The Future of the Content Business

Paid content is making a comeback, but the numbers show the kings have changed.

The content business is all about creating and selling music, videos, pictures and words.

When the Internet first came out, all of these were drastically affected.

For the first time in history, free content coming straight from the creators became widely available and competed with paid content. To make things worse, there was piracy.

Copyright became almost impossible to enforce. The industry tried to tackle it using law suits and various digital rights management (DRM) methods. None of them worked really well.

Today we are closer to solving the problem.But unlike what many would like to think, the solution didn’t really come from technology; it was through scale and price point.

Sure, technology helped, but technology itself wasn’t the main driver. Technology, as always, is an enabler. It can enable solutions (native apps and content encryption), but it can also enable problems (think Napster and Pirate Bay).

Piracy begun to lose the war when content became so easily available and so cheap that it became inconvenient to deal with low quality pirated versions, long downloading time and the risk of malware.