In my recent 5 things article, I noted that digital storage is slowly seducing me, to the point that I now rarely feel the need to buy physical media when it comes to music; soon, I suspect I’ll be buying digital movies and TV series, and only the lack of a robust solution for playback is currently stopping me. *

The media industry of course knows this and is scared by the prospect of falling physical media sales and the decrease of control digital brings, having ceded a lot of power to the likes of iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store. Now, people can cherry-pick music tracks and individual episodes of TV series, without grabbing an entire album or box-set.

In an article over on Billboard.biz, Kristin Hersh argues that there is still a place for physical media. “I disagree with the recording industry which claims that music has been devalued by the Internet, but I admit that CDs have been devalued by an industry that put so much crap on them,” she says. “I wanted to push the idea that music is measured in impact rather than plastic while still giving people something beautiful to hold in their hands.”

Fundamentally, this is about value for the consumer. When the perceived and actual value of a physical object betters the digital equivalent, people will still buy it. However, the days are long gone when a recording artist can shove three great singles on to an album alongside a load of crud, and where a format-bump is enough to convince most consumers to buy all their favourite movies yet again.

* On that note, if anyone knows of a really good wireless or ‘connect to a wireless drive’ system that’ll happily playback DVD rips, QuickTime movies and so on, I’d love to hear about it.

Engadget’s report Toshiba shows off Smart Pad tablet prototype, promises launch before October highlights succinctly everything that’s wrong with pretty much every PC manufacturer bar Apple. It talks about Toshiba’s exciting response to the iPad, the so-called ‘Smart Pad’; it looks nice enough (in fact, it looks pretty much identical to an iPad), but there the ‘smart’ ends. This is because the tablet’s due to launch “before October” and run either Android or Windows 7.

That’s right: Toshiba is a few months away from releasing its iPad rival and hasn’t decided which operating system it will run. Clearly, it’s sure to beat the tightly integrated, user-friendly experience of the iPad. That said, you can put money on loads of tech hacks citing it as an ‘iPad killer’, due to some random specs that most users won’t care about.

Depressingly, Engadget also reports that HP’s Slate is no longer a consumer product, and will instead be deployed for enterprise. HP’s acquisition of Palm made me think it was the one company that was about to play the game right, taking on Apple in an Apple-like fashion, by being able to develop a fully integrated computing solution. There is speculation that HP will appease Microsoft by still releasing Slate with Windows 7 but then offer the consumer version with PalmOS, but that makes little strategic sense. That would keep Microsoft somewhat happy, but also fragment the platform and irk geek consumers who somehow think that having Windows 7 on a tablet is a good idea—as opposed to an operating system that was actually designed to have on a tablet.

So what would you do if a review you wrote that smacked of press release/brochure copy got ‘busted’, and a journo contacted you for more info, to get your side of the story?

1. Not respond at all, playing the ‘la la la la la—I can’t hear you’ game.
2. Pull the article, and hope no-one notices.
3. Come clean, admitting that you’d screwed up (or, if there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, offer said perfectly reasonable explanation and leave it at that).
4. Ban the journo’s IP, and then dig up his personal details and publish them on a hall-of-shame thread, leading, naturally, to said journo continuing investigating any alleged wrongdoing.

Update: Turns out the answer is 4 and 5, 5 being ‘use the DMCA to have the site in question suspended for copyright infringement‘ on what are, charitably, extremely dubious grounds.

Apple’s announced its third-quarter results, and they make for grim reading. Apple only managed to post revenue of $15.7 billion and a net quarterly profit of $3.25 billion. This came in part from Apple selling a mere 3.47 million Macs during the quarter, which in itself represented a pitiful 33 per cent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. With certifiable, deranged analysts expecting Apple to post profits of $900 trillion, the company’s all-time record revenue and earnings increase of just 78 per cent looks miniscule by comparison.

Additionally, Apple reports that 3.27 million iPads were sold during the quarter. “iPad is off to a terrific start,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs, ignoring the fact that crazed, deluded, stupid analysts had predicted Apple would sell 3.27 million iPads per day and is therefore well behind targets set by these self-important idiots who don’t have a clue and yet get paid huge sums of money to write all sorts of garbage about Apple that never comes to pass.

Elsewhere, since analysts also predicted iPad would be a failure and that Apple would only sell eight units in total, the 3.27 million figure is extremely worrying, since it means eight people now somehow own over 400,000 iPads each and likely won’t have the money or space for any more, which will therefore impact Apple’s Q4 results.

AAPL was up 2.57% today, on the back of the results, but Lenovo was up more at 2.66%, proving that Apple doesn’t know what it’s doing and should really learn from the Chinese company who [SUB: PLEASE ADD SOMETHING ON LENOVO HERE—WHO THE HELL ARE THOSE GUYS ANYWAY?]

On Twitter yesterday, I posted this:

BBC ‘rip off’ in perspective: licence fee = £2.80/wk (for TV, radio, websites). New Times paywall = £2/wk (for two websites).

I had two reasons for doing so. First, it shows that the BBC offers great value compared to supposed ‘direct’ commercial alternatives; secondly, it shows costs compared to a service from a company driven by Rupert Murdoch, the BBC’s main critic.

Predictably, responses have been split. The tweet got retweeted by a bunch of people and also ended up on Twitter’s home page for a while. Others have been angered by what I wrote, noting that you aren’t ‘forced’ to buy the Times Online if you want to read a newspaper, whereas you are ‘forced’ to fund the BBC if you want to watch Sky.

Two responses of my own to this common argument:

First, I equate the BBC to a public service that just happens to be very similar to commercial products. This happens elsewhere in the UK for funding things of cultural significance, such as museums. I’m ‘forced’ to fund museums I’ll never visit, but nonetheless have to pay to visit ones I’m interested in. Rather than stomping my feet about the unfairness of it all, I got over it in about a nanosecond, realising that the funded museums are there for the good of the country and are essential to the UK’s cultural landscape, providing what more commercial enterprises cannot or will not. I believe the BBC is the same.

Secondly, a lot of people are getting taken in by spin, which is mostly coming from Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media lapdogs. They argue that the BBC is bloated and offers poor value, and the public is starting to lap this up. The thing is, this is total bollocks. The ad-free BBC, with its four main stations, radio and websites, is excellent value compared to commercial competitors.

However, Murdoch doesn’t really care about the ‘value’ of the BBC anyway. He just wants to see the BBC reduced to nothing, because then more people will be reliant on Sky for quality programming; he and his media cronies also dislike the BBC because it has the audacity to offer a relatively impartial stance when it comes to news, unlike Sky’s output that’s alarmingly tending towards the garbage you see on the likes of Fox in the USA.

So even if you don’t care for BBC content, realise that it needs to be there. And if you do care for it, now would be the time to say so to ensure its survival.