9to5mac has reported today that the upcoming iPhone 5 will have NFC support, and developers are already building apps.
Apparently, Apple iOS engineers are “heavy into NFC” and devs are “confident enough to bet the app development on.”
What remains unclear is who Apple will partner with for its payment systems, and the report has some speculation based on recent reports and interviews.
First comes from Ed McLaughlin, the boss of emerging payments at MasterCard: “The timeline is always as rapid as it makes sense for consumers. (In regards to mass NFC adoption) That’s a combination of having a critical mass of the merchants, which is what you’re seeing right now, and getting devices into the hands of consumers. I don’t know of a handset manufacturer that isn’t in process of making sure their stuff is PayPass ready.”
McLaughlin would not specifically say Apple, however except to say, “well, anytime someone with a major base moves forward, it advances what you’re doing. So of course [Apple is necessary in NFC reaching critical mass].”
While the exec was sidestepping the question a bit, it is very clear even to the casual observer that Apple and PayPass would certainly bring NFC to “critical mass” in the next couple of years.
Result for: consumers
According to BI, Yahoo would be willing to purchase on-demand streaming TV service Hulu for $2 billion, as long as certain demands are met.
Hulu is owned by Disney (ABC), News Corp. (Fox), Comcast (NBCU) and private equity firm Providence.
Yahoo is only willing to make the deal if Hulu guarantees them 4-5 years of exclusive access to the media content.
Hulu, on the other hand, seems to be only willing to give 2 years of exclusivity, albeit with 5 years guaranteed access to the content.
Says one source:
If [Hulu's content creating owners] came out and said, we’ve renewed [Hulu's exclusive rights] for four years at the same terms we have today – it’s really easy to model [a valuation between] $1 billion and $2 billion – maybe more.
Without four or five years of exclusive streaming rights to TV shows and movies, Hulu is not worth anything.
If Hulu does offer 5 year exclusivity, Yahoo would have enough time to “build enough equity with consumers that you’ve created a real leader in premium content and premium advertising,” adds the source.
Without exclusivity, Yahoo (and other bidders) could simply just bid for the rights to stream the content in the future, as it would cost significantly less. In fact, when the exclusivity period for Hulu’s current content ends, Google and Amazon are expected to bid hundreds of millions of dollars for the rights.
Result for: consumers
Edge is reporting today that retailers are starting to see the effects of the over 3-week-long PSN outage, with an influx of consumers trading their PS3s in for cash or Xbox 360s.
Furthermore, sales of PSN points cards are almost non-existent and the ratio has begun to shift for multi-platform games, with Xbox taking the lion’s share.
One manager at a UK retailer had this to say:
In the first week of downtime we did not really see any major change in sales or trades. However from the second week onwards we have seen an increase of over 200 per cent on PS3 consoles being traded in, split almost 50/50 between those trading for cash and those taking a 360 instead.
A different retailer said most of those trading in their systems are from the “hardcore online shooter crowd,” gamers that spend many hours online looking to level up. Black Ops and/or Modern Warfare 2 were cited in many cases.
PS3 sales have also taken a hit (says independent retailer in Germany):
We’re just ten days into the month and already we have an increase of 200 per cent in PS3s coming into the store compared to all of March. Normally we sell them really fast, but not this time. We’ve only sold 30 to 40 per cent of our inventory right now.
For software sales, gamers buying Black Ops have split 66 percent to 34 percent in favor of the 360, although the numbers were 52/48 during the first week of the outage.
Not all retailers said trade-ins were growing but one retailer in the UK did say the satisfaction rate for Sony was falling:
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