Aug 06
6
BitTorrent – The Hyper Distributor
Here is a piece I was forwarded overnight from a year ago – which only goes to show the value of the Long Tail!
It is a really interesting piece questioning why we need broadcasters in the value chain at all when we have BitTorrent as a tool to hyperdistribute content. Well, I can see the value of the broadcaster in the same way that I can appreciate that there is value in what they call “strategic marketing” in the music business. (In record company parlance it means “sell the back catalogue, someone, so we can actually pay the bills!”).
Maybe broadcasters' future role is to be the people who advertise the fact that there is a piece of content that is available, so that we can choose when to download it and when to watch it… ?
The article also poses some interesting questions about how advertisers will get their messages across… will ads be able to continue to interrupt or will we get tired of that?
One thing is for sure that the author says: Audiences will not do what they are told anymore – here is some of the article:
a way to get any television programming they desire. They don't
want to pay for it, they don't want it artificially crippled with
any digital rights management technologies – they just want to watch
it. Now. This is the way that half a century of television and a
decade of the Web has conditioned them to behave. We can't
really complain that audiences are simply doing as they've been
told. It is pointless to try to get them to change their behavior,
because, in essence, you're fighting against the nature of television
programming itself, the behavioral narrative which grew out of our
relationship to the technology. We all understand that this piracy
is technically illegal, technically a violation of copyright; but
we're in a hell of a bind if we're telling the audience to “sit
down, shut up and do as you're told” when it comes to television
viewing. The audience won't do as they're told: they'll do as they've
been taught, and that is another story entirely.