discardia

God bless Netflix. If you don’t have it, get it. If you have it, I applaud you like a victorian gentleman in on the great secret.

Clap clap clap.

I watch my TV in generally two forms… one - from Netflix. Two - from a non-broadcast digital format.

Because honestly, who has time for TV schedules? Not I. And I am not even all that busy.

Content is content in my honest opinion. So shouldn’t that content be available in any format, whenever I want to consume it? I know that advertising is the big reason behind controlled content time frames, but that model is just going to die.

Two outcomes are going to occur from the struggle between content and advertising. One, we will end up paying directly for what we want to watch (in my current situation, Netflix, and in the future, slivercasting), or the advertising is going to be shoved, for lack of a better term, down our throats.

Open content versus controlled content. Both can work. And I have a feeling that Big Media wants controlled content to be the big winner. We are seeing it everywhere… we are being told what content is ok for our use, when and how. You buy a song on iTunes, you can’t play it on any other device unless you crack it (therefore making you a criminal, even though you bought it). You buy a DVD and you can’t copy it to your laptop to take on a plane. If it is your content, where is the line on fair use?

Granted, everyone is asking that question, so I know it is not some great secret or anything. But still I think the focus is wrong. Much like V said in V for Vendetta, “People should not fear the government, the government should fear the people”. I am going to paraphrase it into “Big Media should not control the content, the content should be controlled by the consumers.” After all, we are the ones buying it.

And I have yet to see a business model that can survive without customers. But Big Media is hoping for that one big savior of any market… a trust. Where every single company agrees to the same terms, thereby making a monopoly over the products of the market. Customers can’t buy the content from anywhere else, right?

But isn’t that illegal as well?

Hmmmmmm.

I wouldn’t be able to enjoy Battlestar Galactica if I had maintained strict adherence to the desires of Big Media. That is a show where if you miss one episode, you missed it all and can’t get back into it. A very structured storyline between episodes. So I watched the entire series through netflix and the new episodes from my computer and, occasionally, during actual broadcast.

There is no other way.

Isn’t that a shame?

Then there is Dead Like Me or Firefly, two series that did not last as long as they should have. But I didn’t know about them (or have time for them) until the series was well over. They failed because of the revenue model that supported them did not pull revenue from the actual fan base.

Kind of sad. But inevitable. Technology is progressing. Content has to keep up. If Big Media doesn’t get that figured out soon, their content will be replaced.

…and it is already happening. And they blame us. The consumers. Their customers. Go figure that one out.

I especially love those anti-piracy commercials in the movie theater. When would a pirate ever see (or listen) to such a commercial? Aren’t the people in the theater PAYING customers?

Hmmmmmm.