Humanity's cultural back-catalogue

Marc Andreessen writes today about the potential disruption to Hollywood coming from the ongoing writers' strike, reprising his message that the strike is suicidal from the point of view of both the studios and the writers and pointing out that a new model of VC-funded media (film) creation is the likely end-point for this particular round of the digital media revolution.

I draw a different message from the strike, and it's not to do with how new content can get made when the writers and the studios won't talk to one another.

The world already contains more TV programming, more films, more music, more books and more computer games than I could ever consume enjoy in a lifetime. Unless you expect to live forever (an expectation that, for people in the developed world under sixty in reasonable health, I'd put at about 50/50, but that's another issue for another day) you don't need one hour of new TV programming to entertain you, unless you include the news (which is still being produced by all sorts of people on a 24-hour rolling basis) and news satire (pretty much ditto). The challenge thrown up by the premature closing down of Lost, 24 etc et al really isn't "how then will we fund the creation of the next Lost?" It's "how then will people find all the TV shows / books / music / films already out there that they don't know about yet but would keep them entertained for the rest of their lives?"

The world already contains answers to those questions, some brilliant (TIOTI) some bad (Amazon recommendations) some easily improvable but perfectly adequate to purpose (Pandora, Last.fm). For these technologies to really come into their own as engines for discovering and distributing the vast wealth of humanity's cultural back-catalogue all that really needs to happen is for the studios and other rights-owners to die and the catalogue to open up to unfettered sharing.

So here's to a drawn-out, suicidal struggle between studios and writers. Let's hope they can keep it up well beyond the current prediction of June 2008.