Walled garden (media)
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A walled garden, with regards to media content, refers to a closed set or exclusive set of information services provided for users (a method of creating a monopoly or securing an information system). This is in contrast to providing consumers access to the open Internet for content and e-commerce. The term is often used to describe offerings from interactive television providers or mobile phone operators which provide custom content, and not simply common carrier functions. The term has been repeatedly used and popularized by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block of Engadget and has been used in particular on the Engadget Podcast.
Some examples of walled gardens:
- Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). At the start of 2007, probably the best example. MNOs manage closed networks - very hard to enter the garden, or leave the garden, especially as it pertains to Internet, web services, web applications. Fearful of losing customer and brand control, the MNOs opt to guard the garden as much as possible. In the case of browsing the web with a cellphone, in most cases it is possible to go outside the garden -- and google's WAP interface will convert almost any web page to WAP -- but doing so is not made easy by the interface so few users do. For example, with many Sprint PCS Vision phones the only place where the URL can be entered directly is in the edit bookmarks page.
- America Online. AOL started its business with revenue sharing agreements with certain information providers in their subscriber-only space. Though AOL was one of the most famous walled gardens, in the mid 1990s it started to provide general Internet access to its subscribers.
- NTT DoCoMo i-mode. The interactive mobile phone content portal signs on content partners into their walled-garden, but also allows open internet-access to 'unofficial sites'. For official content providers DoCoMo shares subscription revenue and places the fee on the subscribers mobile bill. It does not share data revenue with any content providers. This is a 'semi-walled' garden approach.
- Full Service Network. A pilot project from Time Warner in the early 1990s, this was an early interactive television system that provided residents of Orlando, Florida, access to online shopping, grocery order and US Mail Service.
- Infovía, a Spain-wide Intranet established by Telefónica in the 1990s. It connected content providers and modem users. Telefonica provided the connection between modems and server over its telephone and data networks. Telefonica expected that its warranty of avoiding man-in-the-middle attacks would promote Infovía as a venue for e-commerce. Soon the main use was just as a gateway between modem users and a plethora of Internet Service Providers that avoided the cost of a modem pool and dealt just with the connection to the Internet.
- iTunes Store/iPod. A music service and music player offered by Apple Inc. technologically designed to work with each other. The iTunes Store allows iPod owners exclusive access to purchase and play DRM songs from its service, but to no others. In 2003, Apple issued an iPod firmware upgrade (v2.0) disabling iPod owners with Real's Rhapsody music service from using Real's DRM songs on iPods. Apple's service is not a completely walled garden, as the iTunes Store now allows anyone to make a podcast available.
[edit] History
The first use of the term "walled garden" to describe a protected collection of information may date to Alcuin of York, the English scholar who established Charlemagne's famous library. In 796, he sent some of his pupils back to his old school at York to retrieve a number of rare manuscripts: "I say this that you may agree to send some of our boys to get everything we need from there and bring the flowers of Britain back to France that as well as the walled garden in York there may be off-shoots of paradise bearing fruit in Tours."[citation needed]
