Will the internet destroy media as we know it?

[on:]

I say Yes.

Back in the Mid 90's everyone was all psyched out because "The information superhighway is going to change everything!"  Now in the mid 2k(10) everyone in the media works are horrified.  Why?  The internet is changing everything!  You can't have this expansive and unlimited media outlet and not completely ovewhelm all other forms of media.


I shed no tears over losing the record industry.  I meant what I said about the 97 grammys.

I'll Miss TV a little bit.  It'll be a fighter, but if the internets unlimited access to free programing doesn't kill it, TIVO will.

Movies I think will still be out there far into the future.  All this hoopla about Pirate DVDs killing the industry, I don't buy it.  People Like going to the movie theaters.

Community theatre will be hit hard.  With the ability to download any show off the internet, the only people in the audience will be frends, realtives, and pirate bootleggers, all of whom will have camcorders. 

[Reply #1 on:]

I don't think so. Things have changed, and things will change. The only way the old media will go away is if the internet becomes fast, safe, reliable, and FREE. TV is free. Cable isn't, and you can tell from the ratings. Also, people watch shows on the internet, but then go and watch them on TV. There is just something about sitting on the couch in front of the idiot box.

Remember in the late 90's, when we were all saying that internet stores would kill retailers? We all know what happened to THAT.

[Reply #2 on:]

Free quality stuff on the internet?  Which internet are you connected to?

[Reply #3 on:]

the internet does seem to be another 99 cent store in a mall..

Maybe sometimes you find a rare gem that has been overlooked (ie peel) but most of it is stupid shit that you don't need, or use once and it breaks...

needless to say it can suck out all your money if you're unlucky..

the news industry no doubt has benefited from the internet giving them fast access to infomation so it's on your screen before it's even happened... i think computers are advancing too quickly and there's too much money involved for people to keep up..
so there's no point developing hightech programs to feed the masses..
you can develop all the technology you can and display it on tv cause you don't need the newest model to see it all.. they will always have a market....


err... did that wander off topic a bit? i hope it makes sense....

[Reply #4 on:]

I would love to see the death of the record industry.  If the internet can help to bring that about, then count me in.  All new music since 1992 has sucked anyway.

I don't think that television is going anywhere, though.  People like sitting on the couch and watching TV just as much as they like going to movie theaters.  Besides, like TheRoyalFamily said, it's free.  The internet isn't, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

I think you're right about movies.  Home video rentals haven't killed movie theaters yet.  Some people must really enjoy paying eight bucks a pop for the privilege of watching a film in a theater with sticky floors.

I'm just going to assume the part about community theatre was a joke.

 

Originally posted by airbagfailure:
the internet does seem to be another 99 cent store in a mall..

Maybe sometimes you find a rare gem that has been overlooked (ie peel) but most of it is stupid shit that you don't need, or use once and it breaks...

needless to say it can suck out all your money if you're unlucky..

That's actually a pretty clever analogy there.  +500xp

[Reply #5 on:]

 

Originally posted by David A:

I'm just going to assume the part about community theatre was a joke.

[Aku]Yes, Samurai,  How very perceptive of you [/Aku]

[Reply #6 on:]

I hope so, TV and popular music is mostly boned anyway. I will personally punch the next director for the next Big Brother or the next crappy piece of so called Soul Music.

[Reply #7 on:]

 

Originally posted by Pitt Clemens:
 [Aku]Yes, Samurai,    How very perceptive of you [/Aku]

Aha, then it is I who have fooled you, evil one; for my statement was meant in jest as well.

[Reply #8 on:]

Records are going to go, replaced by iTunes.

TV I think will be gone as well, but when the internet speeds get up there, there will be an iTunes like store for TV as well.

Movie theaters will go too, mainly because the prices of huge flatscreens will go down enough so that homes can pretty well emulate the theaters.

Community theatere? Don't care one way or another.

[Reply #9 on:]

You of course realise that iTunes barely turns a profit because of the restrictive regulations placed on it through the record industry right.

Something like 95% of iTunes profits goes to mainly the RIAA because of the bullshit laws put in by the RIAA, or rather thier shills in congress.

Link

Sorry I cant find anything more recent, but yeah. iTunes profit margins are Wafer thin. And all that profit has to go towards Programmers, Staff and Servers.

Worst Case Scenario: RIAA stops bothering attempting to remain relevant and just relegates itself to growing fat off the royalties.

I dont own an iPod nor do I intend to. No one forcing DRM onto me and getting TCP entrenched in my life. I might even get a Minidisc just to stick it to the man.

{Sorry, I had just had to get that rant off my chest}

[Reply #10 on:]

I had no idea! Probably because I've been reading those Mac specialty magazines all of the time. Oh, well. That changes most of my predictions.

[Reply #11 on:]

The music industry, being what it is today (sucky).
Well, there might be a few good things out there, but it's
a tedious chore wading throught the muck to find it.
The only place I listen to tunes is in the car.
I don't even listen to enough music any more to warrent a twelve dollar cassette player let alone shelling out 100 o 250 bux for an iPod and then a buck a tune thereafter.
And there will always be some movies worth seeing on a giant screen.
I think TV will be around for a while though, but free over the air waves tv will have to do some major overhauling to compete with cable.
And if idiots would just quit watching all those crappy reality show, the networks will stop making them.
Goddam Geeps (general public)/
Same goes for the movies. Like Henry Rollins says: "As long as people keep paying nine dollars to go see mediocre movies, Hollywood will keep making them."

It wont be the internet that destroys media as we know it...
media as we know it is doing a pretty good job of it all by itself.

[Reply #12 on:]

TV is free? Don't you still have to pay for a TV license if you just use an aerial and not cable?

I don't think teh Internet will kill classic media off completely.
That said, I stopped listening to the media's scare tactics a long time ago.

[Reply #13 on:]

I must say that I honestly don't depend on the media as much anymore.

Growing up on the internet, instead of going out and renting some movies, I just get them bootleg, sometimes I get bootlegs of cancelled shows instead of their respected DVD's. Instead of going to my pathetically understocked retailers(I have still had a replacement xbox on layaway for two weeks now at my EB) I buy from Online stores. I have only bought two albums in my entire life, and they were before I discovered the internet. Instead of buying an entire CD for one or two hit songs, I download them.

I don't think it will destroy media as some people are still computer illiterate, but I do think it's putting a sizable dent in them.

[Reply #14 on:]

 

TV is free? Don't you still have to pay for a TV license if you just use an aerial and not cable?

Ha ha, British Islander. 

Australia and the US don't have TV licences. The broadcast itself is free (except in our case with the ABC and SBS, because they're both government funded - or at least, partially government funded - stations. Hence, some of our taxes go to them.)

[Reply #15 on:]

The media companies are worried because the internet happens to be hurting them at the moment.  Some of them didn't expect that their old tactics, often used for decades, would suddenly be so challenged by this new force in media.  The record companies, after having a monopoly on the industry for so long, have suddenly been challenged by internet downloads.  Television ratings are way down across the board at the moment, largely because many people have started using the internet (among other things, like dvd players and video games) as their pastimes instead.

The internet is not going to kill these things though; not by a long shot.  They're just going through a difficult growing pain, where they're forced to adapt to this new technology.  Some of them have already accepted it and began to adapt, like the record companies participating in the iPod and similar programs.  The internet isn't going to kill these forms of media; its just gradually changing the way these forms of media are going to work in the future.

Community theater is a non-factor.  It wasn't killed by movies or television or anything else, so its not going to die now.  It exists largely for the community element itself, and to provide people who want to perform the means to perform.

[Reply #16 on:]

After reading the article Col.Kink posted, I am more angry than before with the RIAA.

-What do you think about MP3s?

"PIRACY!  THEFT!  ILLEGAL!  UNETHICAL!  IT HURTS THE INDUSTRY, THE ARTISTS, AND MOST IMPORTANTLY THE LISTENERS!

-OK, what do you think about iTunes?

"iTunes are awsome.  We usurp all the profits, and funnel the money into buying Usher a new ass-polisher."

OK, so it's OK for THEM to release an unlimited ammount of copies from a zero-overhead source, while they turn a profit, but it's not OK for US to do it for free?

Greedy bitches.  You time is almost up.   Taste my bankrupsy.

 

Originally posted by DrThunder88:
Free quality stuff on the internet?  Which internet are you connected to?

The non-dialup one.  The one with Bit torrent clients and *.ogg files on it.

Multilingual, multi angle, subtitleable AVI files? Are you Shitting me?

Welcome to the world of tomarrow.

[Reply #17 on:]

 

Originally posted by Pitt Clemens:
I'll Miss TV a little bit.  It'll be a fighter, but if the internets unlimited access to free programing doesn't kill it, TIVO will.

TIVO won't kill TV, TIVO is suffering pretty badly from what i've read and is only going anywhere in the US, i've hardly seen anything about it here. And what about free programming here? Channels 1-5 are free, as are the ~40 channels on "Freeview". Minus the annual "TV Licence" that everyone pays anyway.

The internet is not going to make a big, unreversable change for a while yet. Not enough homes have PCs, not enough PCs have fast enough internet access and 99% of people that use a PC are idiots. A TV you turn on and it's there, a PC you need to download codecs, install programs, find content...

[Reply #18 on:]

Nope, won't happen. The technology will be different (just like when television, then VCRs came about), but I think you're underestimating the ability for big business to capitalise on the distribution of things that people want.

Sure, the stuff Pitt mentions there ^ is great, but only because the very nature of these subversive technologies make them accessible by only a (relative) minority (especially in the case of Bit Torrent, but that's starting to fail because it's now massively popular.)

Once the masses catch onto a good thing it is brought to the attention of the pop culture vendors (RIAA, MPAA, etc) and, fearing for their bottom lines, they will either seek to destroy it or consume it (or in the case of P2P mp3s, first try to destroy it, then consume it.) It then becomes the same thing as TV, music CDs, etc - just in a different format.

A good little consumer who logs onto the AOL portal, buys songs through iTunes and gets the latest Gwen Steffani video clip sent to their 3G cell phone isn't subverting the media, because the traditional media has consumed the technology.

The technology may change, but it's going to be the same people behind the new media as was behind the old.

I think a lot of the battle will cease to be about the distribution and will focus on consumer's perceptions (hence the whole "it's stealing" push from the RIAA and MPAA). Why do you even think that people use ITMS, when they can obviously get the same stuff for free with LimeWire? It's because of a perception of quality and validity associated with the 'legal' product. Excluding poor-ass students, the vast majority of people are going to choose to pay a little extra if, in their minds, they're getting something of quality, and traditional media outlets are in a prime position - with their established marketing divisions and consumer recognition - to offer things that the public perceives as being worth paying for. Besides, people are already conditioned to expect to have to make a financial sacrifice in order to receive goods or services.

That won't be an easy attitude to change outside of college campuses - and it's a good thing that it won't. The whole success of the western capitalist model relies on consumers forking out for life's luxuries. The best thing that can come from the whole Internet free-for-all of current times is that it will get traditional media vendors off their asses and into providing inventive, high quality, legal alternatives to head off the threat (good capitalism) - as opposed to protecting their profits by sacrificing ingenuity around them through lawsuits and perversion of intellectual property laws (bad capitalism).

In the end, the consumer will be the winner.

[Reply #19 on:]

Well, I don't care what format it takes as long as the record companies keep turning out artists like Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson and TV networks keep turning out quality programming like the OC and Fear Factor...

   

Originally posted by SlackJawedMoron:
 Ha ha, British Islander.   

Australia and the US don't have TV licences. The broadcast itself is free (except in our case with the ABC and SBS, because they're both government funded - or at least, partially government funded - stations. Hence, some of our taxes go to them.)

We have PBS, which is made possible by a grant from the Such-and-such Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and viewers like you.

[Reply #20 on:]

 

Originally posted by DrThunder88:
Well, I don't care what format it takes as long as the record companies keep turning out artists like Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson and TV networks keep turning out quality programming

STOP IT! My sides are hurting!

[Reply #21 on:]

I say it will put a dent in the current business models of some of the industries you mentioned, but it won't destroy them.

My major concern in this area is the erosion of fair use rights that many in these industries are advocating under the guise of copyright protection.  I can understand why they want to keep control of distribution of their products, but the methods they are pushing are unacceptable to me and hopefully many others.  Things like DRM and proposed hardware lockouts try to correct the issue by assuming everyone is a potential thief.  That's the lazy (and ultimately ineffective) way around the copyright issue.  I'm not going to spend my good money on a crippled product.

[Reply #22 on:]

 

Originally posted by SlackJawedMoron:
 Ha ha, British Islander.   

Oi!
We're not the ones with the queen on some of our coins and have the british flag sneakily in the corner of our flag! 

[Reply #23 on:]

Wrong... we have the queen on all of our coins.

How utterly depressing.

[Reply #24 on:]

im with ~FazeShift~, i live in australia and i would do anything to have our contry become a republic.

[Reply #25 on:]

*agrees with ben*..it is depressing.. it shouldn't bother us.. but at least we still have the ABC and SBS...the best channels on our free to air tv..

All this talk of video clips on your cell (or mobile) phone jut seems unnecessary... bah... who cares... who needs it.. that's not communication..

and yes, i'm getting an mp3 player of sorts, but it's to store the music i already own so i don't have to cart around my cd case and cd player when i travel next..

phew..

[Reply #26 on:]

Bumped to continie discussing piracy and the like.

Link

Fairly predicatable, although I doubt there is too much room in the market for all artists to do Product endorsments, and unless theres a culture there wont be as large an amount of money to be made from concerts as there are from Cd's. Since these are all things that big time artists do, whereas its the small time artists who are struggling to make a profit because of the weighted contracts they are forced to sign upto.

Link

[Reply #27 on:]

There will certainly be a change in how media is used (a change that can already be seen) but that change is slow and won't necessarily 'destroy' today's media. Companies and consumers will adapt as they always have done. If anything, the internet brought few new innovations, it's just made media more accessible. Something that big business is keen to capitalize on.

Every so often a new bit of technology comes along that gets 'concerned citizens' up in arms. TV, computers, telephones, even the steam engine came under fire when it first appeared. These inventions did change our way of life, but didn't kill off what came before it. Otherwise none of us would talk face to face now, what with all these telephones everywhere 

It's easy to say that the possibilities for the Internet are daunting, but those possibilities will most likely be ignored. The idea of everyone downloading free music and destroying 'Teh Evil Music Industry(TM)' is plausible so long as the industry sits on it's ass and does nothing to stop us. On the contrary, these companies are becoming very involved in the Internet, as evidenced by iTunes. The internet is really a double-edged sword, as these companies can just as easily up their profits by utilising it just as much as we can piss them off.

[Reply #28 on:]

But they arent becoming involved in the internet, they are trying to kill it off as evidenced by iTunes, you didn't read the link I posted did you?

[Reply #29 on:]

i say it will only make a big dent. im probbably wrong it may be bigger.