Channels

You'd think I had a lot of time on my hands lately, but in truth I've been quite busy -- just a lot of thoughts popping into my head. I'm getting better at blogging these. Another similar line of thought that I came across today. Inspiration piece number one was a podcast from a speech that Paul Graham gave at OSCON 2005, the next was a blog from Mark Cuban that I found through an article on Slate. The thought was about channels, as in distribution channels. Paul generalized this in such a beautiful way so that it represents exactly what is really happening. Channels are the aggregate of what businesses push towards us. There used to be such a high cost to getting a product to a consumer that these channels were created to add value in the aggregate. In the digital age, the barrier to this entry is much lower, and yet we still see businesses clinging to the traditional model. Why is that? It turns out that there is a lot of power built up in the distribution channels, and they don't want to give up that power easily. That brings me to the article on Slate, which leads us into where this power is. Wal-mart is clinging to the "video window", which is an agreement between them and content publishers to not allow pay-per-view or any other broadcast of content withing 45 days of a DVD release. What this basically adds up to is that this channel doesn't want to compete with other channels for a certain amount of time. Soak this in for a sec, and I think you'll start to see that the tail is wagging the dog. A single channel is making decisions for consumers about which other channels they can use. That is real power. Mark's proposal is to charge a variable price depending on the date of release. This is an intriguing proposal, and I'd like to see how it pans out. I don't doubt that he is going to keep pushing the boundaries of distribution. Good luck, Mark! Another quirk that brought this to my attention today was a song I heard last night. It was at the very end of the E-Ring episode Toy Soldiers. After some digging on the NBC forums for the show, I found the title of the song was Breathe Me by Sia. The fact that I had to dig into viewer comments to get this information is just ridiculous, but that is a topic for another post. I immediately went to iTunes to try and purchase this song. It turns out that the song was only available for purchase as part of an album (Six Feet Under: Everything Ends, Vol. 2). Someone please explain to me why a single song that is basically part of a mix tape only available as a single song? There wasn't even a discount for buying the entire album. Seriously... this is some kind of a joke, right?