Yesterday, Netflix lost the right to carry about 2,000 movies. Also yesterday, YouTube ‘declared victory’ over television. And this weekend, my fiancée and I are moving her daughter into an apartment of her own, where she has no plans to sign up for cable television.
Wrap you head around all that, and if you come to any conclusion other than ‘the media business is really, really changing’, you need to start over.
Stop Blogging. Fred Wilson has.
Seriously, though? I don’t actually mean either of those things.
Fred Wilson, notorious movie pirate and even more notorious venture capitalist, has decided to curtail—or at least slow—his blogging. Fred, of course, lives in a space that most of us do not, so when Fred Wilson decides to stop talking about something that he’s hitherto been passionate about, the impact it has on his business is minimal.
You probably can’t say the same.
Stealing and Piracy of Movies is Good for Movie Studios
One of the world’s most successful venture capitalists and two music big-shots have gotten behind piracy. Now, as odd as it might sound, there’s (a little bit of) proof that piracy may actually help movie studios make money.
Despite Fred Wilson, Neil Young, and Elvis Costello all coming out in favor of media piracy, stealing movies and music is still . . . well . . . stealing. And forget legal nuances distinguishing copying from theft; if you take something from someone else without paying for it and you know you were supposed to pay, you’re stealing.
I find The Big Bang Theory to be an example of incredibly unfunny television. Of course, tens of millions of people disagree with me; The Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular programs on television and has been for several years.
But what if you had to pay to watch The Big Bang Theory? Would you?
This weekend I came across a piece at The Atlantic, putting forth the position that unbundling cable television, or more specifically putting the various cable channels and their viewers in a position where they do business directly could actually cost those viewers more than they pay now for the bundles of mostly-unwatched cable TV channels most of us pay to receive.
I’ve got me a Google/Asus Nexus 7 Tablet (yep, I’m so excited that I’m going with “I’ve got me . . . “). I ordered it right before the pre-order period ended, and it arrived a bit under a week later. And it’s as cool as all the many, many reviews of the Nexus 7 say it is; the Nexus 7 is an absolutely amazing tablet computer, doing way more stuff for $200 than any device I’ve seen.
It was over two years ago that Comcast introduced 105 Mbps Internet speeds, and I told you you’d never see that speed. Today, Verizon is introducing Verizon FIOS Quantum with speeds of 300 mbps, because the Internet has come so far that you can now download illegal movies even faster.
Umm, no, you (still) can’t.
Here’s the good news: Verizon FIOS Quantum 300 mbps service theoretically offers three times what Comcast offered for downloads and six times the speeds for uploads, at the same price. So the “price of fast Internet” is coming down.
Last week, I talked about the reason I’m not an attorney. If you don’t feel like reading that piece I’ll sum it up really simply: most attorneys are weasels. And I don’t want to be a pantless weasel.
A couple of days ago, a US Court of Appeals judge issued a ruling that to my not-a-weasel eye makes, at least until the problem he’s created gets fixed, digital piracy legal here in the USA. Like, completely legal. Like, go out and start stealing copying stuff all you like. LEGAL.
Every now and then, I talk about coopetition. It’s one of those words you might have to double-take, not sure if it’s a misspelling, and when you’re sure you’re read it right it can become a word that you think I’ve made up.
It’s not. Or at least there are a whole bunch of other people talking about coopetition. As you can see, we’ve just barely cracked the top 50 sites for “coopetition” in Search Engine Optimization results at Google:
Answer Guy Central Influency and Integrated Marketing, New York NY 10128
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