Medium of the Century
By Albert Lin, President of ConDel Technologies Inc.

The form of media evolves: turtleback, stone, pottery, bronze, leather, bamboo, cloth, paper, film, and, beginning from the electronic era, phonographic disk, magnetic tape, magnetic hard disk, floppy disk, CD, VCD, DVD, etc. Certain media prevail other forms and last longer; for instance, papers came to existence about twenty centuries ago and it remains serving as one of the major medium, for reasons not just of their light weight, but also papers serve as the content storage device and display device at the same time. In addition, different forms of medium exist concurrently. We use papers for text, films for photograph and phonographic disks for audio content. It was CD/VCD/DVD that might be the first attempt to unify the forms; software, manuals, movies, music, and the like, can be all preloaded into the same form of medium. However, due to the limited varieties and low mobility of its displaying devices, i.e., PCs and DVD players, diversity remains the main theme of medium forms.

At the crossover of 20th and 21st centuries, a brand new form of medium--flash-based mobile storage device was created. It was firstly applied to PCs and DSCs at the inceptive stage, and later on to MP3 players, mobile phones, PDAs, PNDs, digital frames, mobile TVs, e-book readers, and so on. It is observed that all trendy movable electronic devices carry a slot for flash memory. It’s here, there, and everywhere.

Despite the specifications for mobile flash storage devices were also highly diversified initially, such as the USB disk for PC-centered applications and the CF, xD, memory stick, MMC and SD for flash cards on various mobile electronic appliances, they were converging to a unified spec SD. Nowadays, the SD spec takes over 70% of the total card market.

The evolution of media towards a unified form gives rise to a revolutionary change in content delivery. In the past, subject to different media forms and their displaying devices, the content market was highly segmented. The volume of publication was limited by the number of platforms sold. From the stance of content owners, the number of platforms sold gives a natural limit of total available market (TAM). For instance, in the States, for each game console, there are 3.4 games sold associated with it in a year on the average.

Furthermore, too many choices of displaying devices also set hurdles for the business operations of content owners. For example, the delivery of language learning contents requires involvements in different channels, text by magazines, audio by FM radio stations or TV stations, and CD-ROM for auxiliary learning. Things change after the rise of flash memory products; all contents can be preloaded into one medium and displayed in virtually all electronic devices. Since the number of platforms which can display contents increases drastically, in particular the number of mobile phones (which were not regarded as a kind of content display platform in the past), the potential of contents can be distributed increase sharply as well. Universality of medium to all the displaying devices causes a sudden expansion of TAM.

Mobility is another favorable factor for flash mobile storage devices to serve as the medium for content delivery. The smallest form of flash cards is micro SD, sized 15×10 mm², smaller than a thumb nail. Mobility is not just a synonym for convenience; it also helps to expand the TAM. Contents are products which require time to consume them. In the DVD days, using it requires a piece of dedicated time staying put in front of a PC or DVD player. But there are gluts of fragmentary times in life: in queue, on the move, in commute, etc. These are times beyond the reach of content market in the past. Mobility of medium changes the traditional boundary of the content market; Contents penetrate into every minute of life as long as one is awake and with a mobile electronic appliance. An interesting statistic shows that the average time a Japanese spends playing his/her mobile phone is 68 minutes a day. These piecemeal times are considered “extra” in the past; this fact explains why MP3 music and mobile e-Learning become so prevalent.

Digital rights management (DRM) offers another attractive feature for both consumers and content owners; it is particular the case for flash mobile storage devices. The key components of USB disks or flash cards are in common: flash memory and microcontroller. It is the microcontroller which makes the DRM on flash mobile storage devices versatile. DRM, unlike its predecessor encryption, which only imposes very rigid restrictions on the use of contents, provides very flexible digital rights management so that content owners can design innovative business models to meet customers’ demands; albeit DRM might not be necessarily helpful for business developments in certain content markets such as MP3, and it might cause interoperability problems among displaying devices when being implemented on contents.

Universality, mobility and DRM together make flash cards fatally attractive to serve as the main content delivery medium in the 21st century. By saying so, it does not mean that flash card is already invincible in the content delivery market. Online digital content delivery is there and working fine for a quite wide variety of contents. Its predecessor, DVD, remains robust in certain fields of applications. Some of the nice features of online content delivery and DVD, such as the low cost of both content delivery ways, are hard to challenge at this moment. But flash is a semiconductor product and it follows Moore’s Law. The cost of flash card will decrease steadily and eventually become negligible compared with the contents it carries. What we can conclude now is that there are ecological zones in the content delivery landscape which is already suitable for flash cards to dwell upon, such as GPS map applications, where mobility is absolutely required and online connectivity for mass information is not available. There will be more applications to surface once the cost threshold for a particular application is reached.