Towards age of access
|Published
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One of the topics I hope to bore my grandkids with one of these days is how in my youth we had to buy our music on discs, first vinyl ones and later compact plastic ones, with a period in the middle when it came on magnetic tapes.
Another subject I’m sure will have them sidling furtively towards the door is video entertainment and how in my day I had to wait a whole week for the next instalment of my favourite show to be beamed to the family television set.
“We didn’t even have TV in South Africa till I was your age,” I’ll tell them, not for the first time judging by the glazed look in their eyes.
To them, these tales will seem almost impossibly quaint, like my gran’s stories of how men with horses and carts used to come round each morning to collect the “night soil” from the outhouse.
They’ll be fully-fledged citizens of the digital, on-demand society. For them, any song or video clip will be instantly available on myriad devices, big and small.
We’re still in the fairly early stages of our journey towards this age of access, but in the last week we passed two significant milestones in that direction.
The first was the arrival of Google Play Music in South Africa. The search giant’s local launch of its digital music store and subscription streaming service puts it up against Apple Music, Simfy, and Deezer.
While the last two are pure streaming music services, Apple Music and Google Play Music also let you buy songs as well as add your own existing digital tracks to your Apple or Google collection.
Google Play Music runs on any platform with access to a browser and Flash (or Chrome), and has apps for Android and iOS.
To use Apple Music, you’ll need to use iTunes, which is only available for Windows and Mac, although Apple also has apps for iOS and Android.
Google is running a launch promotion of R49.99 a month. If you sign up after January 26, the price goes up to R59.99, the same as Apple Music and Deezer. Simfy costs R60.
The second milestone was the news of Telkom’s partnership with ShowMax, Naspers’s recently launched subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service.
In terms of the deal, new and existing Telkom Summer Unlimited users will have unlimited data to stream content on ShowMax. Telkom is also giving 30 days’ ShowMax access to all customers that sign up for the SmartHome Premium or Smartplan 100 plan from today until the end of December 2015.
SVOD is taking off globally, with about 100 million people using Web-based services to watch series and movies. But here, its adoption has been underwhelming, with data costs one of the factors, something ShowMax and Telkom hope to change with their deal.
“SVOD is a relatively new concept in SA with data usage and concerns over data caps being the main barriers to adoption,” said John Kotsaftis, general manager of ShowMax South Africa.
“In the four months since we launched ShowMax, the message is that people love the concept and the content, and now all they need is a solution on the data side of things. This is why these Unlimited Telkom products are so important.”
ShowMax’s Telkom tie-in follows closely on a deal it concluded with Samsung through which anyone buying one of the South Korean tech giant’s 2015 smart TVs at participating retailers will get a voucher for three months’ free access to ShowMax.
Showmax already has by far the biggest online video catalogue of shows and movies in Africa. If it continues to ink deals like this with key local industry players, Netflix – the world’s biggest SVOD service – is in for a bumpy landing when it finally arrives in Mzansi.
That should be a battle worth telling the grandkids about.
For more about Google Play Music, Apple Music, Simfy or Deezer, visit their respective websites: play.google.com/music, apple.com/za/music, simfyafrica.com or deezer.com.
For more about the Telkom and ShowMax offerings, visit Telkom.co.za or showmax.com.
Follow Alan Cooper on Twitter @alanqcooper.