I've read another great article on 'Hollywood vs the internet' thanks to the excellent newspapper, The Economist.
The article discusses how the Hollywood companies have missed out on using the web to leverage distribution of their media. It cites some companies which have spouted up offering films at reasonable prices is a range of formats, awesome! Thing is, these sites are illegal. Bummer. It's not for want of trying to get some stuff out there, there are some companies offering limited titles, but no one company seems fully driven to use the web yet.
I wanted to write something about this, but it wasn't until I read San1t1's excellent post on ownership and 20th century mass media that my thoughts stirred once again.
If we ignore worrying stories about ISP bloodbaths about broadband providers not being able to handle the web as a platform for one moment... I really don't want to buy another CD or DVD disc again. What I would like is purchase rights (paid or free - free is the best price) to view/listen content where ever and when-ever the hell I want!
Would I pay £10 for an 'on-demand' movie that I could watch as many times as I wanted, and could watch on my cable box, laptop or iPod? Probably yes. Would I pay that for being able to listen to my music through my cable box, through a web site or my ipod? Probably yes.
As an interesting aside, San1t1 also published another post along similar lines.
Where does this leave us all? While both Hollywood and the music industry innovate on what they think their customers need, I for one certainly continue to push for zero touch, high-definition, highly accessible content, music, films and TV.
1 comment:
I'm not sure that free is the best price. It totally depends on what the product is. Four friends making a cd using Garage Band in their spare time can afford to charge nothing, but an orchestra of 80 people, a couple of studio engineers and the admin associated with the orchestra certainly can't. I love it when sites that provided me with something free, offer a way to pay. Remember the Milk did this a few months ago, and I pay £12 a year. I'm not using any pro features, but I just think that 25p a week is little enough to pay for something that makes my life easier. I completely agree that film studios need to sort themselves out quickly. Sofa Cinema were offering legal film downloads, but last time I looked, they were something like £15 and you got sent a dvd copy too, which totally misses the point.
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