For the purposes of this article I consider "Media" to include all forms of recorded information and/or entertainment that was historically based in the analogue world (books, newspapers, TV, recorded music, movies, etc).

Over the last few months there has been an evolving conflict emerging in the book industry in Australia. The retailers would like the bar on imports on books lowered. The local publishers want it maintained. This of course hearkens back to the period in the music business in Australia when the retailers wanted import restrictions removed on CD's.

The simple argument on both sides right now is as follows:

Retailers: We are getting beaten on price by on line etailers who are sourcing product in countries where prices are lower than in Australia. They are therefore able to pass savings on to consumers and take market share away from Australian publishers.

Publishers (together with authors and their agents): Australia is a small domain where costs are high because demand is relatively low and therefore there are few economies of scale. If import restrictions are lowered, prices and margins will drop substantially and therefore fewer authors will be signed up, and fewer opportunities will arise.

(By way of personal observation, I went in search of Stephanie Alexander's "The Cook's Companion" last week for a gift. I looked for it in Angus & Robertson, Borders, and another smaller store. Prices ranged from $90 - $136. I decided to look for it online and used a rather nifty Web 2.0 search tool called Booko. Booko provides you with an list of all the online stores with the book that you are interested in, listed in price order, including shipping, all converted into Australian Dollars. I ended up purchasing the book, including shipping from the UK, for $54. I was happy with the result. But it shows very clearly that if you are a price shopper rather than an impulse shopper, online is absolutely the only place to get what you want at the price you want to pay).

The fundamental problem in the argument between Publishers (et al) and Retailers is this: Both of them are right. If the import barriers are reduced, publisher margins will be reduced, which in turn may mean fewer local writers signed up. And if the import barriers are not reduced retailers will lose customers to the internet.

Old analogue business models do not translate readily into the digital environment. The digital environment is highly disruptive. It is that way because the costs of the carbon footprint of the products are not required to be included in the costing of the product. Of course if you did this you would skew the value proposition even further in one direction that may not please any of the existing players, particularly when you look at media businesses whose product already exists in a digital format - such as the music and the movie/TV production businesses.

In these latter businesses you have the added dimension of P2P file sharing raising its ugly head. So now instead of just thinking about whether a publisher or a retailer is experiencing disruption through a good being able to be sourced from an online store rather than a local bricks and mortar store, you are faced with the option of the consumer being able to access the product at a cost of near zero (the only cost being that of bandwidth).

Now the content companies might want to stop the internet. The problem for them is that this argument pits them against some extremely large and powerful organizations. Lets face it: Telcos and Technology businesses have a strong vested interest in consumers being able to get content for next to nothing.

So the reality is that the Internet is unlikely to go away if the technology and telco companies have anything to do with it.

The problem for content companies is frankly staggering. TV shows are available via sites like TVunderground within minutes from their first broadcast. Note they are not available directly. TVunderground just points to where the files are and the more popular the program, the more computers have it available on their hard drives, and that means that you can download the program faster. That is the beauty of P2P - its near real time when its popular. And now because of the plethora of file sharing law suits by the music industry (in the US), file sharers have started encrypting their files prior to making them available. Strong encryption would take years and years to decode even with the use of supercomputers, so the irony of this is that the law suits have had the absolute 180 degree opposite outcome for the music companies than was intended, and that in turn is causing irretrievable damage to the studios that make movies and TV shows.

Unless they can come up with a radically different business model.

My partner Tom, and I think we have one. We also think that the only way to protect the IP that we have is to tell everyone about the idea so that they can help add to it and contribute to it as an open source project.

We believe that the answer is relatively simple.

We think that all content should be made available on P2P networks by content companies for free/freemium.

One way to do this is to do this in conjunction with a Carbon Credits Scheme.

We have done some of the economic modelling for this and believe that if the true cost of carbon is taken into account when looking at the manufacturing, shipping, warehousing, inventorying, retailing of a DVD or CD it is then possible to understand that by distributing the content via P2P a massive carbon saving can be achieved.

This would not only generate huge windfall profits for the media and content owners, but would also make them into extremely green companies. Through the use of efficient P2P distribution it would also reduce the amount of bandwidth that is currently being consumed through the consumption of video content that is accessed through the massively inefficient YouTube.

If you are interested in hearing more, please get in touch...