As I mentioned last time, I am finally delivering a long-promised post on the topic of the future availability of content. I’ll acknowledge up front that I am likely a voice crying in the wilderness. Most people like to consume mainstream content. They like movies with big names, they want music from the pop charts, [...]
Intro: Access to Pop Culture in the Digital Age
Recently, I realized that I still owe my readers a post, on the availability of content in the digital age. Now, that probably doesn’t sound very exciting, but what I’m really talking about is the whole big world of pop culture – movies, TV, comic books, music, video games, books, magazines, radio, websites – and [...]
Persons A, B & C: Ownership and Purchases in the Digital Age
In two previous posts (here and here), I touched on something about content today that I think is both important and poorly understood. I wanted to take a moment to re-argue this before moving on to a new aspect of this issue. We are in the Digital Age of content and it didn’t take us [...]
Why Buy the Cow, When You Can get the Milk for Free?
[EDITOR'S NOTE: When I originally write this post, I worked at a trade association in the telecommunications industry. The group's members are therefore connected to the issues discussed in this post, so I would like to take a moment to state that the opinions expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my [...]
What Is the Future?
I’ve sort of made my peace with P. J. O’Rourke. In the past, I regarded him as excessively snarky and he’s certainly not in line with my politics, but he’s a clever writer and he was probably right and I was probably wrong about some stuff in the Eighties. Thanks to Kevin Drum, I read [...]
The Benefits of Touch
There’s the common phrase “unintended consequences.” That usually conveys a negative, something harmful you hadn’t anticipated. But sometimes a new piece of technology has a benefit you hadn’t anticipated. For example, I got high-speed cable modem service when it first became available. The touted benefit was speed — so much faster than dial-up. Well, yeah, [...]
Watch Together, Watch Alone
From time to time, you hear bemoaning about how we’re becoming less social in this country. One well-known example is Robert Putnam’s book from 2000 Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, which argues that a strong democracy requires strong communities. On a lesser note, you might run across comments like these made [...]
Death of an ad salesman
I continue to watch for signs of how the current Writer’s Guild strike will affect the entertainment industry. This article, written from the NATPE Conference this week, focuses on a couple of potential developments. One possible change: “the death of the upfronts as we know it,” predicted Matt Seiler, president and CEO, PHD North America. [...]
The post-strike digital world
Back in May of last year, Hank Bordowitz wrote a piece entitled “Jack Valenti And The Entertainment Business Tarpits” for Cynopsis: Weekender. In it, he said: Unlike their almost extinct saurian cousins in the record business, the TV business has shown some mammalian smarts, keeping their heads about them. It’s heartening to see a growing, [...]
Impact of the WGA strike
One of the incredible things about the current strike is that at this point it starts to look a little like the big studios are either scared of the impact of the Internet or arrogant enough to believe that they can outwait the writers. This is exactly the position the record labels were in a [...]