Streaming Startups: Go Buffer Yourself
Disclosure: This post was edited and added onto using a regular computer
I type this from my iPhone because Time Warner has failed yet again to keep a live connection going to my apartment. This is becoming a more frequent occurence than I would like to admit, and the very fact of how little I am actually home alarms me with the percentage of down time.
So what does my Internet connections lack of reliability have to do with college startups? Most college students who are in dorms come to expect a base level of widely available and reliable networks in which lots of money has made possible on their campus. The unfortunate part of this though is that while we are light years ahead of where dial-up modems were just a few short years ago, we are nowhere near where we need to be for a majority of these starry eyed designs of streaming platforms to actually work.
Loren Feldman of 1938media (who by all rights is a complete jack ass) states a good point in regards to Spotify; which is the music industries current love child. {link} Check out around the 50 second mark..
His point is that streaming services can never quite get it right, he states that it has more to do with the perception of ownership in media (which is valid); but I would like to argue that there is actually something more to it.
Beyond ownership of our content, consumers need reliability within their services and media; coincidentally this is also what has been a driving success factor within the Apple ecosystem. Apple understood that in order for media distribution and cloud services to truly work you needed local copies that sync between your devices and simply leverage the Internet for additional features.
This approach has been successful because it takes a lot of the consumer experience out of the hands of third parties (ISP’s etc.) and keeps the quality of service in Apple’s court. This gives the consumer an improved sense of reliability and quality because now even if a customers internet connection is down, they will be able to access their synced files and their media. The ISP in this case only pads the feature set by allowing these devices to sync through and with the cloud whenever a connection is available. This is also the same reason that the iPhone has done well despite AT&T being the primary service provider.
So if you are planning on creating a startup that depends on largely on a consistently connected environment, take some time to understand what qualities of your service could be brought into a more dependable ecosystem in order to keep your customers happier with the end result.
Did you want more? Follow @travisketchum here!
DISCLAIMER: Before acting on this post, be sure to read my disclaimer.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment