The French President, aka Mr Bruni 2008, wants to suppress all forms of advertising from the national public TV network, à la BBC, to increase the quality of its programming by avoiding frontal competition with private competitors TF1 and M6. I say “Bravo Nicolas!”
But that’s it for the good news. To finance the “unprecedented” cultural revolution, he offers to tax advertising revenues of private broadcasters (fine), but also the revenues of new means of communication like Internet access or mobile telephony, penalizing “relatively new and still-developing economic and communications tools” to support traditional television that draws fewer and fewer viewers. What’s next? A tax on blank CDs, DVDs and media storage like the iPods to support the struggling music industry? Oh wait, I forgot, they have it already.
iPhone is already out in four countries. For those still waiting, there should be high hopes for iPhone has not only changed what we expect from our phones, but also what we expect from carriers.
Only a few months ago, unlimited data plans were a sweet dream for the early adopters among us.
On June 25th morning, only four days before iPhone launched in the US, the word spread out that AT&T would be launching a special data plans (”iplan”) including unlimited data over EDGE. A major revolution.
On the other side of the atlantic, hopes were building up … and went down when it appeared that european data plans would be limited.
Did they hear users moaning? Pretty unlikely. Did Steve call them and explain that his big plans for web applications would fail short without unlimited data plans? Plausible.
A few days later, the news came out in UK, Germany and France: unlimited plans (yes, really - no limit).
Cellphone companies are huge and slow companies that usually take years to prepare and lauch a new offer. Having four of them change business rules (iPhone costs a lot to carriers), get their network ready (visual voicemail and iphone browser both require specific developments) and jump in the big and risky world of unlimited data is an awesome achievement.
But the story does not end here. In France, SFR (Vodafone) and Bouygues Telecom both have announced unlimited data plan just a few weeks before the iPhone goes on sale. Apple is changing the rules …
Take few boring topics like hectic financial markets, surge in oil prices, super weak dollar, a services-only economy, insane credit debts, shake them together and you get one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a while, in last week’s NY magazine. What if suddenly U.S consumers realize that they can’t afford those afternoons at the mall, if Europe and Asia decide to skip American market and currency? Think Jurassic Park meets Wall Street.
Pray for this to never happen, or your job (and mine) would probably be on the line, and you don’t want that, right?
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