Report From the Front Lines of the Digital Entertainment Revolution
The revolution continues unabated, and technology innovation’s tireless march forward proves to be as big a test as the traditional media and entertainment industry has faced to date.
It’s a love-hate thing, this going digital… they hate the rampant piracy, and deservedly so. They love the opportunities technology offers too, though, and now understand full well the inevitability of the shift.
The transition hurts, at least for those in the business of selling content. Ultimately, too much pain for them does consumers no good. But their resolve is building to adapt to the new reality: digital content creation and distribution just plain makes sense.
At least that’s the impression I get after reading this report from the front of the digital revolution written by Nate Anderson on Ars Technica. It’s emblematic that while NBC Universal — like its peers — is naturally committed to fighting P2P-based piracy, it’s doing some interesting things at the same time with the launch of Hulu.
It’s likely much of the revolution will unfold similarly, with multiple fronts raging in a complex ad hoc fabric of innovation, negotiation, compromise and evolution. Traditional content providers are on one side, aiming to protect and foster revenue opportunities, court audiences and advertisers, and capture the new opportunities innovation continually creates. Consumers are on the other side. They want what they want, and often today can find it for free with little or no trouble at all.
I wonder what would happen if it wasn’t so darn easy to download unauthorized content? I reckon many would-be pirates would hang up their eye patches. To quote another battled-shocked character, “So it goes.”
Ewan Morrison
Tags: Ars Technica, Cisco, content, digital entertainment, digital revolution, digital right management, DRM, Hulu, media, music, NBC, P2P, peer to peer, piracy, pirated, television, Thought Leadership, Universal, video
March 24, 2008 at 9:55 am
The media better get used to the new economics. No-cost content is the wave of the future–just ask the NY Times, which is making all its online content free, or the Wall Street Journal (the last big media holdout which will probably follow soon). Most content on the web is already free with a few exceptions (ex: Consumer Reports), but it goes way beyond content.
Wired’s Chris Anderson writes about this, and explains that “free” is the new business model, from everything from content to Google.
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
” Over the past decade, however, a different sort of free has emerged. The new model is based not on cross-subsidies — the shifting of costs from one product to another — but on the fact that the cost of products themselves is falling fast. It’s as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?).”
He claims “freeconomics” is being driven by the falling price of bandwidth and storage, and the “freaky” power of the web.
Who knows how it will all shake out, but companies of all stripes will need to make major adjustments.