Media Convergence: Hollywood Gets Hip to this Internet Thing
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 27, 2008 | Share This
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Previously on SearchViews, I castigated the music industry for its shortsighted response to music downloading and online music sharing in general. The film industry has been luckier in part because film files are comparatively massive and harder to share easily and in part by benefiting from seeing the experience of their music industry colleagues struggle with a consumer that doesn’t want the formats they keep pushing.
Today TechCrunch broke the news that a group of big Hollywood muckety-mucks – essentially all of the major studios save for Disney – are getting together next week to announce shared standards online for movie file interoperability. Specifically we are talking about the thorny issues of digital rights management (known to you and I as copy protection) and software formats so that everyone is offering the same general limits and access. Theoretically this should open the doors to an increase in online movie sales and legitimate downloads as everyone will be operating and endorsing the same standards. What’s not clear is why Disney has yet to sign up.
After the initial backbiting it’s heartening to see the industry figure out that they have more to gain by standing together and embracing the future while they still have time to set the agenda.
The irony is that the age of media convergence in which we all watch our movies and listen to our music and make phone calls and pop popcorn via cellphone over the Internet seems farther away than ever, at least for those of us in the United States. As I’ve also pointed out, broadband adoption is slowing to resemble the kind of crawl that can only be described as 15kps dial-up-ishly sloooowww.
This has added to the breathing space in which to hammer out shared standards and also, perhaps to, to develop their own distribution platforms. Interestingly Apple is not part of the group announcing this. The iTunes store has been a pioneer in selling films online but it’s likely that entities like NBC Universal and Fox which together started online movie and TV site Hulu would like to keep more revenue for themselves, as well as punishing Apple for daring to drive into the gap left by the music industry so successfully.
Topics: ECommerce, Media Convergence, Online Video, Technology |