Media Wants to be Free (But Not in the Way You Think)

CALL IT A MESH MEDIA MOMENT. I was sitting in traffic on the Willis Avenue bridge flipping channels on the radio in my truck when suddenly the Howard Stern show appeared at 88.1 MHz on the FM band. "What the fuck?" I thought. Is a station in New York City bootlegging and rebroadcasting Stern's Sirius signal? Then it dawned on me, I was picking up the show from the low power FM modulator some other driver must have been using to connect his satellite radio to his car stereo.

     By the time I hit Second Avenue, the serendipitous Stern signal was gone. But what lingered was the impact of accidentally happening upon the re-broadcast signal.

     I'm a Sirius subscriber, but I don't have a receiver in my car. Nor has Sirius made it easy for me to consume the Stern show in more than one location--I either need to multiple receivers and antennae (as well as to pay an incremental fee for the additional receivers) or I need to move a receiver back and forth between locations.

     I like Howard Stern. I'm willing to pay $13 a month for the option of flipping over to his show when I feel like it. But I'm not willing to invest time, money, or aggravation in the hardware or installation services required to buy into the Sirius distribution network. I'm willing to pay for the content, but I want my content liberated, free to roam the network of networks until I pull it down to the device of my choice at the time of my choice for the personal use of my choice.

     I don't know if "information wants to be free," as Stewart Brand postulated in the mid-1980s, but I do know that end users want information to be network- and device-agnostic. That's why, for example, my friend Fred Wilson hates DRM-wrapped music. That's why I think satellite radio is doomed. Information wants to be free from the yoke of network exclusivity.

     Consumers are willing to pay for the best network access (I heard recently from a cable TV exec that super high bandwidth Internet services are flying off the virtual shelves--"people want blazing fast," was the phrase the exec used). And consumers are willing to pay for the best content. But they HATE having to pay for one in order to get the other. That's why consumers resent the cable TV model that forces users into a menu of programming (the way auto manufacturers force buyers into more profitable packages of options). I would gladly pay a subscription fee to HBO directly, rather than through DirecTV, if it allowed me HBO video on demand on my TVs, my computers, at hotel rooms on the road, at a vacation rental, on my portable devices.

     The universal appeal of peer-to-peer file sharing, of weird "mesh media" impromptu local networks (of the sort I experienced on the Willis Avenue Bridge) in part has to do with the freedom from paying, but even more so has to do with the freedom of use--not "use" in the sense of piracy--redistribution for commercial purposes--but "use" in the sense of personal choice within a neatly legal context.  In absence of an industrial infrastructure to provide that choice, end users are doing it for themselves.

     The media industry is on the precipice of a challenge at least as substantial as the original challenge of the Internet more than a decade ago. The era of ubiquitous super-broadband (and, increasingly, wireless super-broadband) is upon us. Five years ago, when I was a venture partner with a corporate media technology venture fund, I had a chance to see what the boys at the nation's premier media technology skunk works, Sarnoff Labs in Princeton, NJ, were doing with then-nascent WiMax technology---sending HD TV signals wirelessly through 6 feet of concrete walls. Today Starbucks is a wifi media distribution hub operator and my mother--who types IMs with one finger--has fiber optic to the home (with speeds available of up to 30 mbps).

     Media companies--producers, owners of programming networks, distributors--had better start thinking not outside the box but outside the device and outside the pipe. That's the information freedom that consumers want and that consumers will implement whether media companies like it or not.