Pete Austin's Blog

In part 1 of my article on digital materialism I gave a little background on what got me thinking about the subject. What digital materialism really is, is the transition from buying/owning/using physical (material) media to a single digital library containing all of an individual’s media. Where once people’s media collection consisted of material items, soon it will become entirely digital. Your personal library then in turn follows you anywhere via an internet –connected device and is available instantly through streaming technologies.

Imagine that you live in Seattle, but you are traveling abroad in London. You carry with you a single touch-screen smart phone (yes, like an iPhone you Apple zombie). You arrive at London Heathrow and decide some music is in order while you wait for your luggage. You turn on your phone and associate to the wireless network. You then access, through secure web login, your personal digital library and instantly you see every song and movie you own. You pull up a favorite playlist and the music plays. You get on the train and decide you’d rather watch a movie to pass the time. So again you pull up your library and out of the 200 movies you own you choose your favorite and begin to watch. You’ve listened to what you want to listen to, watched what you want to watch, and you’ve never been nagged to purchase anything because it’s your library. You’ve used your media just as you would at home if you had loaded the discs into your DVD player – except you’re nowhere near home. Also, you’ve never had to worry about your device’s storage capacity or synchronizing your device with your computer because everything is streamed to you.

My family asks me technology questions all the time. Sometimes it’s about how their computer isn’t working right and other times they’re more general questions like, “What do you think will be the big tech trend this year”. A couple years ago I was asked the later and I remember saying that without a doubt, it would be the continuing development of convergence devices. Portable devices that served multiple functions. I was specifically talking about cell phones and in the time since, what used to be just a phone is now so much more. Cell phones are now capable of running almost any type of media; voice, images, video, internet connectivity, e-mail, and more. When I talk about digital materialism, I’m talking about the next step. The further evolution of these devices.

But there will eventually be a revolution, and I believe the revolution will be in the creation of personal digital libraries. So what would enable every person in world to have their own digital library? IPv6. IPv6 is the successor to the current internet protocol IPv4. As people and businesses continue to purchase internet addresses the pool of available IPv4 addresses in shrinking fast and will eventually run out. The IPv6 internet protocol however would allow for trillions of addresses to be given to each of the 6.5 billion people on Earth today. An internet infrastructure capable of supporting the traffic of the world’s population will be a revolution and a building block of personal internet media libraries.

There are certainly major obstacles to this scenario and I don’t think it’s going to happen in even the next two to three years – but it’s coming. Some of the biggest obstacles to personal internet media libraries will be in the form of security and licensing. If you read the news at all you know about the ongoing war between media houses and recording associations vs. P2P file-sharing over licensing issues. The key to personal internet media libraries is that you are recognized as an owner of the music/movies in your library, just as you are recognized as an owner of any CD or DVD in your collection. It’s yours and you can use it as much or as little as you want. Delving deeper into that would be an entire article itself and there are even entire websites devoted to the topic, so I won’t go into it here. The bottom line is, if security and licensing concerns can be adequately addressed and resolved, personal internet media libraries and digital materialism will be in our very near future.

Almost a year ago now, I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine whom I went to college with at the University of Miami.  Purely by circumstance we both moved out to Seattle from Miami, (at separate times) where he currently works as a video game designer. My wife and I had recently moved into a new condo and one of the side effects of moving is that it forces you to confront just how much shit you’ve accumulated.  A particular pain point for us was the five moving boxes full of DVD and CD jewel cases that made up our media collection. And while packing them into a box is easy, finding a place to store them all in an aesthetically pleasing way (milk crates is not a way to decorate your home) was proving challenging. In describing our search for some sort of bookshelf or media tower my friend said, “You need to stop buying physical media.” He went on to describe his own method of managing his media library which consisted of hosting all of his media in digital form on his desktop pc’s hard drives and streaming the media to his Xbox 360 which was in turn connected to his TV and sound system. He had all but given up buying any physical media and instead was relying on BitTorrent and P2P sharing to obtain new movies, TV shows, and music. In the end both he and I accomplish the same thing, we both watch videos and listen to music on our home theater setups. The difference is that he had eliminated the step of putting in a disc or plugging in an mp3 player. The idea of streaming one’s media in the home is nothing new. People have been doing it for years now and with more integrated home entertainment devices it’s only become easier. What struck me about what he said was not what he was doing, but rather his philosophy towards it and how adamant he was against physical media.

My first reaction, like most people to change, was of resistance. I said, “I know it works, I’m just not ready to give up owning a tangible piece of media. When you purchase a disc and store it properly you can enjoy it for a long time with very little risk of losing it. Computer crashes happen all the time. Data is destroyed. Data is corrupted. If a hard drive contains my entire media collection and something goes wrong I could lose everything in one fell swoop.” Obviously there are ways to duplicate your data. RAID hard drive arrays or just plain backup to external disk are the two most common, but I was trying to win the argument. He of course laughed at my nativity and said that the system isn’t perfect now, but it’s coming. Physical media is dead. At the time I didn’t want to think about it, but after looking a little closer at the state of the music and film industries my eyes are open.

There’s a new model of media ownership coming very very soon. I call it digital materialism and the first company to create a truly seamless system of digital media ownership for people is going to reap huge benefits. I guarantee it. Here’s what the new business model will look like.

Instead of the measure of your media collection being how many LPs, DVD’s, photo albums, etc you own, soon your entire media collection will instead exist in digital form as a single virtual entity. Furthermore, you entire media library will follow you anywhere in world over a high-speed internet connected device capable of streaming your media to you instantly. In part two, I’ll elaborate on exactly how this would work.