In the last decade, tech evangelist praised the value of “Content” as the real value in todays and future technological society.
The truth couldn’t be any further from those predictions.
The value of music has dropped to such levels that caused an unprecedented crisis in the Industry. Today any musician can afford to produce it’s own album and distribute it over the internet thanks to it’s personal computer equiped with pro-consumer hardware/software. The Artic Monkeys were one of such cases. The music industry realized this paradigm too late, and is now facing the consequences (decreased revenues, and artists breaking their contracts and going independent).
If such can be said of Music, the same couldn’t have been said of Movies. But their time is getting close. You Tube showed the way for consumers to start doing their own movies, but pro-consumers, and director wannabes are starting to popup around the web.
Watch the movie in here.
It proves that big productions and special effects are no longer a monopoly of big studios. It’s open to all thanks to new computers (with processing capabilities several order of magnitude superior to CGI farms of the late last century).
The new question is now:
“If content tends to be free, who or what will pay for further innovation? (the old paradigm supposedly supported corporate sponsored research)”
One can say that Open Source Software shows the way to go, but what about Hardware? Will the future be made of User Generated Content ?
I have a strong reluctance into believing such world…