The article basically touches over most major technological advances over the last centry, and digs up what “Big Content” had to say about it at the time. Big Content being Music, Film and Print industries.

Such business-busters as the Xerox machine:

“the day may not be far off when no one need purchase books”

The VCR:

We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.

And of course, MP3:

We’ve come full circle here, as this is the inverse of Sousa; a new technology won’t eliminate the amateurs, it will eliminate all the professionals and leave nothing but amateurs.

Of course, this seems all too familiar. The roadblocks and excuses being thrown up today are the same that were spun up all those years ago, those which failed to come to fruition. The same things are being threatened – the death of industries, the loss of jobs and the destruction of dreams.

However, what can be said of all of these advances is that they caused change. They caused a reshuffle of the industry in question, but eventually everything settled down again to get back to what they were doing: making money. In fact, if I remember correctly, most content industries are in boom, some making more money than they ever had (with the exception of newspapers, but I feel they’re the author of their own demise).

So “Big Content” is quite comfortable where it is, thank you very much, and is apparently quite happy to fight tooth and nail against anything that may cause change. The problem is, these industries have a lot of teeth and too many nails. We have the huge lobby groups, the MP/RIAA and the very prominent spokespeople with their voice in the ear of our politicians.

This is why so many people keep an eye on the laws being passed in our names, on behalf of these industries. We need to watch whats going on in the fields of Copyright and Intellectual Property (don’t even get me started about software patents) before we regulate ourselves out of evolution.

My friend Dylan also contributed to the discussion and I left a largish comment on his post during lunch, which was consequently munged into an unreadable wall of text So I decided to post my reply here…

Firstly, in my defense, I left Stuff because of it’s content. Now the stories I want to read are aggregated with Google News. I still visit Stuffs site regularly to read the stories I want.

I would also argue that Jobs.org.nz (and by extention Google News, digg, techmeme and any other aggregator) are not stealing content. They’re using a headline and a small excerpt of the post (permitted under copyright “fair dealing”), and giving a perma-link to the content hosted on his blog. If they were using his entire post as content, referenced or not, I’d understand his anger and would agree that was “stealing content” because that would be copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Jobs.org.nz is obviously a questionable looking site, and I’m not saying that Lance is beyond his rights to ask his feed to be removed. I probably would as well – I wouldn’t want to be associated with that site as it has potential to damage your brand.

Dylan said:

Google News takes traffic away from publishers by “stealing” and republishing content within a news aggregation site where the original publisher has no opportunity to make revenue from ad sales.

I don’t understand how he came to this conclusion. Google uses a headline and sometimes a 20 character excerpt. If you want to read the story you have to link out to the publishers site (except for AP content which Google pays for syndication).

Dylan Said:

In conclusion I’d argue that Google News takes traffic and eye balls away from the publisher…thus reducing their revenues. If I were a publisher I’d be nervous.

I would agree that Google News takes eyeballs away from publishers front pages, but that’s simply because Google do a better job at providing a portal for content the user wants to see.

And of course publishers are nervous. So were the other industries when they realised that they had to change.

We’re entering a stage in our society where consumers want to pick and choose what they consume. The music industry is realising that some people don’t want to pay for an album for a few good songs (iTunes, other digital services). The television industry is realising some don’t want want to watch the endless river of shitty reality TV shows to get to the good stuff (TVNZ on demand, Hulu). The print industry must realise that some won’t want to wade through their quagmire of crap to get to the stories which are important to them.

I recently started looking into a very swish little application called Boxee. Boxee is based of XBMC with a very significant social component to it. Boxee is very popular, especially in the USA because it provides access to legal media streaming services from both content providers (e.g. The Daily Show) and 3rd parties that license content (Hulu, Joost etc…).

Having an idle Media PC I’ve been trying to set it up to interact with TV3′s live streaming and TVNZ On Demand with varying levels of success. After a while I got to asking myself why this is so damned difficult. After all, I’m willing to watch ad-supported content at lo-fidelity, I just don’t want to watch it on my computer.

Part of the problem is that, as usual, the old-time media companies are change adverse. I came across this article, written last year, about how popular TV shows are being screened a lot sooner in NZ due to illegal downloading. It certainly seems like they’re starting to see the bright side of less restricted content distribution, but they’re still tying it to the “you’ll watch what we want, when we want” mentality that TV and radio have imbued.

The question: Would they have improved their service if their customers hadn’t hit them in the wallet? Would they have listened to feedback from their customers telling them they didn’t like waiting for shows that are 2-3 seasons behind? This is a market, and it’s working.

However, this is the part that makes me laugh: after all the conditioning of the consumer by the advertisers that cheap is good, convenience is king and the I WANT IT NOW generation it’s spawned, they’re now grumbling that people can find what they provide faster, cheaper and easier.

It must be more cost effective, too. People only watch what they want, ads can be more accurately targeted. An example: Sky costs $80/month, between all our flatmates we only watch sport, a few shows on Discovery and a very occasional movie. If we could get a decent sports line-up (cricket, rugby and league) anywhere else we’d drop Sky in a heartbeat. The amount of advertising we’re subjected to compared to the amount we’re paying and the amount we utilise is simply staggering. Not to mention, due to their proprietary encryption system means I can’t shift the content where I want it i.e. my iPod or my PC for later. I have to use their platform.

But of course there are also technical barriers to my content freedom utopia.

Broadband quality in New Zealand is, as we all know, poor. Things are improving though, but caps and expensive overseas bandwidth still pose a problem to internet media in NZ.

Lack of support for IP Multicast means that bandwidth costs for the provider may be prohibitively expensive, also. You can think of internet connections as a phone call, one entity communicating with another. This means that to serve content your bandwidth costs would be (Size of Content) x (Number of viewers). Multicast works more like Radio, or terrestrial television. One broadcast and many people “tuning” in.

Of course, if these technical hurdles were overcome, one would wonder if you would even need a broadcaster. Clipping the ticket between advertising and content providers. That’s a question for another day, or another person