Fanning, Cohen And Now Kan

One of the remarkable, recurring themes of our times is how an individual can take an idea onto the web and, often through the power of naïve enthusiasm, accidentally force a billion-dollar media industry to rethink everything it does - whoops!.  This, of course, is what happened when Shawn Fanning unleashed his college dorm project – Napster - onto the world.  Devastating the music business wasn’t Fanning's goal.  He just wanted to help his friends find their favourite tracks more easily.  But the Big Labels never recovered and even though Napster wasn’t the only P2P service offering music downloads, Fanning became the unfortunate public enemy number one of the powerful RIAA and its crazed legal battles.  Then came Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, a P2P protocol that allowed people to share large software files online more easily, by breaking them up across networks of participants’ computers then making them easy to find and reassemble.  Rather than relying on one machine to sit at the centre of a network and do all of the hard work.  Such was the success of Cohen’s brainchild that at one point BitTorrent was thought to account for one third of all internet traffic.  The result was the disembowelment of the movie industry’s distribution model and the eternal wrath of the MPAA.  However, like Fanning, profits didn’t seem to be Cohen’s motivating factor.  The only visible source of income from the BitTorrent project has been the T-shirts he has sold to its fans, emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Give And Ye Shall Receive’.  And now we have Justin Kan, creator of Justin.tv.  Kan’s original experiment in 2007 involved wiring himself up to a mobile camcorder that streamed live onto the web.  His motivation was to let people create their own ‘livestreams’, with the undercurrent ideal that CCTV shouldn’t be available only to the authorities.  However, Justin.tv has quickly developed into a service that allows anyone to create a live TV channel.  Today the site attracts more than 41 million visitors per month and has 428,000 'channels'.  Some of which are dull feeds of people sitting at their desk working, others are vibrant niche channels of hobbyists.  However, a few are feeds of live sports events that individuals are uploading from their paid subscription services, complete with community tools such as chat.  Sound familiar?  The difference may be that Shawn Fanning and Bram Cohen were the pioneers who taught the legal profession that the world has actually changed.  And Kan’s service is already joining a burgeoning, web TV ecosystem.  For instance, Fanning financed his project with the help of his uncle while Cohen had no commercial aspirations at all.  However, Kan’s project is supported by Silicon Valley’s respected technologist Paul Graham and his fund Y-Combinator.  The fly-in-the-p2p-ointment is that live events, particularly sports, are meant to be one of the last bastions of broadcast TV’s superiority.  So it seems unlikely the industry will just sit on the sidelines.  However, the trend of passionate individuals unknowingly wreaking havoc on global industries continues.  And Justin Kan looks like he might just be the next innovator to keep media executives' heads spinning.

Comments

[arseblogger]

Interesting. Also funny how the Premier League, UEFA, FIFA etc are making the same mistakes as the record companies and film studios. Instead of frantically trying to monetise the idea and perhaps provide a better quality product, they are focussed on stopping streaming through brute force. Then you have people who are used to getting it for free who will not even consider paying for it once there's something out there that works.

Internet prices are funny though as well. You'd pay £40 for a ticket to the game but offer a stream to people for even £5 and you wouldn't get too many takers. A £3.99 a month subscription to your club's official webite and TV channel is too expensive but a packet of cigarettes every day is 50 times that over the course of a month.

It'll be very interesting to see how they cope with this.

[James Cherkoff]

Hey thanks Arseblogger, all true. Especially when you take into account the global audiences for the Premier League et al, a good number of which are presumably watching on illegal streams. Maybe Silent Stan's 50% ownership of Arsenal Broadband Ltd is smarter that it may at first appear...

[Brad Bell]

We laugh at the corporate behemoths trying to stamp out new technology, but they are often successful. Rebroadcasting TV over the internet - a business modelled directly on the cable TV business - was successfully stamped out. Public networking, like municipal WiFi and municipal and many national fibre-to-the-home projects were stopped (to the detriment of cities, nations, and the planet). As a result, convergence of all media onto the internet has successfully been delayed by decades, thus protecting business models of the cable companies, TV networks, telephone companies, mobile companies, and ISPs.

It's notable that the technology that gets stamped out is implemented by governments and businesses, and the successful projects are the result of loose collections of individuals. I simply extend your point, James: perhaps ONLY anarchic collections of individuals can effect the kind of technological change you describe.

Frustrated with the slow pace of digital technology? (I am.) Maybe government and big business are the problem. It's hard to get anywhere with so many institutions putting the brakes on.

Check out Us Now.
http://www.usnowfilm.com/
Distributed via Bittorrent. It's a bit like a movie mashup of the books, Wikinomics and Here Comes Everybody.

It includes the interesting case of the peer produced football team. Perhaps football fans can begin peer producing their own broadcasts too :-)

[James Cherkoff]

Hey thanks Brad, provocative as ever ;-). It seems to me that people such as the guys above are interesting because they demonstrate what's possible. Such possibilities are often too disruptive to manage for many vested interests and the law is the only response. However, despite legal challenges, their work creates huge changes in consumer behaviour that forces economic change that eventually hits the bottom line of incumbent commercial operators...who then have to play catch-up. What's that Oasis lyric... 'So I start a revolution from my bed'.

[Rory MacDonald]

I think Brad's point is relevant, brute force, lawyers and high-level cartel behavior can, and will, work if we become too complacent.

By far the most important thing is that people fight to preserve net neutrality, but I fear it is another of those "too techie" arguments that people wont pick up on until it is too late.

[James Cherkoff]

I must say I've been stunned by the lack of imagination or effect surrounding Digital Britain. After massive drawn out consultations - some of which I joined in - the result appears to be a law to prevent filesharing! Was it actually just a thinly veiled lobbying campaign by the content kings?