Dear Hollywood: It’s Time To Realize Artificial Scarcity Is Gone… And That’s A Good Thing
The economics of physical goods followed a supply and demand curve, as you no doubt learnt in high school: the larger the supply of something, the lower the cost; conversely the tighter the supply (a.k.a. scarcity) lead to higher costs. But classic economics doesn’t deal happily with “goods” that are effectively infinite, such as digital copies of media are.
Why ‘Big Media’ Was Just a Historical Blip http://tinyurl.com/68wq5o7
The question isn’t so much that Big Media is giving way to New Media, but rather that the era of Big Media – i.e. mass media, is a historical anomaly.
Before mass media all media was small, serving local audiences or (with books) very slowly distributed over wider territories. Then came an era of mass capital and limited airwaves that allowed broadcasters to build mass audiences, up to the 130 million Americans that saw “Roots” during its first broadcast.
The movie studios once owned all the production technology, talent and distribution channel – the movie theaters. That structure was forcibly broken apart, but the broadcast industry has fragmented due to the proliferation of cable channels, and now direct Internet distribution.