In the High-Tech Sector, Optimism Is Just a Faded Memory
. . . . . but those who control it are afraid of the new markets that the tech boom has created: they understand how to get revenue from theaters and DVDs and CDs, but not from mediumless digital media, like streams or music/movie files.
The most heated debate of the event came during a panel of Hollywood executives who criticized the technology industries for their lax adherence to intellectual property protection and copyright issues in the digital era.
That evoked a response from many executives here that the entertainment industry’s unwillingness to explore new business models was primarily responsible for the industry’s lack of growth.
“We’re in a real technology gridlock,” said Peter Schwartz, co-founder and chairman of the Global Business Network, a consulting group based in Emeryville, Calif. “All of the entrenched industries are attempting to protect their positions so that in broadband, digital television and digital distribution of content, we’re stuck.”
It’s not the tech companies job to worry about copyright: if that had been the prevailing attitude 25 years ago, we may not have had VCRs or even photocopiers. It’s the media cpmpanies job to come up with ways to make money, given a larger market — anywhere that TCP/IP can reach — and little or infrastructure cost — no need to build a theater or ship a print to every small town when you can send the content as bits.
Having worked in a large media company, on both the news and entertainment sides of things, it was frustrating to see how hard people were trying to map their experience onto this new amorphous opportunity. The quality concerns in those early bandwidth-contrained days were valid, but now with increasing penetration of broadband in the home and almost universal high-speed internet access in schools and business, what are the media companies doing to capture an audience? I would guess the big three segments of the Internet are news sites, weblogs, and porn, but not in that order, and of them, news is where you’ll find the big media combines.
In entertainment, the key was driving people back to the TV set with ancillary programming like games and trivia: early attempts to build internet-exclusive programming were not well understood and were ultimately scuttled. Ad sales models from TV and cable broadcasting didn’t translate to the web, and rather than come up with new models, it was easier to kill off the new media products.
Between the potential of broadband and the increasing buzz around TiVo, I wonder if anyone will figure out how to get the content people want served up on demand, rather than clinging to the “must-see TV” model.
It’s getting to the point where I think the English model of a TV license or subscription that would fund a reliably high-quality broadcasting effort makes more sense than the continued commercialization and resulting cheapening of the content. 100 million households times a $10 license fee is a pretty nice budget: of course, my dream of high quality arts and education programming coupled with serious films and documentaries doesn’t appeal to everyone. More’s the pity . . . .