Say goodbye to Hollywood: The business model funding the television business is failing:
We still consume some TV content, but we consume it when and where we want it, and we consume it deliberately: In other words, we don’t settle down in front of the TV and watch “what’s on.” And, again with the exception of live sports, we’ve gotten so used to watching shows and series without ads that ads now seem extraordinarily intrusive and annoying. Our kids see TV ads so rarely that they’re actually curious about and confused by them: “What is that? A commercial?”
In the abundance economy, every business model based on charging a toll to cross a chokepoint will fail:
There are still wannabe barons in our economy, people scheming to find a way to hold us hostage with our own grain. But the last laugh will be ours: They will defend to the death the stout gates they have built across economic chokepoints. And we will go wherever we choose — in a world without walls.
More:
Nothing happens as quickly as we expect it to, looking forward, and everything seems to have happened much faster than we had realized, looking backward. More important, I think, than the plummeting cost of data processing, is the massive and seemingly irreversible horizontalization — the democratization — of information. The most significant man-made chokepoints centered around restrictions upon access to information and concentrations of expertise. When we use the word “disintermediation,” what we really mean is not getting rid of the middleman, but, rather, the dismantling of arbitrary economic chokepoints. As those barriers erode away, one by one, the consumer cost of everything associated with them drops dramatically. The semantic web, Web 3.0 — wherein the information that you want finds you — should only hasten this process.
If your income is based on getting in your customer’s way — prepare to go broke.
Can we find our way back to political liberty peacefully? I sure hope so. So does James Piereson, in an interesting read called The Fourth Revolution.
And thanks to the internet, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. This site is mesmerizing, way more fun than watching TV! (Hat tip: @TeriLussier)
