Digital Home Thoughts: Thomas Hawk: Television Executives Stilll Don't Get It, How Greed Trumps Innovation

"As Om correctly points out CBS and NBC are at least trying to say, "we are doing something." They are doing this in the same way that the music executives said "at least we are doing something," when they launched their initial totally worthless download services. When we had the original Napster, they were giving us Pressplay and MusicMatch full of restrictions and limitations. Funny thing. Nobody used these services. Everybody used Napster. And when Napster was shut down, everybody used Kaaza, and now that Grokster has been shut down we have open source P2P software where no company exists to be sued, and after they sue all of their customers... well, you get the idea. The reason that the record industry executives did not give us a compelling legal download offering was that the money to made on CDs was just too lucrative at the time. For $1 to $2 million they could release a CD that in many cases would return them revenues in excess of $100 million. The money was just too good. And even as Napster ate into their business, there was still just too much good money to make on CD sales to risk cannibalizing this lucrative business."

Wow, Thomas is clearly very upset by the state of things in the television industry. He has provided an analogy to the music industry and the sharing of digital music. While he is right to some extent, I am a little unclear as to what he expects in terms of innovation. Is he referring to areas still left uncovered by MCE, PVRs and the like? I can see how we are being overcharged for the various channel services, especially when it comes to PVR boxes, so maybe that is what he is referring to.