Media wants to be unchained

Perhaps the cry “media wants to be free” should be renamed.

I was pointed by Fred Wilson this morning to the post Media Wants to be Free (But Not in the Way You Think) over at Trickster, and it is one of the posts to which I linked earlier.

I really like this post because it puts a finger on an issue I’ve ranted about before: the freedom of media movement.

Chervokas touches on the real issue but I don’t think he goes into it enough:

Media companies—producers, owners of programming networks, distributors—had better start thinking not outside the box but outside the device and outside the pipe. That’s the information freedom that consumers want and that consumers will implement whether media companies like it or not.

The point is that as a consumer I want to be able to use my media whenever and wherever I want. This means, more than anything, that companies need to abandon the ancient and abysmal model of forcing me to match media to device and bundle crap with cream.

What’s the most popular media purchase today? Well, it’s probably DVDs, but near the top of the list is the digital single. iTunes is nearing their 1 billionth song downloaded, and this is based on the idea that you can pick the songs you like (the cream) and ditch the rest of the CD (the crap).

As Chervokas points out, consumers have already decided this is how we want to get our media, and since the media companies refuse to give us a structured way to do it, file sharing has run amok.

But this is all sort of ancillary to my main point, which is that the best example i think available to big media is Valve Software. Last year Valve released the sequel to one of the best selling video games of all time, and when they did, they built “DRM” straight into the program, but they let the user take it where they wanted.

I bought, more than the game, a “Steam account.” This account lets me use any computer to log into their system and play the games I’ve paid for. Let me say that again. I can use my login and password to play the games I’ve purchased from them ANYWHERE, ANYTIME. And they know I have only the legal copies I’ve paid for.

I can’t emphasize enough how opening up technology will help it grow. It’s so frustrating to see everyone fighting over digital formats and proprietary technology when all it does is limit sales and hurt the consumer.

Give me one device that plays everything, and give me a file format that plays everywhere, and a way to buy that media (or if it’s video, watch it for free with ads). I’ll play nice, and I have a feeling a lot of other people will, too.