Meh; right or wrong it is looking increasingly like sharing of content for free is inevitable. More interesting are the consequences of this change.
1. The resources that were spent on these products will be invested alternatively.
2. With a lower margin for performance, continued (live) performance becomes the only way to make a living.
3. Production-on-demand as opposed to production, followed by marketing for demand will produce more producer-motivated that audience-motivated content.
4. MTV cribs will have a lot less bling.
5. Based on my middling wage in the financial services sector, I could totally get a Kylie.
Why should the music and movie industry be the only industries being allowed to keep the middle men when the value they provide is almost nill.
The reality is that the bands coming out today have no problem being both good with marketing, technology and doing music.
There is nothing that says that it's a right of a musician to record an album for almost nothing, reproduce and distribute it litterally for free. And make hundreds of millions reselling it. It's not a right it's a privilege.
It's inevitable because the producers of the content are stuck to an old model they refuse to give up. About a year ago I abandoned DirecTV. I was paying about US$80/mo for a fairly basic package that included the few stations that I watched. I tried to get it lower, but it turned out the 1000's of stations I didn't want and the few I did want.. always came out to the same monthly fee. I would pay a much smaller fee for those few stations (that contain the shows I really want to watch).
Until then, I'll torrent those TV shows, and use my Netflix subscription to watch movies.
And, I would love to torrent the TV shows from the official TV site. I'd do it even if they included a reasonable amount of commercials. Reasonable is hard to define, but if they became annoying, I'd go back to what I have. If they setup their own tracker, then they'd be able to count the downloaders, which is no different than counting people that have their DVR record a show. Well, it's a little different in that they can't spy on your watching habits like TiVo and the others apparently do.
They could deal a death blow to piracy very swiftly, if they wanted. But they don't. They want the current system, at all costs.
1. The resources that were spent on these products will be invested alternatively.
2. With a lower margin for performance, continued (live) performance becomes the only way to make a living.
3. Production-on-demand as opposed to production, followed by marketing for demand will produce more producer-motivated that audience-motivated content.
4. MTV cribs will have a lot less bling.
5. Based on my middling wage in the financial services sector, I could totally get a Kylie.