Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about how much had changed between 2007 and 2008 in terms of the availability of new ways to consume music, TV shows and movies. Well, the explosion of new business and delivery models between 2008 and 2009 is really heartening (see a slide from a presentation I’ll be giving in a week’s time).

In fact, there’s so much now available - legally and often entirely for free - that the problem is finding what’s available across so many different sources. Some sites are trying to address this issue, like Modern Feed, the United Kingdom’s findanyfilm.com and the Digital Citizen Project’s Birdtrax. Of course, what these sites reveal is that there is no uniformity not just in terms of sources, but also content: some television shows are available, while others are not; some only have certain episodes available, or available for a certain length of time; and some just don’t work from a Mac (hmpfh! :-).

But I’m not complaining too much: it’s a delight to be able to get access to so much online (legally!), whether I pay for it - through iTunes or Netflix, typically - or for free. Connecting my iPhone to my television has been useful; but I can now see why people might pay for a box like Apple TV or the Netflix Roku to “just make it work.” Or use your existing PS3.

And just wait until our mobile devices really take off in this space: for example, LG confirms 2009 launch for 3G wristphone. Dick Tracy, anyone?

Not to mention this should completely change the tenor of discussions during the negotiated rulemaking to begin shortly over the P2P provisions in the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008, which among other things requires colleges and universities to certify that they “...will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property...” That language was written in the time and context of services such as Cdigix and Ruckus, both of which have now gone out of business.

Tags: new business models

Gregory Jackson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago, observed in The Digital Carrot, The Digital Stick (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 2007) that illegal file sharing would rapidly become moot if we could resolve these problems with respect to legal online acquisition of music and movies: I can’t always get what I want; I can’t always use what I get; and I don’t think the price is fair.

Maybe we're close. Consider:

Amazon.com offers music in MP3 format—free of digital rights management and thus untethered from the iPod—often for less than what iTunes charges. Nokia is bundling music access with cell phones, and Universal Music Group is looking to extend this model to other devices. iTunes is suddenly a dominant force in digital movie rentals, having partnered with all major studios, adding alternatives to services already offered by Amazon.com, Netflix (now with unlimited streaming videos) and hulu.com. NBC, CBS, and ABC make available streaming video of popular TV shows from their websites.

Then there's iTunes' new ranking as #2 music retailer in the world, behind only Wal*Mart. And as the ars posting indicates, that's #2 relative to all music sales, including CDs; not just digitally purchased music.

Still a lot of experimentation and practical problems, but the glimmer of a tunnel end seems apparent.

Tags: new business models