Information as a service, not a product
My last post about the demise of newspapers got me thinking about the struggles of media companies to transition their businesses into cyberspace. It’s obvious that information is increasingly moving away from physical media (paper, vinyl, magnetic tapes, optical discs, you name it) to an intangible space allowing for cheap, easy, unrestricted distribution of perfect, lossless copies, which is a very, very good thing in my book.
In the old days you made money in media through distribution, not so much creation. With the barrier to distributing content rapidly approaching zero there’s not much money to be made with that. So if you’re a media company, what’s the next logical step - establishing oneself as some sort of service provider, or slowly die by letting the producer cut out the middleman and distribute directly, or something completely different?