30% of people are sleeping (it's 1710 and pitch black outside!)
30% of people are reading (books/mags/papers)
30% of people are fiddling around with laptops
I dunno/haven't worked out yet what the remaining 10% are up to.
About 50% of everyone has a pair of cans/'phones on.
So, of the 30% of people using laptops, many of them are watching TV shows or movies. Where are they all coming from? I've seen more than one or two external hard-drives attached, so are these legally downloaded or torrents from 'illegal' netspace? How does that work if the files are (say) TV programmes that have been 'timeshifted'? Is there a stature of what is or is not allowable? If (for example) I started watching Die Hard 4 on broadcast telly last night but decided to download it from the net as I couldn't stay up late enough but knew I could watch it on the train today if the file was available in a portable form, does that make me a criminal?
OK this might be a moot point if I'm using a torrent client (which by default uploads chunks as well as downloads), but say I download the file(s) from a non-legitimate source (a newsgroup say) that doesn't use my compute and network connection to redistribute?
In my opinion, there's a trick being missed here, one that is likely to be increasingly filled by instantly-available micropayment services that return the revenue on a per-use basis to the content providers. I should be able to download (legitimately) Die Hard 4 from the Channel 4 website in exchange for bandwidth fees and an understanding that I may be forced to sit through ads or pay to avoid them.
And, I believe, this should be transparent. The recent decision by the BBC trust to limit the expansion and potential of BBC's iPlayer platform as a cross provider content portal was extremely short sighted. There's no reason that the service could not be split into 'free' and 'non-free' content with some limited amount of money going to maintain the core infrastructure at the centre. Then I could legitimately torrent what I wanted to watch, help other users doing the same and be watching *paid for* content on my laptop on the train - just like the other 50-60 people on this train!
BT/Tiscali/Virgin (in the UK) have woken up to this with content aggregation services as part of their VOD offerings, but they're missing a trick too as these rights only exist within the context of the walled garden of the STB device. I should be able to take my identity with me (banks let me do it with tokens already) and have access to my paid for content from wherever.
Stretching this point to cover convergence thinking, if the delivery content/portal platform is available on a number of form factors I could increase the penetration and have content being delivered to iPhones and gPhones.
Content providers need to make access to their data easy and legitimate or all the legal controls and 3 strikes rules just add layers of complexity and obfuscation to a system that is already deeply outdated and outclassed.
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