Distance Equals Rate Times Time
It’s not often I get to title a post with a Pixies song, but this one seems very relevant, being about both speed and music.
When broadband arrived, it meant that you could download an album, or a song, in minutes, or indeed seconds. The whole inconvenience of something sitting hogging your connection for hours put a lot of people off, I’m sure.
But if you could download a whole album very quickly, and fuel that ‘instant gratification’ thing you’ve got going on (don’t lie, you do…), then hey, why wouldn’t you.
Bang… there goes the music industry.
So, until now, movies were in the ‘pre-broadband’ scenario; sure, some people download content, but it takes ages, and puts a good few people off.
Today, Virgin Media have announced that their superfast 50Mb broadband will allow users to download films in just over three minutes.
The age of film downloads taking hours is about to end. Now all the industry needs is the (real) AV equivalent of the iPod to arrive, and people will want lots and lots and lots of film content… and maybe not want to pay for it.
It’ll be interesting to see how the film industry deal with this differently from the music industry… my gut instinct is ‘not well’.
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