1st Post
So, yes, I’m still on a kick about the future of media, but for good reason. I think the writing is finally on the wall for some of the older media companies. Companies that just simply can’t or won’t accept that the world and content delivery have changed, and no amount money thrown at the problem, no matter how many lawyers they have, no matter how many congress critters they rent or purchase outright, nothing will put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The market won’t allow it. (I’m also not talking simply talking about stealing music, movies, or software)
Why won’t the market allow us to go back to the old model. Cost. I’m going to link you out to an article I read a few weeks ago, but I also want you to think about this in terms of packaging, distribution, and materials.
Basically, Amazon, Itunes, Rhapsody, and the rest will sell you the same music you can get on a CD at Wallyworld, but the one you get from the online folk is all digital. This means in a sense, they get one copy, make millions of identical copies at the cost of running a few computers, and then pay a small bandwidth fee to deliver it to you now. Not later, not then, not some indefinite time in the future when you make time to go to the store, NOW! So, did you think about this in terms of cost? No one paid for a print run of a few hundred thousand of the latest wanna be pop stars CD’s, nobody paid for the plastic, the shrinkwrap, the transportation, the rent for the hundreds of retail outlets, the gas to go buy them. All they paid for was some webhosting and CD ripping. You get instant gratification or disgust depending on the album, they save millions and charge you about 30% less.
Want proof? Go take a look at the state of news papers today. Everything that they print ends up online along with everything CNN reports, Fox News makes up, and MS NBC lets it’s one viewer know about. The key here is the tons of ink and paper that are consume everyday. Then paying that strange albino (maybe they just play a lot of WOW) couple to drop it off at your house at 3am everyday. Sure CNN, Fox News, and to a lesser extent MS NBC film everything, but it is all digital, pay some guy to point that super expensive camera that doesn’t use film at the folks at the desk and then beam it out to the cable companies and the internet. Sell some advertising, and be done with it. When was the last time you actually looked at a news paper for anything that wasn’t related to the Sunday Coupon Section?…ohhh, I downloaded a few of those last week too…give it a few more years and that will be gone too.
Now, this brings me to a really fun part. Companies that compete with themselves. Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox, Verizon, Sony, and a few others. Click the link for Time Warner for a good laugh, or cry if you are a customer.
Ever wonder why download caps are such a big deal for cable companies? Not that it doesn’t cost money to deliver bandwidth to your house, but why say 40Gigabytes? Because they don’t want you online looking at the competition. They want you sitting on your couch watching your super HD, DVR’ed, digitally broadcast cable television. Or better yet, ordering Paper Per View, anything they can upsell you to.
If you go online and discover that a little box about the size a paper back book will let you watch any of a few thousand Netflix movies when and where you want, or that ABC, NBC, CBS, and others have their shows on their websites, or that Hulu, Joost, and that other site have cavernous amounts of content. Well then you might want to cancel cable tv and just eat up a few hundred gig of bandwidth every month. And they can’t monetize it. (The Netflix Roku player also plays Amazon Ubox video, this is basically like pay per view, or iTunes videos. DRM’ed, digital copies, that you can download. I don’t recommend them until you can actually burn them to something to use when and as you choose. )
So, that explains the cable companies, but Sony? Sony is the force behind BlueRay. A high capacity disc that may, or may not replace DVD’s. I see it almost making it. I have a Playstation 3, and it plays the four or five BlueRay discs I own. Problem is, well see CD’s above, but add in the fact that Blue Ray can store massive amounts of Data, but who cares. I have a 16 gig flash drive and if that isn’t big enough, I have a 250gig external that is USB powered, and I can reuse it. Ok. So Sony makes BlueRay, so what. Well, you know how I own a PS3?, the one I just mentioned, did you know it has a digital store that sells movies and TV shows?. Yeah, so at Target Sony wants you to buy the latest season of insert lousy reality show title here, on BlueRay, and when you get home and pop it into that PS3, they want you to buy and download that exact same show.
So, why the title? I just read a book that had everything, telephone, mail, television, radio, and well all content delivered via the web, they didn’t call it that, but close enough. Well, guess what? My television delivery is IP Based, my telephone is VOIP, my favorite radio station is di.fm (some of you may prefer Sky.fm), I have how many email addresses, pay my bills online, and have started downloading books.
Next week, or sometime in the vague and misty future we will talk about Podcasts, e-books, and end of publishing as you know it.
Seriously though, if you enjoy anything history related, especially Roman I want to direct you to this guy’s podcast. I’m on episode 60….Nero going off the deep end and committing
suicide and the year of the four emperors…also about the time of the great rebellion in Judea. It is 100% free, and better then a lot of college courses I took. The author will be on a four week break doing the wedding thing I won’t talk to Jared about, and then moving so it is a perfect time to catch up.