Content, downloading and experience (4): the worst-case scenario

A few more thoughts following on from an earlier post about content and experience.

Let's extrapolate and imagine that (what some people see as) media owners' worst-case scenario comes true: all digital-rights-management initiatives fail and all content becomes freely available on peer-to-peer networks forever. Never mind that this may never be the case; it is clear that this picture describes a (small) part of the current scenario, and for the sake of argument we might as well consider the case in which it applies generally.

Would there still be a future for media companies? If my earlier conjectures hold, then the answer is yes. If it is true that what audiences consume is media experiences and not content, and that content is no more than an enabler of experiences, then there will always be a market for providers of media experiences.

It may be, for example, that there will always be a market for something akin to television channels--something providing a lean-back way to access an experience that is 'live', is being consumed by many others at the same time (and known, by consumers, to be so), is a subject of conversation, and is suited to certain moods, dayparts, social situations, etc. Other examples include the cinema, newspapers and other practices yet to be invented.

To be sure, providing these experiences will require content, which may be expensive to produce. But the providers of experiences are not consumers--they are companies, and for them content is not free.

Those who say that in the future, if content is widely available, audiences only will rely on personalised, automatic aggregators base their claim on the understanding that what audiences consume is content and not experiences. But an experience that starts by browsing an aggregator, or accepting the recommendation of an automatic 'agent', would totally fail to provide many of the key satisfactions that I get when, e.g., arriving home from work, tired and in need of distraction, I turn on the television and start flicking channels.

None of this is to say that the status-quo will persist, that the media industry won't change radically, or that content will necessarily have the premium it has today. It is only to say that that, precisely because content is not king, it will, ironically, survive as a business.