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All Roads Don't Lead to Disney

In my Brainstorm 2006 panel this morning, I was a somewhat lonely voice in the conversation about entertainment’s future in a Digital Age. Everyone was talking about monetization. I was talking about democratization of media.

At one point, former Disney CEO Michael Eisner seemed to dismiss bottom-up media as the rough equivalent of people walking down a dirt road, telling each other jokes. Hollywood was the real thing in his world.

Anything that’s good, he said, will be discovered by the talent agents, who’ll sign up the talent and make deals with Hollywood producers and their equivalents to make content for companies like Disney. Meetup’s Scott Heiferman was rolling his eyes from the audience. Me, too.

Sure, some of the great stuff will be captured by the current powers. But not all, and not always, unless they take such control of the Internet that they can get away with it. Let’s not allow them to get away with it.

1 Comment on “All Roads Don't Lead to Disney”

  1. #1 Mark Petrovic
    on Jun 30th, 2006 at 6:31 am

    In order for “them not to get away with it”, we are going to have to provide for ourselves. Stop renting and begin owning. Networks. We cannot leave our children something we do not own.

    From

    http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060629.html

    “The obvious answer is for regular folks like you and me to own our own last mile Internet connection. This idea, which Frankston supports, is well presented by Bill St. Arnaud in a presentation you’ll find among this week’s links. (Bill is senior director of advanced networks with CANARIE, which is responsible for the coordination and implementation of Canada’s next generation optical Internet initiative.) The idea is simple: run Fiber To The Home (FTTH) and pay for it as a community of customers — a cooperative. The cost per fiber drop, according to Bill’s estimate, is $1,000-$1,500 if 40 percent of homes participate. Using the higher $1,500 figure, the cost to finance the system over 10 years at today’s prime rate would be $17.42 per month.

    What we’d get for our $17.42 per month is a gigabit-capable circuit with no bits inside – just a really fast connection to some local point of presence where you could connect to ANY ISP wanting to operate in your city.

    “It’s honest funding,” says Frankston. “The current system is like buying drinks so you can watch the strippers. It is corrupt and opaque. We should pay for our wires in our communities just like we pay for the wires in our homes.”