{"id":1068,"date":"2007-09-20T14:07:56","date_gmt":"2007-09-20T14:07:56","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=1068"},"modified":"2007-09-20T14:07:56","modified_gmt":"2007-09-20T14:07:56","slug":"the_new_promiscuity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2007\/09\/20\/the_new_promiscuity\/","title":{"rendered":"the new promiscuity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A couple more small items for the &#8220;content is free, networks are valuable&#8221; meme&#8230; these w\/r\/t television. First, this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/business\/la-fi-cbs20sep20,1,4035540.story?coll=la-headlines-business&#038;ctrack=1&#038;cset=true\">LA Times piece<\/a> on CBS&#8217;s &#8220;new internet strategy&#8221;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>The idea is to let their online material be promiscuous: Instead of limiting their shows and other online video to CBS.com, the network is letting them couple with any website that people might visit.<br \/>\n&#8220;CBS is all about open, nonexclusive, multiple partnerships,&#8221; said Quincy Smith, president of CBS Interactive.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A big part of this strategy is building an &#8220;audience network,&#8221; and to this end the newly revamped <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbs.com\/\">CBS site<\/a> provides a variety of fora &#8211; ?\u009dmessage boards, wikis, and user-generated media galleries &#8211; ?\u009dto try to capture some of the energy of its various fan communities. It&#8217;s a fine line to tread, since fan culture is almost by definition self-organizing and thrives on a sort of semi-autonomy. But perhaps this only because the broadcasters have hitherto kept their distance (the occasional self-defeating lawsuit notwithstanding). It&#8217;s an interesting (and somewhat yucky) question, and one that applies well beyond TV: to what extent can community be branded?<br \/>\nCompare this with NBC&#8217;s more retentive move toward quasi-openness, post-iTunes, with <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2007\/09\/20\/nbc_will_offer_free_tv_downloads_via_nbc_direct.html\">NBC Direct<\/a>, a service that offers free downloads of shows with auto-destruct DRM that wipes files after a week. I don&#8217;t think either network&#8217;s got it yet, but these are interesting experiments to watch.<br \/>\nIn light of this, it&#8217;s worth revisiting Mark Pesce&#8217;s 2005 talk, &#8220;Piracy is Good?&#8221;, available <a href=\"http:\/\/video.google.com\/videoplay?docid=-1720068211869162779\">here<\/a> on Google Video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A couple more small items for the &#8220;content is free, networks are valuable&#8221; meme&#8230; these w\/r\/t television. First, this LA Times piece on CBS&#8217;s &#8220;new internet strategy&#8221;: The idea is to let their online material be promiscuous: Instead of limiting their shows and other online video to CBS.com, the network is letting them couple with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263,352,395,528,647,1258,1279,1832],"tags":[2714],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cbs","category-community","category-copyright","category-drm","category-fanculture","category-nbc","category-networks","category-television","tag-networks-television-community-fanculture-cbs-nbc-drm-copyright"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}