When will media providers learn that their platforms have become irrelevant? Seriously, no-one cares how they get the songs/movies/TV shows they want, as long as they get them when they want.
This, to me, seems to be quite a few steps shy of rocket science.
I read somewhere that when MP3s became all the rage and record companies were trying their best to shut the whole thing down, they had an argument somewhat like this:
"You have not been buying songs, you have been buying songs on CDs. You are buying music on that format, and you do not have the right to separate the music from that format, it's a package deal."
The audience responded something like this: "For real? We never thought about it before, because we never had a way to get the songs off. Do now though, catch you later. Are you crying? No seriously, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my hard-drive".
Say I want to watch a television show that I love. It is screened in America on Thursday. Living where I do, my only option is to download the show illegally. This is not hard. It will be beamed to the television in my house in the conventional way, but it could be in two weeks, two months or two years time. I have suffered through years of television stations treating me like garbage. Given the chance to avoid them, and irritate them in the process, why would anyone resist? Technology - driven by people - has kept moving to circumnavigate the faulty part of the process - television providers. I can now plug my computer into my television, or beam AVI files wirelessly to my Playstation 3. I now only need my TV for the screen.
Thing is, I'd still happily watch TV on TV stations if they'd give me a shot. I buy TV on DVD, I'm giving them my money when I can. But if you screen shows a month after they were shown - and widely discussed on the internet that I can view everyday because you do not control that - or show shows later than advertised, or not at all, or at weird times, or you cancel every show that is good, well ...
... I'm only like this because you trained me to be.
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