By Jayson Jarmon, CEO, Lux Worldwide
In a blog entry made last month, I talked about halfway measures being used by traditional media to enter into the digital age...sort of toeing into the field of digital distribution to avoid the fate of Tower Records and the other Luddites who held on to mechanical distribution far too long.
I made an offhand comment about Blockbuster being doomed, and that Netflix had at least taken advantage of a digital ordering system, but would fail unless it moved rapidly and affirmatively in the direction of digital-only distribution. I think I called it a halfway measure, sort of a quasi-digital lifeboat.
Allow me, after the briefest chuckle of self-satisfaction, to direct you to the following story posted today on MSNBC.com, involving Netflix. As a matter of survival Netflix is adopting a strategy that will *begin* digital distribution with a limited number of subscribers.
For Netflix, I fear, it is too little too late. In the final analysis, content is king and the owners of the content, whether they are the movie studios, the record companies, or the television networks will ink exclusive deals with larger carriers (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL), or they will begin their own digital distribution systems and have no need of smaller carriers enacting halfway measures.
At the risk of being preachy, let me once again quote Jeff Dachis and say "Everything that can be digital, will be digital." All news, books, television, radio, music, motion pictures, greeting cards, communications, jobs, retail, *everything*. It is admirable of Netflix to move in the right direction, but hardly laudable that they saw the situation too late to effectively take advantage of the change.
(By the way - how cool is it that Blockbuster is now using Alec Baldwin to do the voiceovers for its new ads?)
