I was sitting in Richard's lounge room in Santa Monica yesterday. We were talking about the impact of technology on media and media companies.

This is about convergence.

Media companies pay sometimes billions of dollars to get the exclusive rights to the Olympics, the Rugby, the Tennis etc. I am thinking sports here, because the data that I see indicates that it is sports that is the killer media for people viewing content on 3G phones. (A soccer match can generate thousands of 1 hour plus engagements with subscribers to phones in Europe). But as the cameras on mobile phones become ever more powerful, cameras themselves start having cellular engines on board, and also become even more micro, and as you can upload the material that you shoot faster and more efficiently, think of the possibilities.....

I imagine that by the time of the Beijing Olympics people will be shooting and sharing the events as fast as the networks covering the events. And then they will be posting them with RSS feeds that will be Bittorrented to the world....

And what will that do to the value of the traditional broadcasters?  OK you can argue that in China the government will choke all the file transfers that are uploaded anyway so the problem goes away. But what about in other countries? Where it is a lot harder for governments to control unilaterally?

The only thing I can see is for media companies to take the position of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em". And the most likely contender I can imagine is News. I can imagine a business that is set up to bit torrent sports content from phones and insert ads at the front to pay the bills being an interesting acquisiton for a News Corp that wants to aggressively compete with some of the other broadcast networks....