Nice article about the death of Viacom and the end of traditional media industries. Ironic that it's written by one of the TheStreet guys - still more ironic that they've finally woken up to the fact that this industry doesn't need (rights) protection, it needs revolution. We get fresh examples of this every day.
On another note, Cory's speech about DRM that's flying around the Net is nice, but seriously old hat - the question now is, what happens next? I've heard endless arguments by analogy to previous technological shifts for media (ie phonograph, etc, etc). I think these are no valid arguments.
Here's why: None of these previous innovations actually
altered the fundamental economics of media; they simply changed the size of the structures involved (ie, printing presses and phonographs lower entry barriers to consumption of their various media). So media industries haven't needed to change in a very long time. And they've ended up in a very nasty place - one where hypercompetition and strategic myopia have created massive zero-sum winner-take-all dynamics fueled by marketing and licensing wars.
But the Net
does fundamentally alter the economics of media - it actually vaporizes the old media economics, and creates entirely new structures and mechanisms, like distributed economies of scale, massively multilateral contracts, replication chains, so...but my ideas are fairly well known by now - let's see if they pan out.