Reflections on CES2011
Been looking at the new product at this year’s CES. Tablets abound (over 30 announced) and while Android may be the most frequently used operating system there seems to be an explosion in terms of the number of different screen sizes. The big consumer brands (LG, Samsung, Panasonic et al) are showcasing their convergent TVs (yet another set of screen formats). Even the auto manufacturers are in on the act with the connected car - and, yes. the screen size will vary in this sector as well.
So how is the content going to be displayed on these devices? Talk to the major corporations and their initial answer is apps - 100 new ones every 24 hours for Windows Phone 7 alone, according to Steve Balmer. The logic is at first sight reasonable - namely consumers will want a high quality, easy to use experience. However, I suspect they have arrived at this conclusion because the decision makers work for large corporates and their views will be informed by talking to similar executives in big media - which are also large corporate organisations.
There are two unfortunate problems with this apps based strategy. The first is that the plethora of device types will mean the content owners will have to spend a lot of money writing and maintaining basically very similar bits of code to ensure they are not locked out of a device. The second is that with all these devices able to access the Internet, you can guarantee that pretty soon a lot of the content accessed will be ‘off portal’ (or should I say ‘off app’?). While big media might be able to afford the software development overhead of keeping apps up to date for the latest screen size, most content owners can’t.
So what’s the way forward for a content owner? The more elegant solution is to work with a mobile Internet enablement company, such as Mobiletech, to ensure that you only have to publish your content once and then allow the software to work its magic and render the content to the screen/browser/operating system combination.
And with the advent of HTML5 a lot of the things that are perceived as making apps a cool experience will be available on the ‘ordinary’ web.
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