What are they worried about? That Amazon might force a little competition into this changing market? That brick & mortars will be disadvantaged? That customers will get better prices? They should be!
I want to own content.
Contrary to what many content owners would like to think, digital media has done wonders for content and is continuing to open the doors to new business opportunities.
I like being able to carry thousands of songs in my pocket. I love streaming Netflix movies straight to my Xbox, or watching them on my Apple TV. I love being able to take a photo and share it with dozens of people in a heartbeat. And I’m growing to love my recently acquired Barnes & Noble nook.
As recently as a year ago, the major issue surrounding digital content was DRM. That battle has thankfully been won — at least with music — and progress is being made with other types of content. But I think it’s time to refocus the debate. The next battle is over format shifting.
With DRM it was popular to argue that customers wanted to truly own content they purchased and not simply purchase a license for it. I want to take this one step further. I want to truly own content and not be tied down to the medium on which it exists.
Let me explain. If I bought all the Beatles vinyls 40 years ago and want to have these in a digital format, I’m forced to pay full price for the latest remasters. Granted, significant work has been done to restore the recordings. But we’re not only paying for that work when we buy the remastered digital files, but also content ownership rights. How much would one have spent on the exact same Beatles content had they bought every new edition and remaster in the past 40 years?
And what about video? How many of you have purchased a movie over and over again on Betamax, Laserdisc, VHS, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-ray, Xbox Marketplace, the iTunes Store, and so on? I want to have the choice of paying a small fee for the medium itself, and any applicable work that went into adapting it to a newer technology. But there’s no need to pay for the content over and over again.
As far as I know, there’s only one company who is doing this right now. The Criterion Collection allows you to trade up from your DVD versions to Blu-ray for a minimal fee.
There are obvious technical challenges to this idea. In an ideal world, these will be lifted as we move away from the physical and toward streaming content and an omnipresence of DRM-free digital files.
