Pete Austin’s Blog

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.