DOES THE INTERNET POSE A THREAT to established entertainment companies? Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang lead a class at Carnegie Mellon University in which a student recently put that question to a visiting executive. He pooh-poohed the idea: “The original players in this industry have been around for the last 100 years, and there’s a reason for that.” As co-heads of CMU’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics, Messrs. Smith and Telang aim to counter this line of thought, and in Streaming, Sharing, Stealing they do just that, explaining gently yet firmly exactly how the internet threatens established ways and what can and cannot be done about it. Their book should be required for anyone who wishes to believe that nothing much has changed.
At one chain, the top 100 movie titles accounted for 85% of the DVDs rented in-store. But online, the top titles make up only 35% of rentals.
That such thinking still exists, at a time when Apple and Alphabet (that is, Google) are by far the world’s most valuable corporations, is testament to the power of self-delusion. Whether in music or movies or television or books, digital technology has given artists the tools to strike out on their own, enabled audiences to avoid paying for anything they don’t want to pay for and denied media companies the ability to control audience behavior. No longer can executives in New York or Los Angeles force music fans to buy an entire album instead of a single song; or movie buffs to line up at the box office for something they’d rather watch at home free; or television audiences to rush home and endure a barrage of ads in order to see their favorite shows. Remember NBC’s “Must See TV”? Not if you’re under 30.
Books: Digital Life |
Swept Away by the StreamBinge Times, by Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski“Is the Albanian army going to take over the world?” Old-media conglomerates famously dismissed Netflix when it was a fledgling startup. Time Warner, Blockbuster: Where are they now?
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After the DisruptionSystem Error, by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy WeinsteinThe digital transition was always going to be a messy one—look at the antitrust fights that followed the telephone during the analog era.
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The New Big BrotherThe Age of Surveillance Capitalism, by Shoshana ZuboffTech companies have shown themselves to be increasingly cavalier with our personal data. Are we handing over too much information?
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The Promise of Virtual RealityDawn of the New Everything, by Jaron Lanier
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When Machines Run AmokLife 3.0, by Max TegmarkThe author was taken aback when he observed an AI program teach itself to play an arcade game—and play it much better than its human designers.
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The World’s Hottest GadgetThe One Device, by Brian MerchantApple’s iPhone—a 21st-century American icon—could not exist without the labors of Bolivian miners and Chinese factory workers.
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Soft Skills and Hard ProblemsThe Fuzzy and the Techie, by Scott Hartley
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Confronting the End of PrivacyData for the People, by Andreas Weigend
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We’re All Cord Cutters NowStreaming, Sharing, Stealing, by Michael D. Smith and Rahul TelangWhat happens when media executives refuse to believe the Internet is a challenge to their businesses?
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Augmented Urban RealityThe City of Tomorrow, by Carlo Ratti and Matthew ClaudelCan smartphone connectivity and shared data solve the problems of crowded cities?
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Word Travels FastWriting on the Wall, by Tom StandageTwitter and Facebook are just the latest incarnations of a tradition that dates back 2,000 years, Tom Standage says.
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The book opens with an emblematic story about House of Cards, the Netflix political drama that upended television, not just because it didn’t come from a conventional network or because the whole first season was released at once but because Netflix dispensed with the pilot process and put up $100 million to produce 26 episodes sight unseen. What looked from the outside like a stunt was a considered investment. Because Netflix has finely grained information about its subscribers—their likes, dislikes, viewing histories—the company can make determinations that television networks, which see audiences through a Nielsen lens that reduces viewers to demographic blobs, cannot.
Data gets you not just granularity but clarity. Do low-cost e-books cannibalize the sales of expensive hardcovers? No, it turns out that people who want one format were never likely to consume the other. What about piracy? Evidence suggests that it does indeed hurt music and video producers, though hardly as much as they claim. Efforts to fight piracy have been shown to cut down on illicit downloads and increase sales; so does a strategy of making more titles available legally. What doesn’t work is conducting business as usual.

STREAMING, SHARING, STEALING: Big Data and the Future of Entertainment
by Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang