The future mediastore
Submitted by infojunkie on Sat, 2009-03-21 10:27.
The mediastore will replace today's both DVD rental and music stores. It will only serve digital media, that customers will load onto their personal storage devices, such as USB flash drives or iPods. They will also be able to order it to be placed online, to later stream it from home.
The value of the mediastore will be the same as today's video or CD store: to find current media in an environment designed for findability. Except that the layout and functionality of the store will differ greatly: no more physical goods being displayed, but a computerized system, also organized by thematic geographical sections, where one can search for media using its metadata, sample it freely, and directly perform the transaction at the console where the digital item is found. Rows of touch screens would enable customers to access the media commerce system, to sample the media using headphones, and to load it up onto their flash drives through dedicated in-situ ports. Today's technology would easily supply this computerized system: a normal Web CMS would do, combined with a good media player, an integrated POS system, perhaps a live customer support system, all organized atop a flexible operating system like GNU/Linux. The video clerk job will move online, to organize CMS content and provide customer support.
The real obstacle is the current media licensing schemes which would need to be stretched or re-negotiated to fit this model. Nevertheless, with the trend towards digitizing and virtualizing all media, as well as the influence of the Internet on re-defining the value of media, this seems like a logical outcome.
licensing is important but
broadband, even as important , at least. Will their prices come down as mch as the speeds are going up to allow for the wide adoption that VHS and DVD enjoyed ?
The speed/price ratio of
The speed/price ratio of bandwidth has been steadily increasing AFAICT. As more services become dependent on the Internet, prices will have to drop further.
Pricing bandwidth consumption is a difficult problem. Should we price per content, or per MB as is the case today? Intellectual property and royalty owners are pushing for the former. It does make sense in terms of fairness to content producers. It is however a very difficult operational problem to solve in its full generality, given the need to identify any piece of content regardless of its encoding. And that's not even factoring in privacy issues.
On the other hand, assuming equal compression ratios among all files, information theory tells us that the information content (complexity) is directly related to its size. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a movie is worth a thousand pictures. Would content producers agree to be paid according to the size of their content (after suitable compression to make sure they are not "cheating") ? It's a long shot for sure :-)
Bandwidth ought to still be
Bandwidth ought to still be priced in bandwidth - or bitrate.
The content however should be charged through a different mechanism on the upper (application and session) layers.
I say this for the sake of maintaining the technical Internet ethos of decoupling all physical layer issues & charges from those of the app and user layers (where content ultimately and meaningfully resides).
As you mention charging by qualitative (or even just quantitive) modes of content usage opens up a floodgate of privacy and complexity issues.
Nor should we expect normalized compression rates - why should we? every format has its intended uses. Although I haven't read your previous posts on DRM or kept up with the legal debate very closely, intuitively I lean strongly that we keep the rights and charges of highway access separate from usage and content - and I think this is more in line with net neutrality goals.
On the application layer where we interact with content , of course variable pricing and other ideas can come into play - within the safety of the session layer.