Consumers are expected to spend almost $45B in 2012 on mobile media related apps, video, and music according to Strategy Analytics. Many of these purchases will be for personal use, however gifting media to others has long been a popular way of sharing ones favorite music or games with others. This functionality was added to the iTunes app store in Mar 2010, following its success with music. Online social interaction in general has grown over the past decade, and smart phones continue to provide greater accessibility in this area.
Now it seems Apple wants to make it even cooler to gift media products, and their recent patent grant suggests that Near Field Communication (NFC) is part of the strategy. On March 6, 2012 Apple was granted US patent 8,131,645 entitled System and Method for Processing Media Gift. The patent reveals an iPhone that is NFC enabled, having the ability to pass data to another NFC enabled iPhone by simply tapping the two devices together. The data transfer would not be the media file itself, but rather the gift information directing the recipient to download the media (DRM protected of course) from the iTunes store.
NFC is normally associated with retail or kiosk purchasing, where the user taps an NCF enabled credit card or cell phone to a reader terminal, and after a short “beep” the transaction is complete. Sharing media by gifting using NFC enabled phones is a novel use of the technology.
This patent grant is certainly not a guarantee that Apple will integrate NFC into the iPhone, but it does shed some light into how this technology could engage users socially, with iTunes continuing to be the center of Apples media and payment ecosystem. With $45B in mobile media spending at stake, it’s easy to understand how competition will pressure media suppliers to maintain the edge over the competition.