It’s happening on a daily basis, if you watch the media news: Big corporations are flailing around trying to figure out what to do about the Internet.
The telecom and cable companies that built the infrastructure over which we little people access the Net are screaming that their infrastructure is being unfairly abused, even though in most places cable companies are granted monopolies by local municipalities, even though telecom and cable infrastructure is built with taxpayer participation while also allowing private companies to benefit from public rights-of-way. (Some groups are fighting these corps.)
Meanwhile, content providers -- TV networks, movie studios, book publishers -- are trying to figure out what it means now that, as Forbes.com says:
Media content is increasingly becoming "unbundled" from its physical distribution medium, such as CDs. This "disruptive" technology has led to different pricing models and lowered barriers to entry for content authors, creating a challenging business environment for publishers and media companies.
In other words, music is no longer necessarily “CDs,” TV is no longer necessarily “Monday night at 8pm,” movies are no longer necessarily “multiplex” or “DVD,” and fiction is no longer necessarily “books.” Which isn’t news to anyone who’s spent any time online in the last few years, but it’s fairly amusing to see the globocorps trying to play catch-up.
As in: AOL’s In2TV is letting TV nuts watch -- for free -- a ton of classic TV including geek favorites like Scarecrow and Mrs. King, V, Freakazoid, Babylon 5, The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., and more. CBS let sports fans watch March Madness basketball games for free. British publisher Bloomsbury, the U.K. home of Harry Potter, is now offering digital downloads, for a fee. Brokeback Mountain today becomes the first major film to be available for legal, paid download on the same day the DVD goes on sale. (Good luck watching any TV or films online if you’re not using Windows XP, though.)
It surprises me that that Forbes piece has the grace to put quotation marks around that “disruptive,” because of course it’s only the big corporations to whom the Net is a problem. Independent musicians, writers, and artists aren’t finding it disruptive at all, unless being free from the shackles of corporate overlording is somehow a hardship.
