Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group (formerly Forrester) often has some very interesting stories to tell – not surprising, really, because he’s been watching the industry for quite a while. I used to read his comments on the semi and systems side when he was at Giga (and prior at Dataquest). I’ve always found his comments good food for thought (even if we don’t always agree)…
In chatting about media-ready devices, we got onto the subject of the difficulty of creating content. We both agree that building a set-top device is pretty easy given some of the new hardware coming along, but making an interesting service without having good premade content (like getting a Hollywood deal, and that’s hard to get when the studios already have their content delivery channels) is hard. He thinks education is the first target – I think journalism – but content is the key to all.
Interesting about education content. I did a paper on that topic – video serving educational content per a test run in a local school district. Short creative works by kids on California Missions, etc. Webinars for teachers per school district. All automated, secure, simple, centralized. Content trackable / licensable. Focus on project basis – not process. But education is very conservative – while it was fun, it definitely was not first mover from my perspective.