Andrew Currie on Posterous

Michael Geist is a joke... this guy supports pirate dowloading. this is irresponsible opinion.

Oh look, it's a clueless old media shill posing as a commenter!

As much as I like Michael Geist, I don't agree with his position here. I've studied game theory, reward systems, and economics enough to understand that deregulation will only serve to wipe out the smaller niche markets. People think too linearly sometimes, like if 10% of the market wants niche programming than in a free market there will be 10% niche programming. It doesn't work that way. There will eventually be 0%.

And to be honest, I don't find this article represents the video I just watched. Ian Morrison was describing the size of the online market compared to TV over the next decade. If everyone watched everything online then there definitely is not enough bandwidth, regardless of how many streaming TV sites you Google. But that's part of the problem. We need more bandwidth so that we can all watch online since it is a cheaper distribution method.

I also didn't see Norm's head exploding. Michael was talking about the coming revolution, his own habits, and the similarity with a growing number of people. Nobody disagreed with him. All that was said was that the percentage of people viewing that way will not overtake the market for quite some time.

All in all, I'd say it was a good discussion and everyone had decent input from various perspectives. Michael was indeed good, but I thought seemed a little out of touch with the details of the actual topic. He was probably middle of the pack as far as useful input, in my opinion.

"People think too linearly sometimes, like if 10% of the market wants niche programming than in a free market there will be 10% niche programming. It doesn't work that way. There will eventually be 0%."

Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail", Amazon and eBay all prove you dead wrong on that...