By now, Every Schoolboy Knows that Viacom suing YouTube is a strategically irrelevant ploy to stall the inevitable evolution of the market. All the best people have pointed out that Viacom's best case is for a $1 billion court case to distract and inconvenience Google while they go about the business of remaking Viacom's market. The worst case leaves both parties in court for so many years that by the time they come out the market has shifted to in Google's favour and left Viacom in an even worse negotiating position.
So much, we say, for Viacom.
This is already the conventional wisdom. Today I'd like to consider the counter-view, perhaps purely by way of a gedankenexperiment. Here's the question - what would we have to believe to make Viacom's move a strategically valid one?
At the moment, rights-owners find themselves painted into a technological and cultural corner. The very technology that originally made them rich - mass media, and the possibility of bringing mere concert-hall performers to a global audience via mass replication and distribution, has been taken out of their hands by their former audiences. A scarcity of printing presses, of airwaves, of record factories has become bandwidth so cheap and plentiful it isn't metered. Rights-owners, especially for music but increasingly for film and for TV, are now little more than an atavistic kink in the digital value chain as the real power shifts to MySpace and YouTube and BitTorrent. If it wasn't for the fact that the old game of cinemas and broadcast TV has still to be played out, the new digital game would already have finished them.
What could we possibly believe, therefore, to make Viacom suing Google a good idea?
Perhaps that the current state of mass entertainment technology - effortlessly replicable and shareable film and TV and music - isn't actually history's final word on the matter and that new technologies and cultures will emerge.
Film, in its current incarnation, can't be defended except by temporary litigious maneuvers. Even theatre is heading towards replicable commodity - Avenue Q is on YouTube as much as it is on broadway. But dramatic productions like Punchdrunk's Faust are not and could not be digitally copied. Live music performances have a value that cannot simply be pressed onto a disc (LongTail). The only original artform of the C20th, video gaming, has already found a model that transcends piracy with MMOPGs making the point of the experience collective and the commercial model a levy to play together rather than a fee to own. Blizzard, NCSoft, SOE are essentially insulated from Viacom's travails.
And so the thought experiment becomes...what is the technological and cultural future of mass entertainment? Is film where we end the game, or is there something next? Science fiction provides us with plenty of possible answers. William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy and short story The Winter Market imagine entertainment technologies that feed sensations directly into the brain rather than coming at one remove through a screen into the eyes. Tad Williams' Otherland imagines a next generation, completely immersive synergy between gaming and film. Star Trek's holodeck is perhaps a better known vision of a future direction for mass entertainment.
Science fiction? Really? Yes, really, because I'm not asking you to believe that holodecks will be installed in every Odeon in time for the Viacom/YouTube fight to be resolved. Don't concentrate on the specifics. I'm asking you to consider the possibility that film, TV and music in their current incarnations are not the endpoint of mass entertainment and that something else - we don't know what yet - comes next. That we can't quite yet draw a line under the history of entertainment technology.
(If you want a steer on what comes next, incidentally, keen an eye on the porn industry. Almost every media/entertainment innovation starts out as porn. When the US congress starts thinking about passing laws to stop people having sex with robots, you'll know a new entertainment industry has been born.)
How does any of this help Viacom? I've already pointed out that their current travails are a function of the effortlessly replicable nature of their product. The production and distribution markets for TV, film and music have been utterly transformed by digital. But...the gaming industry is already finding solutions such as MMOGs that move the power back to the centre. The technology and culture of entertainment advances every day. To believe that Viacom should hang in there, you just have to believe that future mass entertainment technologies might not be as easily copied and shared as those currently in fashion. That's not such a big mental leap. And if that's true, there's still a place at the table for a company with expertise in exploiting the global rights to mass entertainment output.
Sure, it's a pretty slender chance to hang a company on. But have you got a better idea?
Update: Now&Next turns out to have a speculative timeline of future innovations (pdf) which predicts "Dream Machines" in about ten years and "Virtual Reality Windows" in about twenty-five. That's just the sort of expensive, unreplicable, hardware-based entertainment platform I'm thinking about. (HT: Adverlab)
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