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.

Vlogging the anwser to TV reborn? Get out of town!

The panel in this session were rambling on about video blogging with a bunch of web apps which I won't mention here. Don't get me wrong, this is relevant, the fact you can do an interview on a phone and publish it is freaking cool. However, this session titled "TV Reborn" sounded like it should have been a discussion on how media companies can play with the web and they failed to deliver!

I asked a question (heartbeat++++): "you've talked a lot about video blogging, but what about open source film like A Swarm of Angels and content providers giving it up like Star Wars Mashups?"

The answer was summed up by Paul Downey on Twitter.

The panel didn't understand the question, and I was largely ignored. It's not that these guys don't get it, but (a Phillipe Stark saying coming up) they are walking and looking at their feet.

[edit]

thanks to Phil Hawksworth for capturing this photo:


[edit2]

Here's the video, goto 41 minutes to see my question:

http://light.vpod.tv/?s=0.0.394193