Consumers content with no content?
"For arguments sake," Leathem told HEXUS, "imagine that a USB drive costs seven dollars and then a film studio charges us another $10 per drive to add a film on there, plus the licensing fee. That's a big investment and a significant risk for us if that drive doesn't sell."
Therefore, unless the conservative film industry becomes slightly more flexible either in terms of licensing or pricing, or even simply agree on a per sale price basis, Kingston is stuck between a bit of a rock and a hard place where pre-loaded content is concerned.
The challenges and hurdles involved haven't put the company off, though. Kingston's VP of Flash sales and marketing, Darwin Chen, is optimistic about his firm's potential in the content bundling market.
"Flash memory is not so much the future as it is the present," he told HEXUS. "It continues to replace traditional media such as film, floppy disks and one-inch hard drives. It's a natural migration and is a convenient device that can be used as a delivery vehicle." A good example, he said, is the netbook market. "As netbooks become more prevalent, the need to use Flash to replace the optical drive is evident in delivering content," he declared.
What do you think? Is preloaded content the way forward for Flash marketing, or is it doomed to failure? Let us know in the HEXUS.community discussion forums.
