More Thoughts on Future of TV and Movies

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.

International Surfing

Sitting in a hotel lobby, trying to get onto wifi, I seem to have 4 accounts with my provider through an employee scheme, my broadband and FON and a mysterious 4th. When I tried to log in with two of those I had an error messaging saying something about not having 'roaming' enabled. The provider didn't recognise my FON account and I couldn't get details of my other account. Thank you, but why should I have to have roaming to get on the web? It's not like I'm making long distance international phone calls, the web is here in the room (I can feel it), but I'm not allowed to play. I had to buy credit, and that just sucks!