From Doc Searls: Television’s future potato famine

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I think this post from Doc is pretty interesting. As he mentions it puts the control of the a-la-carte experience into the viewers hands. I don’t follow his idea on the transmit side of the equation; I need to read the pointers he mentions below. We are about ready to disconnect DirecTV and sink the money into Netflix or something similar. There is just so much drivel on that it is not worth the monthly fees.

I wonder how this would change the equation for documentary film makers? Could this be an alternate distribution channel? I find some similarities to what is going on at the Public Radio Exchange. Their goal is to produce a bridge between independent producers and public radio stations.

I see the future of television in two places: 1) BitTorrent; and 2) Konspire2b. Dig the list of things you do on the receive side of Konspire2b:

  1. subscribe to channels that match your interests
  2. go to bed
  3. wake up in the morning to the files that have arrived on your subscribed channels
  4. feel certain that the files are legit, thanks to konspire2b’s heavy-duty, automatic, digital signatures
  5. unsubscribe from channels that disappoint you
  6. build trust for a channel owner’s tastes over time (owners are completely responsible for what goes out on their channels)
  7. spend the time that you used to spend searching doing other less frustrating things (see 8 for a suggestion)
  8. start a channel to broadcast your own files

This is the answer for the transmit side too. It’s the future commercial Television will discover after it dawns on the people who pay for it (remember, it’s advertisers, not viewers) that viewers will get better deals as active customers rather than as passive consumers, and will eventually contrive their own means of getting those deals. Remember that TiVo was invented in Silicon Valley, by Linux weenies. Not in Japan, by Sony.

Well intended though McCain’s a la carte law-making may be, I think we’ll be better off leaving the feds out of this thing, and developing our own solutions to our own problems. Sooner or later, Hollywood will wake up and smell the money.

Thanks to Mark Turner for the pointers.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]