Ross Dawson has just published the Future of Media Report for July 2008. The report is available as a PDF download and is an interesting read. In it, the Future Exploration Network predicts the global media industry will be worth US$5.7 trillion in 2024 and discusses how businesses will have to gear up to address this. There are a couple of great points in the document, but Apple is singled out as a business that has handled market and consumption shifts particularly well:

"Apple has proved very effective at repositioning itself across the flow economy. Most prominently, it has used its strong positioning in Interfaces (e.g. iPod, Mac) to shift to Content (iTunes). It has also built direct Relationships with its iTunes customers whereas before distributors held all customer relationships. Apple’s adoption AAC as the default music encoding Standard on iTunes provided some lock-in as it was a less common though still open standard. For iPhone it has selected and generated revenue from selected partners for Connectivity (AT&T in the US), and is now taking part of the Service revenue for iPhone apps provided by a broader developer community."

It just so happens that I read this on the day the iPhone went on sale in Australia, prompting a sight we're becoming familiar with: people lining up overnight in the winter cold to be among the first to purchase a new Apple gadget. The first official Australian customer allegedly queued up for eleven hours to buy his new phone, but claims he's not a fanatic (I'd dispute that point, but perhaps that's a topic for another blog). In an emerging world where content and relationships with consumers are becoming critical, Apple's managing pretty well.

As an unrelated side note, another wonderful stat that was re-introduced to me by the report is the notion that, according to the Daily Telegraph, "in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000". Wow.