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The brilliant and brilliantly funny Harry Shearer (of The Simpsons and Le Show fame) has some interesting things to say in an Online Journalism Review interview.
On DRM:
Once content providers get their digital rights management (DRM) ducks in a row, the business model seems pretty simple -- feed highly copy-controlled movies and TV shows down the broadband pipe. That doesn't leave much bandwidth left for the rest of us.
On the most buried technology story:
The same story -- the absolute failure of the federally mandated switch-over to digital television. Compare and contrast: when color, a visibly superior method of transmitting television was introduced, the feds set technical standards and let the market decide when and how the changeover would occur. With digital, an arguably sometimes superior method of viewing television -- assuming the compression ratio isn't driven too low and the bandwidth isn't split up into too many profit centers -- the feds set almost no technical standards but tried to mandate the market into making the change by a date certain.
Everyone now, finally, admits that deadline is utter fantasy, and political observers are coming to absorb the obvious -- that it's political cyanide if you vote for something that turns off the television of a large number of your constituents in order to force them to go digital. The bill for PBS alone to switch to digital is $1 billion of taxpayers' money. Yet the media, strangely, continue to ignore this story, even though there are cognate examples, even more dramatic, of the failure of digital switchovers in other countries -- see, viz, the disaster of UK's ITV Digital scheme just last year.
As Harry would say in giving voice to Mr. Burns, "Excellent!"
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