TiVo Jumping on the iPod Bandwagon
TiVo has now released more details as far as the what, who, how, with regards to their new venture to offer support for the iPod and PSP for syncing video to your favorite player (*cough* iPod).
They have indicated that beta testing will begin within the "coming weeks". That would be the when. No, we don't have any details on the when yet, but
C/NET has released a FAQ for the iPod/PSP to TiVo integration that might be interesting to those TiVo subscribers out there.
So why do we care? After all, it's TiVo. Well, while not the biggest provider, we are hoping that TiVo will be a trailblazer with their iPod integration, leading to more, larger, providers to take some initiative also. Cross your fingers everyone.
iPod Exposes Lame Japanese Competitors
By: Terrie Lloyd
In what must be a low point for Sony and for the Japanese consumer electronics industry in general, Apple has announced that it now outsells Sony for music players, the first time that Sony has been outsold on home territory.
According to Business Computer News (BCN), iPod sales now account for about 60% of the entire market of portable music player sales, including CD, tape, and MD players combined. The Apple domination became complete in July, with the launch of its iTunes music store, in competion with Sony's Mora music download website. Apparently the availability of a huge number of titles, more than 1m tunes, coupled with lower prices, around 150 yen versus Mora's 200 yen, have helped turn Japanese consumers on to the value proposition which is Apple.
Sony is trying to fight back, with new MP3 Walkmans priced close to the Apple models, such as 29,000 yen for a 6GB unit, and they've cut the pricing of Mora online songs by 15% recently. However, this is a lame-ass effort, given that the iPod is sexier, smaller, and cheaper, and since Mora only has a catalog of 200,000 tunes, users are flocking to the iTunes site instead. Even Sony's own recording artists are complaining about Sony withholding its catalog from Apple Japan, and people like Motoharu Sano are signing up directly with Apple.
Not just Sony, but all the Japanese manufacturers have been caught flat-footed by the sudden explosion in music players and online entertainment. A quick look in the stores shows an overpriced Toshiba 40GB Gigabeat, a unit that is well designed and sounds OK, selling for 44,000 yen, while in the next showcase over, the much more capable 60GB iPod Photo is available for just a fraction more at 46,000 yen. We wonder if Toshiba actually sells any Gigabeats and why they think consumers wouldn't buy an iPod instead. Have they lost their ability to market properly, even here at home in Japan?
What is up with Japanese manufacturers that they can't compete? They have factories in China and access to the same or better technology than Apple. My sense is that Sony, Toshiba, Casio, Sharp, et al, have found out too late that they now have serious global competition. This is a very fundamental problem, and one that implies that either these companies have to start internationalizing and practicing proper marketing or else they will have to shut down their mobile consumer products divisions — much as D&M Holdings (Denon and Marantz brands) decided to do in July with their Rio brand.
As well as being marketing isolationists, Japanese electronics makers seem to still not be able to deal with the old bug-bear of software development, and this failure is now coming back to haunt them. A classic case of this has been the Sony fiasco over DRM malware that they included on their music CDs. If you had the misfortune to play one of these CDs on your PC, the Sony software, programmed by another firm, secretly installed a buggy DRM program into your PC and in the process compromised your Internet security. Sony has been thorougly lambasted over its rootkit software and hasn't understood at all how to respond to the public.
Indeed, their first response, from one of the senior management, was to say disingenuously, "What's all the fuss about? Most people have never even heard of a rootkit." And then Sony went on to release a fix which was simply an upgrade of the exact same software! The bulletin boards ran white hot the next day with users trashing Sony.
If Sony is to regain its leadership in mobile gadgets, and perhaps in the entire consumer electronics sector as the competition from Apple, Dell, the Taiwanese, and Koreans strengthens, then they need to act soon. They need to internationalize, drawing in and properly promoting foreign designers and marketing talent; they need to reign in their engineering departments and get them solidly underneath sales and marketing, and not the other way around; they need to figure out how to co-opt their user and fan base instead of trying to control and harrass it, and lastly they need to start more trends instead of playing catch-up. Sony's PSP and Aibo ERS-7M3 have been steps in the right direction, but the company needs to roll out such products on a monthly basis, not once every 2-3 years.
As for Toshiba and some of the others — they should probably give up trying to be all things to all people and just focus on 1-2 main mobile products bound for the global markets. For Toshiba this would be notebook PCs and for Sharp PDAs and camcorders...
Terrie Lloyd is the founder of DaiJob, Inc. He also writes a weekly newsletter for entrepreneurs and business people about business and political opportunities in Japan. You can find the newsletter at www.terrie.com. For further contact with Terrie, email him at terrie.lloyd@daijob.com
