Sales will have to be up from before because they came out with WebPainter 3 not too long ago, but we should maybe reserve comments until is is printed as fact by the company. And one product is good but 3 and 4 are better. THW now has more products.
How about that CNET download stuff. Can't wait to see what people build with LiveStage. I'm still working on my project and LiveStage is really cool and does it ever create really small interactive rich media QuickTime movies that play back seamlessly on Windows and Macs.
The thing it don't like about Shockwave is that everytime Macromedia comes out with some new feature in the development tools like Director or Flash, or even a change or fix, it requires a new download of an updated Shockwave player. This creates incompatibilities with users who may not have the latest version.
With LiveStage, Totally Hip doesn't change the Apple QuickTime or plug-in. They told me on Monday that they haven't even finished tapping the potential of QuickTime 3 yet and I heard down here from other sources that QT 4 is hot and being readied for release soon. No changes to the plug-in and Apple looks after QT and that distribution and I hear down here from friends at Apple and former employees that tens of millions $$ of advertising and promotion dollars are going into marketing of QuickTime soon.
And who is the key QuickTime developer with award winning products of LiveStage and WebPainter 3 for Mac and Windows? Totally Hip is leading edge and every day I hear that the industry is taking them more seriously. THW conversations turn heads now in the Valley.
Our little gem. THW.
With Apple being the industry standard for media creation and playback with QuickTime for years, it is no wonder why Macromedia is putting out as many news releases as they can about their ShockWave stuff being the standard. Macromedia must know about Apple starting to really promote QuickTime.
Macromedia says 40 million downloads of Shockwave but one has to keep this math in mind:
Shockwave is at version 7. That means at least 7 new versions that people would have had to download to stay current.
As an example: If 1,000,000 people downloaded the first ShockWave and all continued to use Shockwave, they would have had to download each new version to stay current. That brings the download total to 7,000,000 7 times 1,000,000 = 7,000,000. So I would say that there are actually only 3 to 5 million real users of Shockwave as compared the 40 million that Macromedia is claiming.
That is way short of being the standard since I recently read on Apple's QuickTime site and in 3 analyst documents that Apple has 24 million Windows active users for QuickTime for Windows as of September last year, and when you add the 10's of millions of Apple Macintosh users that is about 8 to 10 times the Macromedia number.
Since LiveStage plays back seamlessly with QuickTime for Mac and Windows, Totally Hip LiveStage and Apple QuickTime is really the standard for creation and playback of interactive rich media content, and not ShockWave.
And I use Director and Flash and have tried others, and nothing is better than LiveStage for ease of use and flexibility. I own Macromedia stock, but I might just sell and buy more of the GEM.
Since Totally Hip did the smart thing to bundle a new version of WebPainter 3.1 with LiveStage for $199.00 USD, it is cheaper and better to use LiveStage for rich media development. It is not just the cost of the product, but the learning curve cost that a developer faces, and Director has long been known to have a steep or long learning curve. And Director Shockwave files are way bigger than doing the same thing in LiveStage and spitting out an Interactive QT movie playable anywhere.
This will become very apparent as users download the LiveStage trial version off of Totally Hip's site and Download.com and the many other download sites all over the world.
Now if Totally Hip can capitalize on LiveStage sales to many new and current Web developers, that is great news for us shareholders. It all takes time.
I think they will because this LiveStage and WebPainter 3.1 is real hot. The Windows LiveStage development tool is coming soon. The Mac is used by about 67% of Web developers so LiveStage Mac will be real popular.
Back to work. |
