Apple's media strategy: There's an app for that

[Commentary] One of the most striking aspects of the iPad is the extremely limited means of content ingress and egress. The device has no USB ports, no, Compact Flash, SD or microSD port, no HDMI port, no Ethernet, not even a camera. Basically, there's one way in, through the wireless connection, using either WiFi or 3G, and no way out. This thing is a sealed vault.

Even through the wireless connection, content acquisition is tightly limited. Yes, you can browse the web with your iPad but you can't use it to stream most web-based video because the device lacks support for Adobe's Flash (Hulu) and (natch) Microsoft's Silverlight (Neflix), the two most popular streaming platforms. What video it can access, such as iTunes movies and YouTube, must come in through a dedicated app, not the browser. The operating system does not support multitasking. If you're running an app, you can't also be browsing the web or reading emails. Basically, the iPad is a one-way street. While many commentators have described these limitations as bugs, or design flaws, I suspect they're features.

Basically, the iPad is a device for running apps, at least as far as media consumption is concerned. It is designed not for discovering content, or searching for it, or even managing it directly yourself using your choice of applications. It's designed for being served content, through proprietary apps, on the content owner's terms. What Steve Jobs is offering media companies with the iPad is, in effect, the anti-Internet: a platform for digital distribution in which all aspects of the user experience and functionality are under their control. Just as importantly, it's an environment where their content can't easily be scraped, aggregated, re-published, mashed up or indexed by search engines.