Reading about the trackerless BitTorrent beta got me thinking some more about the future of media (movies, television and music) in a capitalistic economy (the latter article, while often insightful, is hurting my brain).
Let’s talk about how things that work now will break in the future, shall we?
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Syndication prices will plummet, as those who still want to watch the television show will simply have a copy from when it originally aired.
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DVD sales of movies and television shows will continue to be valuable for a while, but will become less and less potent as it becomes easier and easier to just download the entire DVD rip and create the disc yourself. If you don’t believe me, look at how easy it is to grab an album of MP3s now, and ask yourself whether it has influenced the albums you’ve purchased in the last three years.
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Commercials shown during breaks between show segments can be easily cut out or skipped through with DVR technology, such that advertisers would be fools to continue relying on audiences actually absorbing such messages.
On the other hand, some strategies will continue to work. In particular:
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Movie theaters will continue to function – they just need to tighten their security to prevent their material from getting leaked. Recording devices within the theater will not be much of a concern until they can capture the movie’s original quality. Commercials shown before a movie will continue to be effective, since the audience has no choice but to watch.
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Television shows will be effective the first time they are aired – again, assuming there is no leak. Advertisement overlays during these shows will be effective. It will be annoying, but it’s either that or direct product placement within the show, which is perhaps even more invasive (at least with overlays, the product isn’t being endorsed within the show’s universe).
There will be technologies to combat the overlays, but as long as the advertisements are irregularly shaped and semi-transparent, it will be nearly impossible to remove them cleanly with 100% accuracy. And though industrious rippers may eventually produce “clean” versions of the material, such modification will require non-trivial effort. Most fans of the show will not want to wait, and will download and watch the dirty version immediately.
Also, if the overlays are fixed for a given episode (rather than a given airing), they will command a much higher premium, with the product being permanently etched into history. Allowing full distribution of the material simply spreads the advertisement to a larger audience.
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CDs are harder. The analagous technique to #2, but audio-only, seems too invasive for the public to accept, and bootleg live recordings would overtake “polluted” studio recordings. I do not know how viable it is for bands to give away their music for free, and succeed by selling merchandise (I am concerned that things like T-shirts will soon be easy to produce on your own, making the $30 concert T-shirt a thing of the past, but maybe social norms and pressures would take care of that).
There are alternative schemes, such as donation systems (people give money to shows they like), pledge systems (e.g., people pledge a certain amount of money toward the next episode of a show; if enough money is pledged, the creators make the episode and collect the pledges; if not, no money is forfeit), or even government funding (an equivalent to the National Science Foundation, but for entertainment), but all these schemes have serious weaknesses.
The other possibility is that unprofitable media stops being created en masse or with today’s budgets. But people love their entertainment; somehow I don’t think that is going to happen.
“When your DVD player tells you ‘This operation is not allowed’ when you try to skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital Restrictions Management.”
—Jon Johansen, co-creator of De_CSS