I said in my last post that the Internet is boiling again. I ran into this FT article* which depicts the same trend and has some interesting insights and quotes that I wanted to discuss.

This article is especially focused on the fact that the future of the media industry is at stake and starts with a very catchy:

They're young, they're idealistic - and they don't care whose multi-billion dollar industry they destroy next.

In my opinion, this is not about destroying any industry but changing it – the same way Henry Ford or Toyota revolutionised the car industry, for the best I think. But it’s always easy to blame the first wave of internet entrepreneur – at least Yahoo, Amazon and eBay haven’t done bad, neither for their industry or shareholders, right?

Moving on, there is this quote:

Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer network that has speeded up the internet delivery of movies and other data-intensive files - to the annoyance of legal copyright holders. "The costs of distribution are plummeting rapidly," says Mr Cohen. "When it gets to zero, the content distribution businesses will disappear."

What role will there be then for the middlemen who stand between the creators of "content" and consumers? "There won't be a middleman," says Mr Cohen

While I think the zero-cost of distribution argument is weak and highly debatable, Bram Cohen is right about the death of the middleman, at least for online business. Unless you are a large portal or service (Yahoo, iTunes), there won’t be much space for you if you don’t produce the content. I wonder whether consumers will want to syndicate contents by themselves or will prefer to get pre-syndicated content. Working with consultants at London Business School, I could say “it depends”. :) After all, everybody likes to watch some TV passively slouched in a coach now and then – Channel 4 here in the UK runs back the “best” shows of the week on Sundays on E4.

The rest of the article is a good read that I recommend, with some more quotes from the founder and one of the investors of Six Apart (Movable Type & TypePad).

One last insight by Reid Hoffman (CEO of LinkedIn and board member of many start ups):

"A lot of the underlying technologies and technology companies are here, but the markets are elsewhere," says Reid Hoffman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. "That's unusual - usually the first market is here, then it's Europe and then it's Asia."

My opinion: we’ll see more ideas emerging in Europe (Skype?).


*: “It's the internet, but not as we know it…” By Richard Waters, 20 April 2005, Financial Times