Kill (Your Parents') Television

Horace Dediu explains how young peoples’ viewing habits has begun an ugly war between Silicon Valley and Hollywood:

Paying $150/month to watch incontinence and erectile dysfunction ads—at a time not of your choosing—is preposterous for the young. They may like the programs but not the way they are packaged, delivered or interrupted. They are not smarter than their parents. They, like their parents, took to new technology more quickly. What makes the technology new is also what lets its makers separate the content from its delivery. These new technologies allow “modularizing” or unbundling that which was was integrated/bundled and thus allow their developers to focus on the customer’s real jobs-to-be-done.

Unsurprisingly, incumbents have responded by throttling access to original programming–an asset over which they still exert influence as distributors. Netflix and Amazon are taking the path of responding with their own blockbuster productions. Although Silicon Valley has more capital to deploy than Hollywood this battle of attrition is by no means one that incumbents will win, and generally, it’s not going to be pretty.

Both Silicon Valley and Hollywood lean left, but a savvy GOP ought to look for regulatory means to peel the Valley away from the Democrats, and leave them stuck with Hollywood’s dinosaurs.