You'll have seen by now that the UK's largest independent TV broadcaster, ITV, plans to learn from the mistakes of the music industry and keep control of its content as that content moves online. This is just a brief note to point out that the music industry's mistake was not to hand copyright over to iTunes but to persist in the fantasy that content creation was the core source of its value.
(Think about it this way - if content creation the source of value why did the money in the pre-digital music industry so often end up in the hands of the companies that marketed the music, not in the hands of the guys who wrote and played it? Why indeed are newspaper owners so rich and journalists not? Why has Google - that finds and validates content - scaled online while the New York Times - that produces it - has not?)
If ITV plans to become a major online destination for TV content it has probably already missed the boat. If it wants to keep its content off third-party electronic programme guides, search engines, aggregators and filtering tools it's not clear how anyone will find that content (this is the elementary Sam Zell/Google strategic error). This is just another page in the story of pre-digital content businesses trying to replicate those businesses in the digital world and misunderstanding which aspect of their pre-digital business created value, and indeed still exists in the new world.
Update: ...and in comments Ben Metcalfe (whose blog, here, I just subbed: you might want to do the same) points out that ITV in any case "doesn't own many/any of the programs it broadcasts and so strictly speaking it's not their content to decide what happens with it online". A very good point and one I'd entirely overlooked - ITV isn't going to be the driver here given its contribution to the party has always been a gateway (license and equipment to broadcast) which digital entirely obviates. Look at what's happening to music labels - the bands are beginning to just cut them out of the loop.
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