Epic Drama Number 1, Content v. Technology
The world just loves a good love-hate relationship. Here’s the wonk’s-eye-view of Epic Drama Number 1, content v. technology. Sure you can say it is a gross oversimplification, but I prefer to regard it as a value-added crystallization.
There are several forces battling for survival and prosperity in the coming decade, and they can be summarized as follows:
Epic Drama Number 1: Those Impassioned Lovers, Content and Technology.
“No, please, you be the razor blade and I’ll be the razor this time, I insist.”
“Oh no, it’s my turn to bundle a discount coupon for your latest HD-DVD player with my next trilogy release, oh, say 50% off? Your turn to do the tech support, of course.”
“Now, now, have another cosmopolitan, and be reasonable. We’ll bundle a limited edition version with…w-where do you think you’re going? Come back! You can’t leave me. You need me more than I need you! You’re nothing without me!!!”
“HA! I’m leaving you and going somewhere where content is appreciated.”
“Oh yeah? Like where?”
“Like, um, wireless broadband. Yeah, that’s it!”
Epic Drama Number 2: PC, TV, and the Connected Home. The wifi home network is finally forcing the competition for the controls of the TV screen and the PC screen between consumer manufacturers and computer manufacturers, if not the displays themselves, for dominance as the home media gateway/server to manage the entertainment and information content consumed. Once these contenders merge or purge one another the emphasis shifts to…
Epic Drama Number 3: The Team with the Ball is on Offense. A home library of content and/or a viable broadband channel to the home is fueling the competition between network delivery and media delivery of entertainment and information content. Holding the content remotely from the user premises emphasizes the value of the channel feeding the display via a relatively dumb terminal, while holding the content locally benefits the suppliers of processor and storage devices. As the dust is settling over the next decade on this struggle it exposes the ongoing…
Epic Drama Number 4. Content is King, Content is Kindling. Rich, comprehensive, and compelling content can be extremely profitable in and of it’s own right. But sometimes the copyrighted content creators are victims of their own success, and a wave of user-created content, or creative commons, could seize the opening.
Why Technology Needs Content
Technology, by which in these pages we mean information and entertainment delivery technology, undergoes variants of the same cycle over and over again. Major manufacturer A invests in R&D and comes up with an invention which is patentable and an improvement on the current technology by some order of magnitude.
Major manufacturers B through X challenge the new pack leader for awhile then fold their invention cards, license the invention from manufacturer A and they all enter the commercial market within a short period (videogame console manufacturers skip this step).
The companies jointly develop the infrastructure consisting of enabling technologies, distribution channels and market positioning collateral.
The companies lobby the content providers to publish in the new, improved format, and provide them with authoring tools to build the new, improved content products and market research showing the ramp-up that will create critical mass of installed playback devices in a reasonable amount of time (internet and wireless services start-ups enter here).
At first, the market is orderly, prices allow for good margins all around, and the original patent holders see a good ROI.
More companies with lower manufacturing costs license the technology, driving down the purchase price of the technology, opening up the downmarket, and putting pricing pressure on the content.
Content providers must keep developing new content and chronically lose money on most projects that are not hits, and therefore want to maintain prices at the same high level, so a domestic black market develops to serve the content demand of the lower income markets (technology manufacturers skip this step).
Technology manufacturers just need a constant flow of content to keep selling their technology until the point of saturation, at which point they try to maintain the status quo to keep the replacement business buoyant unless and until they are threatened by competition, and then the cycle begins again (monopolies skip this step).
The beginning of the next cycle is also triggered by the first group of technology licensees who were squeezed out of the mass market by the second wave of lower cost competitors and, having no position in the patent pool, they try to be the licensor in the next round (the Wintel group skips this step).
There is one thing about this that is gross in the sense of rotten, and that is that while no one buys a player unless and until there is something they want to play on it, the technology manufacturers don’t care one iota what that is. All they care is the consumers should care enough to buy a machine that goes with it. If the content costs less rather than more, all the better, for the consumer only has so much disposable personal income to spend on entertainment, so why not spend it on more deluxe kit?
The main categories of content are: user-created, and copyrighted. When we use the term content here, we usually assume it to mean copyrighted content, we assume copyrighted content is published for profit, and we expressly avoid addressing communications and computer software applications as a form of content, although it is to some.
Copyrighted content falls into one of four areas: music, video, games, and information. User-created content includes photographs, home videos, self-publishing, and amateur music for the most part (videogame home development is an oxymoron). Generations of personal computers have latched onto various forms of content to sell users on the need for an upgrade, and as consumer electronics now uses microprocessors, so to does it assume the computer upgrade cycle frequencies. The opportunity represented by user-content has given unprecedented and invaluable creative outlets to millions of children and grown-ups, and a very small percentage of this user-content has been good enough to copyright and publish.
Here is the climax of part one, if you have not already figured out where I am going with this. The more the copyright content owners copy protect their content the bigger the pain in the butt it is for the technology manufacturers who are forced to invent the unbreakable technology to keep that content locked up tight or else the content won’t show up on their new, improved device. The more the copyright content owners arbitrarily restrict access to the content with anti-non-profit- piracy controls, pricing schemes and terms that boggle the minds of consumers and wonks alike, the less attractive the new, improved technology is and the harder it is to sell.
The creative commons starts looking better every day. If authors and artists are to form a viable alternative to big media, however, they still need producers, editors, directors, promoters and distributors.
Why Content Needs Technology
When Apple introduced the LaserWriter, they made a big thing of it as a personal empowerment, self-expressing, even emancipating technology. ‘Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one’ was the quote from A. J. Liebling hanging on the wall over my first laser printer. Twenty years ago, it was just possible to start a business without a secretary, and instead I put a luggable computer, a modem, a fax, a good dot matrix printer, and three phone lines in a place just north of Killington Vermont.
Analog media mean many things in the technical sense, but in the very essence the term means what you can see and hear. Electronic publishing is a representation of what you can see and hear that requires a machine interface and a recording or a broadcast. Digital is a representation of what you can see and hear that requires a computing machine interface. Publishers, studios, labels and game developers all made the transition from analog and/or electronic to digital delivery within my professional lifetime, and most of that within the 20 years since I founded Infotech.
Digital content and the revenues the copyright owners receive for it all would not exist without technology. Yet the more technology the vendors offer copyright owners, the more they seem to resist. This is because technology is the undoing of the copyright content owners, although not in the way they usually resist, the distribution of perfect copies for pirate replication and for-profit resale. It is because the same technology that allows publishers to edit, print and publish books is now in the hands of the public, too. The same technology that allows record labels to record, mix, and publish multi-channel recordings is now in the hands of the public, too. The same technology that allows studios to shoot, post-produce, and publish cinematic-quality movies is coming soon to a consumer near you.
This forces the copyright industries to raise the bar on production values, among other things, to differentiate their content from the commons. The higher the resolution, the better the editorial quality, the higher the stakes, the harder for start-ups to compete.
In the coming war between copyrights and the commons, the industrial state sells the high tech arms to anybody with the means to pay. When the creative commons becomes an economic force as well as an artistic one, could technology be used to block it?
posted by julia b schwerin