(This has NOTHING to do with a certain football game)
Ever since it became affordable for consumers to replicate media, the content creators have tried to inhibit the use of these replicating technologies. And yet they keep becoming more popular and evolving.
It was true when photocopying (and later digital scanners) became mainstream; authors, artists, publishers (and even the US Treasury) became worried.
It was true when audio cassette tapes became popular and recording artists and record labels worried about lost sales.
When video recording (VCRs and, later, DVRs) became popular it wasn’t just the creators and distributors of the content worrying about lost revenue. VCRs and DVRs gave people the ability to copy video content, time shift TV programming, and skip over content. Time shifting refers to the ability to record a (video or occasionally audio) program in order to view or listen to it at the consumer’s convenience. Time shifting and content skipping threatened a new group: advertisers.
Advertisers were threatened by content skipping obviously because people now had the ability to fast forward through the commercials. Time shifting posed a slightly different threat. Advertising and marketing companies spend a great deal of money studying demographics and targeting specific audiences. A very general example of this is that if you want to sell breakfast cereal to kids, advertise during Saturday morning cartoons. Not only are you targeting your demographic (kids) but you are also catching them at a time associated with your product. As VCRs and DVRs became popular, the audience not only became able to chose not to view the advertising, but even if it was viewed it was at a less appealing time (for the advertiser).
The latest technology to threaten these groups is content streaming, the ability to listen to or view programs via the Internet (a.k.a. the Cloud). Cloud based streaming services such as Pandora and Spotify, and Hulu and Netflix on the video side, offer the same content available on radio or TV with limited or no advertisements. The advantage of streaming is that now you don’t have to record or even store the content – it’s out there just waiting for you to find it!
A recent engadget article posed the question: “Is Streaming Undermining Family, Kids’ Program Disc Sales?” My co-workers and I had a very similar discussion at our recent staff meeting. We all know what direction this is going so lets figure out how to provide the best service to our clients and even make a little money at it. Migrating away from physical media as well as media servers like Kaleidescape impacts us as well – fewer pieces of equipment to sell and install. No wonder the “glory days” of the last decade were so good in our industry, I remember a proposal that had VHS players, DVD players, and a Kaleidescape system. These will all soon be replaced with a network switch! (Correction, naturally there was a full network in that proposal.)
Cloud based streaming content is the future. The lawyers, lobbyists, content distributors and many of the content creators are stuck in the last millennium. If there were a group of buggy whip lobbyists in the 1900s with any where near the strength the recording artists and the DVD Copy Control Association (DVD CCA) have today, the automobile would never have reached mass market. Much has been written recently (see this CEPro article)about how the DVD CCA is preventing storing/watching electronic copies of DVD content. We are back to the legal mandate that the disc must be present in the player.
Who cares? Pretty soon there won’t be a player, that’s the real game of innovation (innovators come up with alternative solutions) – don’t hate the game!
Philosophy of Technology 