A lot of dreaming lately by folks whose baggage is clearly lost somewhere over 1994. Latest is Leo Hindrey, a major cable player in the mid 90s, who claims that the Yahoo and Google’s of the world are temporary phenomena – and that soon all that will matter is distributors (the cable and telco guys, natch), and content (their pals at Disney, of course). Yahoo and Google, et al, will fold because they don’t own rights to content packages like movies, and they don’t control distribution, like cable companies and telcos.
This guy is deeply, hilariously wrong. TechDirt points out the first reason – he’s missing that folks don’t go online for content alone, in fact, they go online to communicate, converse, and to declare who they are in the world. Sure, they also expect content to be there, but increasingly, it ain’t Time Warner’s or Disney’s, it’s YouTube or blogs. And if the Disney’s of the world want to succeed on the Web, they best learn from the habits of the web natives, and not shove mid 1990s media models down their throats.
But Hindrey is also missing that the business model of controlling proprietary content due to massive capital outlays and control of distribution channels is, well, no longer the only game in town. There’s a new distribution sheriff in town, and his name is search. His deputy is the open Internet. Get used to it. It’s not going to go away.