Old media versus the new
p2pnet.net News:- Since blogs and video posting sites have become popular, media executives are starting to look worried, says Hal R. Varian, professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley in his The New York Times column.
In truth, they’ve been worried for quite some time but it wasn’t, and still isn’t, smart for them to admit it. After all, they set the rules and determine what we see and hear, and how much we pay for the privilege.
Don’t they?
But that’s all changing and, cut to the bone, in Varian’s view, that’s because there will be, “a flowering of creative, inexpensive and compelling semiprofessional content available via the Internet,” and, “This content will occupy more and more of people’s attention, particularly young people.”
He goes on:
What gets squeezed is the middle. Those actors, writers and directors who do not command the big audiences may well find it hard to compete for attention with the video blogs. True, the videos available there are often sophomoric. But there will always be sophomores to watch them.
The good news is that the same forces that are pushing costs down for amateur video are pushing costs down for professional video. It will become cheaper to produce quality video as well as sophomoric video.
Just as television commercials and music videos have provided a training ground for today’s directors, new distribution channels will provide outlets for tomorrow’s artists.
Advances in printing and binding technology led to cheaper books, which, in turn, meant more demand for authors. Only a small fraction of these authors became rich and successful, but readers benefited tremendously from the increased variety of books. Today, we are seeing the same story play out for digital content. It is a great time to be a video fan.
Maybe. But then again, maybe not.
The undeniable fact is: the controlling Big Music and Big Movie cartels are trying desperately to crush anything which threatens the status quo and the absolute last thing they want is for content innovators to innovate and new creators to create, free of restraint.
“Increased variety” is the operative phrase, but increased variety also means increased competition, a pure horror to the 10 companies which control the music and movie industries, and which are hell bent on continuing to do so.
It may a great time to be a video fan, but the vested interest conglomerates are doing everything within their powers to make sure that doesn’t last for long; that they’ll eventually be able to monopolize content online as they do offline; and, that no one develops anything without their explicit permission, and only then after the creators have been wholly ensnared so they and their products are under rigid control..
But that’s OK because they’re too late. P2p is here to stay and thanks largely to that fact, a parallel world is developing where the consumers, as the cartels contemptuously named them long ago, are becoming customers again; people with free choice and the ability to communicate directly and instantly with each other, in the process running rings around the former exclusive purveyors of information, the world press corpse, as it’s rapidly becoming.
New distribution channels are indeed forming, but they’re being opened by peer-to-peer sharing technologies.
Knowledge, not money, has always been the real currency and until this 21st digital century, it’d always been tightly controllable, and tightly controlled.
However, that was then and this is now and Power to the People is becoming a reality.
JN
Also See:
The New York Times – Why Old Media and Tom Cruise Should Worry About Cheaper Technology, November 14, 2005
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