquakes or planes landing, and now there are going to be all sorts of citizen journalism events now if we have millions with this application over iPhone.”
The developer of Knocking Live Video, an app that broadcasts live video between iPhones, said anywhere-video broadcasting is the evolution of Twitter.
“We are focused on phone-to-phone, not uploading to the web,” Pointy Head developer Brian Meehan explained to Ars Technica. “Who really cares about fleeting moments other than friends and family seeing it as it happens? With Knocking, people share what they are doing right now. Our testers have referred to Knocking as a ‘visual tweet.’”
And then there are those who are already using video cameras in phones and point-and-shoots to capture events like concerts or soccer games, which eventually get e-mailed or posted on Facebook. Sharing his personal experience, McQuivey said he went to a concert with his daughter recently and saw about 100 pocket video cameras shooting the show on the main floor.
“The performers even said, it used to be what goes on tour stays on tour, but now it ends up on Facebook,” McQuivey said. “Apple would be foolish not to try to be the center of that buzz.”
“Google is going to want to go with this, too: They have YouTube,” McQuivey noted. “This could be really interesting.”
And what about Lala? According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is working with Lala’s engineers to revamp iTunes into a streaming music service that lets users buy and listen to music through a web browser.
“For consumers, such changes could make it far easier to manage and access large libraries of music, which need to be stored, maintained and backed up on computer hard drives and portable devices,” The Wall Street Journal wrote.
Why stop with music? Adding video to the mix would turn iTunes into a personal media hub.
In a nearer term, McQuivey says Apple has an easy opportunity to integrate video from the fifth-generation iPod Nano into iTunes, enabling users to share recordings with one another through the software.
“This puts Apple in an important place it hasn’t occupied until now: It makes Apple software the potential hub for personal media, something that is poised to explode in the next 2-3 years,” McQuivey wrote in a blog post when the video-equipped Nano was released in September.
“Even Flip’s success has not guaranteed that people use Flip software to manage the videos they capture,” he added. “But Apple’s iTunes has always been the glue that makes Apple’s ecosystem work. And now it just acquired superadhesive properties.”
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