Are You Content with The Future of Content?

There’s an interesting article over on Content Agenda regarding the future of content. There’s a few nuggets of wisdom to be found, and if you aren’t keeping a close eye on the way media delivery is rapidly changing, this might be of interest:

Piracy of digital content has become something of a big business in its own right. Recently, an incomplete version of the upcoming summer movie X-Men Origins: Wolverine leaked out, perhaps one of the earliest leaks of a major Hollywood movie to date. Perhaps more interesting, a reviewer for Fox News got into hot water when he reviewed the unfinished movie–ironically, a movie by another News Corp. affiliate, 20th Century Fox.

Meanwhile, the much-ballyhooed trial of the bad, bad boys who run The Pirate Bay tracking site were found guilty. The comments from The Pirate Bay organizers in response to the verdict reads much like something right out of one of Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan graphic novels.

Then there’s the ongoing battle between Hulu and just about any non-browser device or software maker who wants to embed content streamed from Hulu into their device, particularly Boxee.

Finally, Stardock Software has become a victim of software piracy, something the company has tried to avoid by eliminating content protection from their games, which removes one of the major annoyances of PC games. Stardock published Gas Powered Games Demigod, but the game was released a day early by one retailer. Shortly afterwards, Stardock’s servers were hammered by multiplayer game play requests–most of them from illegal copies of the game. A patch or two later, and the pirates can no longer annoy actual owners of Demigod. Still, it’s something of a lesson learned for the Michigan software company, who is trying in all sincerity to develop content protection that serves the needs of game developers without annoying users.

What does all this mean? It means that how we look at content (no pun intended) is evolving at a rate so rapid, the legal system and purveyors of content simply can’t keep up. Trying to find successful business models for writing and disseminating news has become one of the major challenges of the 21st century. While citizen journalism is well and good, it costs serious time and money to do good investigative journalism. Who will pay for that if all news is aggregated coverage by bloggers?

Entertainment media, like music, movies, games, and television are trying to adopt the Web, but are mired in old business models that are both location based and hard goods based.

I can only agree that I don’t know the future, but I’ll be watching just like you.