A few recent developments remind me of previous posts I've written about gadgets and content.
First, the Fortune piece on Ray Ozzie's reinvention of Microsoft around web services, and its mention of Live Drive and Google's Gdrive:
Microsoft is planning to use its server farms to offer anyone huge amounts of online storage of digital data. It even has a name for that future service: Live Drive. With Live Drive, all your information - movies, music, tax information, a high-definition videoconference you had with your grandmother, whatever - could be accessible from anywhere, on any device.
Google apparently has similar plans. An internal memo accidentally posted online in March spoke of company efforts to "store 100 percent of user data" and mentions an unannounced Net-storage system called GDrive.
Second, ABC's plan to offer free prime-time shows on the net with ads that can't be skipped.
Third, Philips patent of a set-top-box that won't let consumers skip through ads.
What all this points two is a media world of dematerialisation, where the concept of 'property' (not in the sense of my previous post) loses significance for consumers. Media companies' response to the widespread availability of pirated content seems to be to concentrate on the experience, which is spot on. As I've argued many times before, consumers don't consume content: they engage in practices around it, and it is these practices that they seek and are willing to pay for. The practice of downloading pirated content, managing the files, backing them up, burning them to a DVD, is a messy and geeky one. It's much better to get a Roku box and pay Rhapsody a small monthly fee to get a steady supply of pleasant, evocative, elegant experiences. There will always be a market for providers of media experiences.
It's not only consumers who care about practices (whether they see this or not): the same is true of advertisers, who care about ad recall, product associations, brand identity and things for which context is key. Even without advertising, consumer-facing media operations focus on the experience, not the content. Subscription services (e.g. HBO) don't just well content: they sell nicely packaged, nicely scheduled content, presented with a smooth voice over nice elegant graphics that make the consumer feel special (or alternative, hip, etc).
What about the pleasure of owning content? Owning, and all the enjoyments that go with it, is no more that yet another practice. I own my personal contacts, even if they are spread accross Exchange servers, PDAs, mobile phones, etc and I don't have anything physical to keep. Or even better, even if I lose a physical thing, I still have my contacts because they are somewhere in the cloud, somewhere only I (and my boss) can reach. That's close enough to ownership in the good old physical sense.
In the future we will care less and less about files and about content. They will both be seen as the invisible enablers of experiences that they've always been.
And finally, what about the devices that make all this happen? We will always like some of them, and there will always be luxury options, but they will generally be simple, thin, cheap, and totally replaceable (i.e. commodities) much like TVs are today. They main task won't be the delivery of content - they will only be the edge (in Umair Haque's term) of a cloud whose mission will be to enable experiences. Our payments will be for the whole cloud and not for the device - which may well be subsidised or free.
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