SanDisk Enters Digital Scene For Delivering Entertainment

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) writes that SanDisk will be launching at retail new TrustedFlash memory cards, under the brandname "gruvi," that can include pre-recorded copyright-protected multimedia content and offers the ability to unlock and/or download content to the card. Card pricing starts at $39 with memory capacity from 256MB to 2GB.

On the potential for selling pre-recorded content, such as music, on memory cards, Richard Doherty at the Envisioneering Group said, "It's a huge change in the way people think of music. I think it will appeal to people's lifestyles."

David Card posts at the Jupiter Analyst Weblogs that "most people see a higher value in physical than digital music," but asks whether the world really needs "another physical format for music that offers nothing but capacity. And copy protection, of course."

One of my clients is in the memory business and so I'm a believer that there is a market for publishing mobile content on memory cards for use on one's handset or mobile device. Critical factors will be usage model and of course pricing.

At $39 a pop for SanDisk's product, I could go down to Target and purchase a CD for $9.99 and a DVD for $14.99 and still have money in my pocket to take the whole family to McDonald's to feed off the dollar menu (that is if my wife would let us eat beef, but that's another story). After a couple of hours, all that content (not the McDonald's food of course) could be on my Audiovox SMT-5600 smartphone AND my son's PSP with the music on his iPod Shuffle as well. So unless SanDisk can deliver a lot more value for that $39.99, I have a hard time seeing where there market will come from....