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Where does your entertainment dollar go?

Understanding Collaborative Content Distribution

Regardless of your nationality, race, gender, or political views, at some point you have the need to sit down and unwind. Whether you unwind by reading a book, playing games, listening to the news, watching a television show or experiencing a movie for the first time, you do so with your hard earned money. You are also, whether you realize it or not, putting food on somebody’s table. In fact, you are putting food on hundreds if not thousands of tables with one flick of the TV remote or one nod of your head while listening to a song you purchased. This has been a largely one way process for centuries. It is the standard producer-distributor-consumer model and it is changing. We can see the change clearly through how we use the Internet and software today versus ten years ago. We are at the beginning of a fundamentally world-changing shift in media dissemination – the birth of collaborative content distribution.

To understand collaborative content distribution it is important to identify how we got here – how did the Internet and software help us make working with each other easier? We communicate far more often with each other than we did a decade ago. Rather than go into the technical details, let us focus on the Internet and software at a high level. Namely the Free Software Movement, Collaborative Content Editing and finally Collaborative Content Distribution.

So, why do we collaborate? …

3 Comments

1. This is an extremely wonderful and well thought out essay. I would love for everything to happen like that, and to tell you the truth–if we are ever able to build this model I will GLADLY pay $20-$30 more to keep commercials out of my life.

   On the other hand, I don’t see this happening. I hope I am wrong. What you are proposing is to cut out the middle man, who gets at least $92 Billion a year to provide us with "entertainment". With this much money on the line, I really don’t see the big telecom just "giving up" their content. They will surely put up a hell of a fight to preserve the old model. Just look to what they did to "a-la-carte" model that was just floating around a couple of years ago.(ability to buy only cable channels that you want). This had an overwhelming support among the Congress and the General Public who is sick of paying $100 a month to basically watch their 3 or 4 favorite channels. There were even hearings on the Hill scheduled. And what happened? Poof! GONE! Not even a peep.

   Comment by BrooklynNY — December 12, 2006 #

2. It’s not so much the networks that control the conent of our favorite entertianment shows on tv as much it is the companies that advertise. It’s sort of scary that a cat food or plastic company has a lot of control over our favorite sitcom or reality show!

   Comment by Luke Schmucker — January 23, 2008 #

3. Hi,

   I am looking for an open source solution that I could install on my own server so I can distribute my music my self without giving away precious % to middle sites, plus getting paid in 60 plus days…

   Anyone knows of something like that?

   Thanks in advance,

   Thierry Deruelle
   http://www.dztd.ca

   Comment by Thierry Deruelle — May 23, 2009 #

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