"There’s a myth out there among some newspapers folks that “if only” the newspapers hadn’t committed the “original sin” of putting content online for free, the newspapers wouldn’t be facing difficulties these days. It’s the kind of story that sounds good if you don’t look too closely at the details. … However, it looks like Mark Cuban believes in that “original sin” concept, and is posting a series of blog posts to try to prevent TV networks from making the same “mistake.” It started with the claim that anyone who thinks TV is going a la carte online is crazy, because the “content companies” will never give up the fees they earn from the networks. … He (like NBC Universal execs) laughs off the “threat” of people switching to all online access to TV content, noting that very few people have done so. This surprises me, since you’d think that Cuban would be familiar enough with Clayton Christensen’s work to know that just because there are only a few early adopters (and the quality isn’t as good) that it doesn’t mean that it’s not a potential threat. In fact, those questions are basically the de facto list of questions that an “incumbent” player tends to ask when facing a Christensen-style “innovator’s dilemma” just before the upstart technology really begins to hurt the legacy business."
Mike Masnick @ Mark Cuban Declares War On Free TV Online… But Misses Out On The Economics | Techdirt
free online tv is pissing a lot of people off.
"When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie."
Clay Shirky @ Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
it’s a revolution.
"File this in your the “Yet another way Fox has found to inspire geek hate” folder: According to a report by VideoBusiness (Via CNet), 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment is going to start stripping rental DVDs SKUs of special features like commentaries and featurettes, in a horrendously misguided attempt to spur retail DVD sales. Retail copies available for purchase will retain all the special features. … It seems nobody is happy about this situation, including video store workers. According to one video store buyer in the VB article: “Can you imagine explaining this to all of your customers? People will think when they rent, it should have everything on it. And why shouldn’t it? This is just silly, and consumers aren’t going to be happy."
David Chen @ Fox To Remove Special Features From Rental DVDs | /Film
very silly indeed.
"Damage your biggest asset, destroy your product, and complain when others do a better job… In the end, the fact is that newspapers have been providing people with a poor quality product for too long, neglecting their biggest asset (the community) and have been totally unwilling to recognize the onslaught of competition coming from multiple angles. And, to that, their response has been to say that they’ll raise the price on that very “icky” community? And that somehow people will “miss them” when they’re gone? That seems unlikely."
Mike Masnick @ What Dying Business Has Survived By Raising Prices On An Inferior Product? | Techdirt
if you don’t “get it”, you won’t be around much longer to wonder what happened.
"The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated for decades because of limited consumer options. The last 15 years of innovation have lifted those limitations, effectively leaving the music industry with an obsolete, defective business model of monopolized production technology, forced album bundling, and almost nonexistent competition in the realm of home entertainment. What is happening now - the decline of music profits and the piracy witch hunt by the music industry - is merely the panicked struggle of a dying business model, a complacent industry’s refusal to accept its diminishing role in a digital world. The pirates are not the reason, and the decline is the not the disease. It is the cure."
the pirates fault? too easy. a symptom of a bigger shift.
"Micropayments introduce friction into an otherwise frictionless world. This means that no matter how efficient they become, it is more efficient to bundle. … Putting micropayments on news is like putting tollbooths on an open ocean. Internet users, awash in a sea of information, will avoid new barriers by navigating around them. And frankly, the interests of a free society are rarely served by building barriers between the people and their news."
Marshall W. Van Alstyne @ What Would Micropayments Do for Journalism? A Freakonomics Quorum - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
tollbooths in the ocean suck.
"If online sites were only “winning” the traffic battle because they were ripping off others’ content, then that would be easy to fix: those very same newspaper sites should do the same damn thing. Hell, it should work better, since they’d have the original content. The problem is that it’s not the reporting that’s attracting the community. It’s the community. For way too long, the newspapers have ignored or diminished the role of the community. They were forgetting that, in the end, it really is the community that’s their “product.” They sell the attention of that community. But, for years, they had little to no competition in doing so. That meant they could basically ignore serving the community… and they did. Now that there are sites that actually do serve the community, people prefer going to them than the sites that treated the “community” like lower class riffraff to be kept away. Funny how that works."
Mike Masnick @ If Newspapers Went Offline For A Week… People Might Realize They’re Fine Without Them | Techdirt
go offline for a week newspapers… please.
"People regularly draw a comparison between the music industry and publishing. The Amazon Kindle, we are told, can be “the iPod of books”. … The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn’t because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod. … It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead. To put it less glibly, the publishing industry isn’t being forced to confront a radical shift in consumer behaviour caused by technology, because that scenario just is not happening. Customers aren’t forcing the issue by choosing to abandon books and read pirated text instead. And this means the problem isn’t there to be confronted."
Bobbie Johnson @ Why aren’t ebooks taking off? Not enough pirates | Technology | guardian.co.uk
pirates lead the way. and pirates apparently don’t like to read books.
Walter Isaacson @ John Stewart’s The Daily Show
i can’t decide if “how to kill your newspaper by adopting micropayments” is funny or sad. i know. it’s desperate.
