Archive for December 20th, 2007

20
Dec

The Media Wars are Over (We Just Don’t Know It Yet)

David Pogue points out that there’s a crushing generational wave coming:

Recently, however, I spoke at a college. It was the first time I’d ever addressed an audience of 100 percent young people. And the demonstration bombed.

In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids’ morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.

Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, “O.K., let’s try one that’s a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don’t want to pay for it. So you download it.”

There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.

“Who thinks that might be wrong?”

Two hands out of 500.

I’ll post this without comment, except to say that sticking your head in the sand isn’t a viable business model for the future…

20
Dec

The Writer’s Strike Helps Drive the Future the Studios Fear Most

Unable to get the studios to pay them a pittance for online content, some writers are trying to do it for themselves.

I can’t say I’m surprised by this at all, and hastening the demise of the current system seems like an inevitable outcome of the strike.  The studios still don’t get that they no longer own the sole means of transmission, and they don’t seem to understand that their ability to package and market content is at risk when you can get all your services ala carte.

There’s already some interesting independent web-centric production that started to show up before the strike began.  Accelerating this trend won’t be good for the studios in the long run.

But I’m guessing the current mentality is, for some executives anyway, basically built around logic that begins and ends with “screw those guys”.

At the same time it looks like that some producers are starting to realize that they’re in competition with each other, not the writers.  And some of them have more to lose, it turns out.