The BBC has announced that it is to release news and sport applications via the iTunes App Store – to the horror of many in the press industry. For me the real news here isn’t that the BBC seem to be relaxing their attitude to favouring individual suppliers but that the News industry as a collective didn’t see the BBC Apps coming.
As we all know the BBC’s mandate is to provide License Fee payers with the opportunity to watch/read/listen at their convenience and to invest in the technology to facillitate this. The News App has been a long time coming, representing a bridge between on and offline content. Likewise it was the next logical step after the iPlayer to announce live television whether on the internet or mobile, and the 2010 World Cup seems to be the perfect launch-platform.
Major papers including the Telegraph, Guardian and Times have all recently launched or announced their own iPhone Apps, (The Guardian’s App has racked up 100,000 downloads so far) and the newsgroups clearly view this as a potential revenue source to counteract their declining sales. The big surprise is that News groups are still clinging on to the idea that they can charge people for the news – the internet, and especially the rise of social media has ensured that news is available immediately and from any number of different sources. News is no longer a commodity because it is ubiquitous and the sooner Newspapers shift their focus onto the op-ed and insight areas of journalism the sooner they will reap the benefits. Reportage just isn’t valuable anymore because any member of the public with a twitter account can report instantaneously from wherever they are – why pay a foreign correspondent when a holiday maker looking for a quick buck will do just as well?
The new technology does not sound the death knell for the Newspaper but it might just be the end of the line for reportage – bring on the rebirth of Op-ed!
So it’s finally landed, the most talked about gadget of the last year, decade, millennia even; Apple’s iPad, the most hyped invention since our ingenious early relatives made a rock round and called it the “wheel”. Web developers may bemoan it’s lack of flash (more on that later), snap-happy users the lack of a camera, and everyone who’s busier than they have any right to be the lack of multitasking, but at Mentor Digital we think that this might just change the way the world thinks about the web. The Apple iPad adds new meaning to accessibility, as all iPhone owners know it’s simply easier, faster and way less effort to check that film time or browse your hotmail through the gloriously slick interface than waste valuable time waiting for a desktop to start. Add into the mix a screen big enough to really read content or tick off the shopping list at ASOS and I simply can’t remember why I might need the desktop in the first place.
