Bathroom breaks and golden geese
Earlier last week, I'd ranted in my LiveJournal about the head of Turner calling me a thief. Now, I'm reading what Mike James has to say about what Brad Templeton has to say about the ?TiVO, PVR's, and what they are gonna do.
Brad offers up a few very good suggestions-- ways to offer more options with regards to TV funding, ways to mix up and better target ads and ways to buy out the ad time. Some of the "enter the keyword from the ad" suggestions strike me as eerily similar to the ways warez and porn trading servers on the Hotline network. Go visit 3 sites, usually casino sites and other banners, spend about 30 seconds exposed to each site searching for a certain keyboard, come back to the warez/pr0n server with your keywords in hand.
Again, the porn leads the way. :) Well, sort of. The Hotline servers are pirating the porn industry, but porn tends to always be one of the drivers of tech. I wonder if purveyors of porn might not also be the first to hit on the new business model that rakes in the cash from what's coming?
I can't help but think of this in terms of golden geese. TV studios have had a golden goose in advertisers, and she's laid wonderful eggs for decades. But now the old gal's tired and the eggs are getting smaller and less shiny. Must be something in the water or the goose feed that's changed. Seems that there just might be another goose out there that'll lay even bigger eggs. Not only that, but I hear that this new goose might even deliver the eggs right to them, and maybe even thank them for it. But, rather than questing and finding this new kind of goose, they're trying to sow the goose feed fields with salt and poisons. And they're looking for thicker chains for the current goose's ankles, and reinforcing the bars of the cage.
I really must be missing something. I can't help but think that consumers wouldn't mind being treated like customers, finally, and not as assumed thieves. I have to think that some very smart people work in the entertainment industry. At least a few of them must have read the Cluetrain Manfesto and come away with something. Is this just naive to think? Seems vaguely incomprehensible to me that fear has them working this hard to maintain an aging business model, where the rewards would be staggering if they put that much effort into exploiting a new one. And they'd be praised instead of pissing everyone off.
Wish I could remember the quote (was it Heinlein?) about companies and their making money, which basically gets summed up in Mike's quoting of Spidey, "I think I missed the part where this became my problem." It's already been heavily quoted, but it's worth repeating.
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