That's true, cable brought us HBO back in the 70s. I pay $5.99/month for DishNetwork's
NFL RedZone channel, which is only broadcast Sunday afternoon for seven hours, showing every play (and lots more, such as after game coaches/player interviews, extended series of key games, etc.) within the 20-yard line and every score of the day as it happens. With
NO COMMERCIALS, it's absolute heaven. Imagine the world free from ads!
But if everything is going digital, going onto the Net, where is the money for advertising going to come from?
During the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, Stewart Brand uttered the infamous maxim,
Information wants to be free. But he meant freedom, not necessarily price.
Entities like Rupert Murdoch's newspapers and TV stations don't "own" the news they cover. RARELY do they write anything original, unless you consider a columnist such. Thus, whatever Rupert's selling, so are many others, but then I can also obtain "it" (the story, the news, the info) for free from other sources (such as daily company press releases). News is not treated as property such as a physical music CD, a book, or a film. Apple's solution is to control access and destination points, which as we all know is expensive.
* Musicians will have to go on tour.
* Newspapers will have to go digital by selling a futuristic digital reader activated by your fingerprint, and then uploading fresh content to it 24/7.
* Novelists are making the transition to ebooks and actually getting paid more per book than paper copies.
* Actors will have to work for $50,000 rather than $25mn per picture; oh, the horror!
I could go on, but the 21st century is a digitized one. Guys like Murdoch and Mandelson (look up "ACTA") prefer the analog economy of the 20th century, where business titans can control supply and artificially leverage their profits at the expense of the consumer. (Bought any computer memory in the past 20 years?!) In a digital economy, some people will have to go back to work and not live off of copyright lawsuits.
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