This will be the year the history books will record as the beginning of the end for the way we watch television.
My question is why the content providers still struggle with petty things like content protection, a.k.a. DRM, even though the world around them is changing at a pace of Formula-1 racing and size of continental drifts?
First of all, this is really one of the few articles in which they discuss niche TV offerings.
I am great fan of the German website Liebling Tier.tv. Not because they have great content (I am in no way affiliated to them), but because it shows how niche TV should be produced and will be produced and distributed.
Basically, you create great, niche content. It must be extremely niche and very focused to be successful. I don’t have any background information about Liebling Tier.tv, but they seem to have understood that following ingredients are required for a good recipe:
- Great, target-group specific content
- Focus, focus, focus!
- Free availability of content
- Tell stories, don’t report
- It works regardless ofend-user equipment
All of which we can sum up in two words:
Customer Orientation
Customer Orientation, the key element of every successful business, seems to be forgotten nowadays. I am really amazed at how stupid companies can act in trying to protect their “intellectual property”, especially by criminalizing their own customers.
This article starts with “Death of DRM?” I should in fact remove the question mark (I never believed in DRM), call it “Death of Copyright as we know it” and put an exclamation mark behind.
Back in 1999 I suggested that Copyright/DRM would be one of the most stupid issues for a while to come. My suggestion to solving the problems regarding “intellectual property theft” was by introducing watermarks into sold content and thus tracking who gave it away. Of course, I wouldn’t really want to track the regular users or those customer who give it to their friends. The reasoning was just to track “professional copyright breakers”.
On the other hand, I still believe (as I did at the project called “Music & More“, where we wanted to give away music for free in exchange for “eyeballs”, i.e. marketing/advertising) that content should be free and financed by advertising, sponsoring and other third parties. It seems odd that that article about Music & More, especially the “Problem”-section, was written 8 years ago and is still valid and we still have the same problem as back in 1999.
Anyway, looking back and forward, I believe that the DRM and the Copyright as we know it, must die and will die out.
Copyright as we know it was built on top of scarcity – scarcity in terms of packaging, production and distribution of information (Record-production, -packaging and distribution was something for bigger companies). Nowadays, with the Internet available everywhere, there is no need for such a thing as “Copyright” (as we know it) anymore. Why would a content producer (the Creator) need to give a company exclusive Copyright if he/she could copy, “package” and distribute their content by themselves?
Well, of course, there is the issue of marketing, but it seems Apple really has understood the wind of change and is offering itself as the Marketing Company for Content. They are not asking for exclusive copyright, they are not asking for copyright at all, and they actually leave it completely up to the content creators to put their content into their shop – or not.
So, what is the real implication of this? I believe that we are seeing a tremendous shift, a shift as big as the introduction of “Copyright” back in the 19th century, in the content/media industry. The content creators don’t need any Copyright-Holders anymore, but they need marketing companies able to aggregate and advertise their content. The content creators don’t want to give exclusivity to any content marketer but keep the rights on their “intellectual property” by themselves. But also the switch to niche offerings. I had hoped, with the advent of digital TV, that we would have hundreds or thousands of niche channels but was disappointed at the ever same offerings.
The content creators should in fact have the freedom (and they will have the freedom) to decide at any given moment to cancel an agreement with the marketer and/or add a new marketer to their intellectual property. Additionally, we will have a tremendous amount of new, probably highly niche offerings – I highly believe in niche offerings, I said so back in 2001 (look down to: Wie schaffen wir es nun, dass unsere Künstler nicht verhungern – sorry, in German only) and will do so all the time. I believe that with the advent of Internet-TV, the niche offerings will finally catch-up and become the $$$-business I had hoped for back in 2000/2001.
So where does it leave the content industry? I believe, companies like Apple, who realize the the continental shift happening will be the winners. As will be the content creators. As will be companies ready to ditch their old-style, 20th century business model and come up with completely new business models based on
- Free content (free of DRM),
- Customer oriented behavior,
- Not owning, but marketing content,
- Not only direct, but mostly indirect sales,
- Concentrate on many, many niche offerings
- Get your costs under control
- Opening-up back-catalogues (music + movies!)
Those companies who cannot adapt themselves to the winds of change should (and will hopefully) go down the path of companies like PanAm, ITT, Compaq, old-AT&T and others.
The only big question remains for me is: Since every good manager, and especially CEO, should know that re-inventing oneself is the solution, why so few of them analyze the Apple story and follow it? Maybe those managers (and CEOs) are in fact just a bunch of egomaniac, low-quality, in-efficient and in-effective cost-centres, who should follow the path of a Will Eisner, Carly Fiorina, and Michael Spindler and hopefully never show up again in human history? Maybe…