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Where does your entertainment dollar go?December 1, 2006 on 10:11 am | In Bitmunk, Industry, Music, Television, Movies and Video |Collaborative Content Editing The second stage of Collaborative Content came about when collaborative editing became mainstream. Sites like Slashdot, launched in 1997, were instrumental in pushing collaborative content editing systems to the mainstream. Shortly thereafter blogs started to become main stream, which has started to shift how people get their news. These base set of features were further enhanced by sites like Friendster, MySpace, YouTube and Digg. In each example, the core content for the website is created not by the site operators, but by the community surrounding the website. For example, personally created videos are uploaded to YouTube. MySpace and Friendster are websites dedicated to a personalized web pages and friend networks. Digg’s entire submission and moderation process is run by their community of readers. So, who is paying for and benefitting from the Collaborative Content Editing sites? This is where it starts getting tricky. In general, these sites do not share revenues with their content contributors and editors. There are some that are starting to share revenues. Sites such as Revver and Metacafe are showing great promise, but we think there is more to this whole collaborative creation and editing landscape than giving away your content. The content is worth something - in some cases, such as YouTube, the content is worth a great deal of something. To the tune of $1.5 billion dollars. That something is advertising - the bread and butter of most Internet-based sites. This concept is not new - wherever there are eyeballs there is a stream of advertisers standing in line, waiting to pitch their product to all of those eyeballs. Take away the content and those eyeballs disappear. A clear example of this happening was when MySpace crushed Friendster’s user numbers in a matter of months - the eyeballs follow the content and the community. Hold on to this thought, it is important to understand how eyeballs translate to cash. Super Distribution Blogs and news sites are one thing, but what happens when the content is too large to be distributed by a single website? What happens when we want to send movies, television and high definition video over the Internet? YouTube, Metacafe and Revver is not what I’m talking about - I’m talking about REAL HD video - entire DVDs in a single transfer. Super Distribution has been around since Napster 1.0, but no one company has truly figured out how to capitalize on this and make it fair to everybody involved in the process. Kazaa, GnuTella, eDonkey, Morpheus, BearShare, Limewire, BitTorrent and other such companies fall into this continuously churning tumult of copyright issues. Some of them tried selling advertising to stay afloat - they had the eyeballs. The only wrench in the works was that most of the content that they were using was not properly licensed. They were all violating copyright law. That is not fair to the content creators, and so most of the first generation of super distribution services that did not comply with copyright law were shut down. The Methods of Internet-based Media Distribution Currently, there are two different methods of creating content and distributing it via the Internet. In each method, there are three important roles: the content creator/owner, the content distributor and the content customer. In Collaborative Content Editing, the content creators can be anybody, including you. The content distributors are the website where the content resides, such as MySpace or YouTube. The content customer is anybody that visits the website. Collaborative Content Editing does not remunerate the content creators but it does reimburse the content distributors via advertising revenue. In Super Distribution, the content creators are usually professional artists or teams of artists, but can be anybody with talent (talent being a relative term). The content distributors are regular people on the Internet, people that are running programs like BitTorrent. The content customer is anybody that downloads content from the network. This method does not remunerate the content creators nor does it remunerate the content distributors. In both cases, somebody is being shortchanged. So what are fair distribution terms and how do you ensure fairness throughout the process? Is it possible to be fair to everybody involved in the process, and what would that cost? Would it be more expensive or less expensive? Enter a third method, Collaborative Content Distribution…                 3 Comments »RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment |
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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 #
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 #
cool story
Comment by laptop batteries — October 5, 2008 #