Todd Mundt

From “On Demand Media,” a “media world of de-materialization,”

where the concept of ‘property’ loses significance for consumers. Media companies’ response to the widespread availability of pirated content seems to be to concentrate on the experience, which is spot on. As I’ve argued many times before, consumers don’t consume content: they engage in practices around it, and it is these practices that they seek and are willing to pay for. The practice of downloading pirated content, managing the files, backing them up, burning them to a DVD, is a messy and geeky one. It’s much better to get a Roku box and pay Rhapsody a small monthly fee to get a steady supply of pleasant, evocative, elegant experiences. There will always be a market for providers of media experiences.

What about the pleasure of owning content? Owning, and all the enjoyments that go with it, is no more that yet another practice. I own my personal contacts, even if they are spread accross Exchange servers, PDAs, mobile phones, etc and I don’t have anything physical to keep. Or even better, even if I lose a physical thing, I still have my contacts because they are somewhere in the cloud, somewhere only I (and my boss) can reach. That’s close enough to ownership in the good old physical sense.

In the future we will care less and less about files and about content. They will both be seen as the invisible enablers of experiences that they’ve always been.