Coming Attractions?

Technology and Content

Today’s new entertainment technologies are more powerful than the ones they replace and more impatient; they break boundaries and reduce the need for physical means of content distribution, thus undermining business models that refuse to adapt. Until recently, technology and content didn’t play well together. This must change. Likewise, content industries – movies, publishing, and music – have traditionally been separate, with distinct delivery technologies. Now they face convergence, as content becomes digital data. The entertainment, computing and telecommunications industries are complementary, each made more valuable by the others. Yet entertainment and computing remain at swords’ point.

Content owners have reason for fear, though they still can cash in on new opportunities. Typically, information content is expensive to make but cheap to copy. Now, digital duplication facilitates digital piracy, since outlaws have minimal duplication costs. The record companies weren’t ready for digital duplication, which opened the door for file sharing via Napster, a program they regarded as piracy and crushed in court. With increasingly powerful Internet...