Monday May 16, 2011 – Myra Moore
You know the old saw: Content is King. I’m not delusional enough to suggest that has changed, and, in fact, it hasn’t. But the quest for convenience has become almost as important as having access to high-value content when it comes to entertainment media consumption.
It’s more common now that we no longer hold in our hands the media we purchase – CDs, DVDs, newspapers, videogames, etc. The devices that we hold in our hands do the work of accessing the media we consume, which, we are told, will be lounging about in the cloud not cluttering up our hard drives, and providing us with greater ease of access from multiple devices.
Traditionally, “access” means watching all you can eat from the plate that your pay TV service provider puts in front of you for about $40-$100 a month. The only thing you hold in your hand is a remote control. It’s a pretty clean transaction, or, at the very least, one that most of us understand.
Now that we’ve got these devices that let us access media from most anywhere we are, providers understandably want to figure out how to extract as much value as possible for providing this convenience. We may not have to give over actual cash (so says Google and Amazon as they formulate their cloud strategies that they tell us are free, for a limited amount of cloud real estate), but in the “matter of fact” words of Bob Dylan, we all know that in exchange for this nice convenience “we’re gonna have to serve somebody.” It is, after all, a transactional relationship.
What exactly is being transacted? Well, in exchange for getting to park your stuff on someone’s cloud, the cloud landlords get greater access to you in hopes that you will buy more media/stuff from them (assuming the content owners play nice with them). But more importantly the cloud owners just get plain old access to consumers and who they are, what they buy, what movies they watch, what books they buy, where they are, what concert they’re going to on Saturday night, etc. This isn’t news. We’ve all heard the Orwellian nightmares and the opposite utopian views regarding the ease of only being told/sold what we want to hear/buy.
So, what more is there to talk about? I’ve got one question: Do consumers care?
Maybe consumers don’t care if they don’t own what’s in the cloud and that the cloud owners can use their personal information to sell to advertisers. Minus the factor of personal media ownership, millions of people have signed up for that transactional relationship with Facebook – without batting an eye.
When it comes to your media and/or documents that you’ve always “owned” how important is it that you can’t hold it in your hand? My guess is that most people will say “not so much” as long as they get headache-free access to their (or formerly known as “their”) content.
Still, there are many unanswered questions about the rules for content hanging out on a cloud that may cause some to pause and think before hitting the “I Agree” button on a terms and conditions box. What if someone hacks into my cloud? What if law enforcement wants to know about my music/book/comic book collection; do agents serve me a search warrant or just ask my cloud landlord to tell them? How do I take my stuff to another cloud if I don’t like the one I’m on? What if the content owner tells my cloud landlord to delete a certain piece of content from my cloud? These are all important questions that will most likely be answered by current or future cloud landlords. Why will the cloud landlords get to answer the questions? Because most of us will click the “I Agree” button.
