How To Cut Your Cable Bill – or maybe not….

What’s on?

Technology moves fast.

The law moves slowly.

And as the curve in Moore’s Law becomes more and more hockey stick, technological change will move ever faster.
Alas, there is no Moore’s Law for the law so an ever -widening gap will continue to divide the two.

The technology increasingly militates for cheaper and cheaper content and greater sharing.

Conventional media companies were all built on the foundations of two ideas:

-content was expensive and difficult to create
-putting that content into people’s homes was also expensive and difficult to do

Both of these basic premises have now been blown away by the miracle of Moore’s Law and the ever increasing speed and decreasing cost of digital techhology.

This technical revolution does not sit well with conventional media companies

In fact, it undercuts their entire reason for being.

But, like Dylan Thomas says “do not go gentle into that good night”. And, as MItt Romney ways, ‘corporations are people, my friend’.  So when corporations are threatened with death, they also don’t go gently.

And when you can not longer pull another technological trick out of your bag to save your ass, you resort to the last hope of the dying – the law.

Two weeks ago, mogul Barry Diller announced the launch of a novel new cloud-based broadcasting technology calledAERO.

AERO is uber-cool.  It essentially brings broadcast networks to your hand-held devices and lets you watch TV over the web.

This is great.

I am tired of paying $225 a month for cable service and being chained to my set top box.

Just what I was waiting for.

Me and probably about 200 million other people.

AERO is launching its first service in Brooklyn. They charge $12 a month, which is a lot cheaper then $225.

Their motto is:   “Live Broadcast TV, meet the Internet. Finally. With Aereo you can now watch live, broadcast television online. On devices you already have. No cable required.”

Of course, there are massive ‘re-transmission’ issues here. But AERO would seem to have a case.  Individuals are allowed to receive broadcast signals and record them on a personal level. This is just a lot of personal recording, Diller has argued.

Maybe…

But this ignores the elephant in the room. The technology exists to obviate cable.  It is here already.  The networks may strive hardily to suppress this technology and they may succeed… for a while (see Napster becomes iTunes).  Ultimately, the technology wins out.

Always.

Do you think Borders liked Amazon.com?

Do you think legions of horse trainers liked automobiles.

Once technology rears its ugly head, get out of the way – or get on board.

Last week, broadcasters filed a suit to shut down AERO, which is scheduled to start service on March 12.

The lawsuit will certainly slow down the inevitable. But it is inevitable.

Broadcasters would be smarter to get behind the technology instead of standing in front of it.

But history tells us that is unlikely as well.

Otherwise, Kodak would have owned digital cameras.
And NBC would own AERO.

Which they don’t.

**And a tip o’ the hat to Mike Tannen, who turned me on to this piece of news.

 

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