A New Approach
Last night, whilst a mate and I were bitching about how the obtrusiveness of Sky's adverts spoilt our enjoyment of Battlestar Galactica, I happened to mention that consumer electronics really should be rethunk. My mate agreed. I got stuck trying to describe my vision of technological utopia. When my mate piped-up saying that what we needed were huge storage arrays. When you buy a DVD you pop it into your DVD player and watch it as normal. Whilst watching it the system also copies it to your array. Hence, once you have watched the DVD once you never need the original media again. Great idea. But it'll never work.
Well, actually, it could work. It's just that it'll never be allowed to work. I've been thinking about the development of media in the 21st century quite a lot recently. As yet I can draw no real conclusions, except that mostly the problems are not technological. Which is nice. Because contemplation of thesenon-technological issues which I find most fascinating. I'm not helped by the fact that I'm having problems turning up hard data but what I can find only makes me think more (and a recent Vagueware post has made me think some more too).
Consider:
TV advertising in the UK generates £4 Billion a year. Counting only people with TV licences this figure is only 56p per person per day. Of course everybody pays for advertising. It's an indirect cost of the goods we buy. A tax levied by the market as it were. But I think I'd happily pay 56p PER PROGRAM on top of the advertising tax just to be rid of irritating commercials for the five or so programs I actively sit down to watch on a weekly basis. Now, given that a single episode of the sort of thing I like to watch costs up to $3Million, if I could find 3 million people who feel the same way then together we could commission our own episodes. And watch them advert free. Once we've done this there is nothing stopping us from selling broadcast rights too... thereby receiving a rebate on the aforementioned advertising tax.
I feel the need to contemplate this some more. Because although this sounds awfully simple it's not. And just trying to contemplate the effects on the status-quo has wasted a whole morning. But still. I don't think I'm alone when I suggest the time has come to change some things about the way we interact with our media. We need a new approach...