Mayhem & Chaos Blog

Blogging

No time...

A killer wedding, an awesome music festival, an amazing Faire, a wonderful birthday party for my Mom and traveling to London leaves no time for blogging. :-(

I hope to fix this soon! Anyone up for getting a beer in London this thursday evening?

Dumbshit Dept.

The media industry starts feeling the heat -- finally!

CNN just posted a piece about TV viewership being down by 2.5 million people in the last two months:

In TV's worst spring in recent memory, a startling number of Americans drifted away from television the past two months: More than 2.5 million fewer people were watching ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox than at the same time last year, statistics show.

Everyone has a theory to explain the plummeting ratings: early Daylight Savings Time, more reruns, bad shows, more shows being recorded or downloaded or streamed.

Similarly CD sales have collapsed in the last few months. Down 20% in the US over last year. Down 35% in Canada. A good friend of mine recently quipped:

If you run a business and you have a 20% drop in sales, you better start touching up your resume. A 20% drop is a death knell!

At 35% you can see that you're going to be out of business real soon now! We saw it coming and we've been waiting for this to happen for a long time now. Finally!

New technology to enjoy TV/music in new ways has reached the masses and the majors are not equipped to deal with the shift. For years the majors have been bucking the trends, trying to stem the inevitable changes that technology and the Internet brings. Consumers have been asking for new ways to get music/content and the majors have refused -- the end result is rampant piracy because stealing is much easier than buying.

The majors should've embraced technology and rolled out a transition strategy. CD sales declining was inevitable and the majors should've made up for it by selling content online. But their greed or lack of vision (probably more greed, since there were lots of people spouting all sorts of good advice all along!) caused them to stall the transition. They were capable of doing it -- all the previous transitions (e.g. LP -> CD) worked hugely in their favor.

And now they are not ready. They can't keep track of where viewers are. Did they leave? Maybe. Are there fewer of them? Sure. Most TV/Movies/Music sucks these days, so you're loosing audience left and right. Consumers have made the shift, the majors have not. Fewer viewers, fewer sales means less money. The majors slacked and are now feeling the heat.

I think things are going to be real interesting for the rest of this year. Before the year is out I would expect to see lay-offs happening in all of the major old-skool media houses. Some of it will be butt-ugly too: For instance this drop in sales makes it more clear why SoundExchange is strong-arming the CBR to change the web casting royalties. They have to make up for lost revenue somehow.

The lion has been driven into the corner and he's starting to lash out at anything that gets near it. The end is going to be ugly. Really ugly. And its going to be fun to watch!

DRM

HD-DVD DRM Encryption key fiasco

Wow. Never in my wildest dreams did I see this coming. I'm sure you all know that the HD-DVD key was leaked and posted all over the internet. There are soo many things wrong/right with this:

1. You can't copyright a number.
2. You can't hide anything on the internet.
3. HD-DVD was the sponsor of Digg and thus Digg did the idiotic thing of cancelling accounts and nuking HD-DVD related postings. Digg is a community site and this is the best way to kill a community -- you can't play the hand of god and start interfering with people and not upset the community. I would've thought that Digg undestood this -- it appears that they do now.
4. This "accident" may let HD-DVD win the war with Blue-ray! Just think, if the linux community can play HD-DVDs on their machines, but not the Blue-ray DVDs, then Linux geeks will favor HD-DVD!
5. DRM doesn't work. Dumbasses!

I'm amazed at how this shook out -- I can't wait to see what else will happen with this!

UPDATE: Bryan asked why I didn't include the magic string of numbers. Good question! For good measure: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0