With heartfelt apologies to John Donne, recent events compel me to ask not for whom the bell tolls, but to propose that it tolls, pretty loudly, for CD. And DVD. And HDD. Oh, and of course for Thee (this last a sop to all you literary traditionalists out there).
The news of the last couple of weeks suggests that a long-brewing shift in how we consume our movies, TV shows, music, books, magazines, newspapers and other media is about to speed up, a lot, thanks to several very big kicks in the keister.
What’s it all mean? To start, I’d sell off that optical-disc duping factory if I were you. And you may want to get out of the hard-drive and home networked-storage businesses, too. They’re on the way to buggy-whip status and fast.
All of a sudden, we’re moving a lot more quickly to a world where most of our media content will be sitting up in “the cloud,” on far-away online computers that send us a stream of whatever little slice of media we want, just when we need it, to play on whatever Internet-connected device we happen to be using at the time.
The resulting shifts likely will change the kinds of entertainment we consume (it will be a while before that shakes out, I think), but those shifts definitely are already beginning to change the way we consume them. For evidence of what’s happening, consider the following:
-- Netflix CEO Reed Hastings told shareholders his company is now a streaming business that also delivers DVDs by mail, instead of the other way around, which is how it started. Netflix now accounts for 20 percent of Internet video streaming during prime-time hours, says an analysis by Canadian-based Sandvine.
-- Apple has been a major force toward streaming and away from optical-disc drives and hard-disc drives. Recent announcements include:
o The razor-thin new Air computer models have no optical- or hard-disc drives at all. Even to re-install the system software, you would use an Apple-provided USB flash memory stick.
o Apple was able to ditch the Air’s disc drives because it also announced the creation of an Apps store for its computers, similar to the hugely successful Apps store providing 300,000 small, cheap programs for its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices. Now, Mac users wanting to add a program to their computer won’t need to go to a store to pick up a box full of optical discs.
o Apple also revamped its iTV (née Apple TV) as a tiny box that can stream music and video off any Mac in the house, and pull down 99-cent TV shows from Fox and ABC as well as more expensive movies. You won’t own, or download, any of the shows or movies; they’ll stream onto your TV from the cloud and then go away when you’re done.
o When Apple bought (and killed) music-streaming site LaLa late last year, it took a big step toward creating a music-subscription service through iTunes.
