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.

last.fm vs musicovery vs pandora

I love listening to music while at work, and I can't help but feel agitated that my favourite web music players (last.fm and pandora.com) don't work when I'm on the company network. I've recently discovered musicovery.com from a friend mentioning it on Twitter, which more and more is my source of information. It works on the company network which rocks, I think it streams through a flash based player to traverse the company network rather than streaming straight into the browser. I can't help but think though that why isn't there a microformat for favourite and 'banned' music to use anywhere?

I'd rather use last.fm or pandora.com at work, but I can't. The next best thing would be to share my 'taste' of music across these sites.

Come on everyone, microformats are the way forward!

data mining for good

There's been some press about data privacy, and these do revolve around large issues such as national ID cards, but data mining has it's uses. Consider this, I use last.fm to scrobble my music through my music player on my PC (also available for iPods when sync'd through iTunes).

From this data along with my location, I just got an email with gig listing of music I might like coming up in my location.

Awesome.

More finger pointing in the music biz

Apparently Apple and Tesco are more to 'blame' then the P2P file sharing sites for the 'crisis' facing the music industry. There has been a flurry of activity around 'the biz' recently with Radiohead's freebie album. At least Universal have taken some steps to move forward by selling USB sticks with singles on them with additional value add features such videos and the like. I can't say that I'd buy one, but at least they're trying something.

Once again I'll repeat my message. Stop moaning and change your business models to survive, or you will fall.