<videovortex> Nicholas Carr on The Price of Free (in NY Times)

[Geert Lovink]

The Price of Free
By NICHOLAS CARR

Published in the NYT on November 13, 2009
When, in late September, rumors surfaced that Comcast was trying to  
buy NBC Universal from General Electric, Wall Street reacted with  
dismay. Grandiose attempts to combine media production and  
distribution — programming and plumbing — are nothing new in the  
entertainment business, but they almost always end in disappointment.  
Witness AOLTime Warner. So what in the world could be prompting the  
Comcast chief executive, Brian Roberts, to start down this accursed  
path?

I fear that I’m to blame.

A few months ago, while stalking the aisles of my local Best Buy, I  
gave in to techno-temptation. I bought a Blu-ray player. What I didn’t  
realize until I unpacked the gadget was that it does a lot more than  
just spin high-definition discs. It is, as they say, Web-enabled. As  
soon as I plugged it into an outlet in my living room, its built-in  
WiFi antenna sniffed out my home network and logged on. The Blu-ray  
player became a gateway between the Internet and my television set.

Ever since, and much to my surprise, I’ve been using the device more  
to transmit Internet content than to play discs. I stream TV shows and  
movies fromNetflix, music from Pandora and videos from YouTube. Beyond  
my existing $11-a-month Netflix subscription, I haven’t forked out a  
penny for any of this programming. It comes flowing out of the Web,  
whenever I summon it, free.

My new viewing habits must make Brian Roberts very nervous. The more I  
play movies and TV shows from the Web, the less I use my cable TV  
service. I almost never order pay-per-view movies anymore. And I  
recently canceled my premium Showtime subscription. Most of Showtime’s  
best programs, including “The Tudors,” “Weeds” and “Dexter,” are  
available to stream through Netflix, as are a lot of the movies  
currently playing on the network. Why pay $23 a month when I can get  
the stuff for almost nothing?

I have a feeling that it won’t be long before I and a whole lot of  
other people start asking similar questions about pay-TV subscriptions  
in general.

Until recently, the TV business was shielded from the turmoil that the  
Internet has visited upon other media industries, like music and  
publishing. The reason was largely a matter of network capacity.  
Sending high-quality video through the Web requires a lot more  
bandwidth than sending text or music, and until 2007 most Americans  
lacked high-speed Internet connections at home, according to the Pew  
Research Center. The Net simply wasn’t a viable alternative for  
distributing the signals traditionally sent over cables or beamed down  
from satellites.

That’s changing, and fast. With broadband becoming the norm and  
connection speeds continuing to quicken, what has happened to music  
companies and newspapers is beginning to happen to broadcast networks  
and cable companies. People like me are using the Net to bypass the  
customary providers of television programming, along with the ads they  
show and the fees they collect.

My Blu-ray player is just the tip of the iceberg that the TV business  
is about to hit. Today you can watch snippets of shows on YouTube or  
entire episodes on sites like Hulu or Yahoo TV. You can view news  
reports at CNN.com, sports events at ESPN360.com and documentaries at  
PBS.org. You can download shows, sometimes without charge, from  
Apple’s iTunes store and watch them on your iPod, iPhone or PC. Or you  
can stream them through your Xbox or Wii.

Television is escaping the TV set and the cable box. We no longer  
watch the tube. We watch, to borrow ex-Senator Ted Stevens’s memorable  
conceit, a series of tubes.

As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience  
of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of  
communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect  
around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games.  
They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams,  
chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one  
another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton  
Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a  
speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared.

The communal mode of TV viewing isn’t gone, but it’s becoming less  
common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to  
view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching  
video alone. That’s one funny thing about the Internet: it’s an  
extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and  
entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures  
and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us  
deeply but in isolation. Even when we’re together today, we’re often  
apart, peering into our own screens.

Television companies, desperate to protect their sources of revenue,  
are trying to figure out ways to control or at least influence the  
shifts in our viewing practices. If a transmission company like  
Comcast — although it owns a few cable stations, Comcast’s main  
business is providing cable TV, Internet and telephone service — were  
to own more of the programs it distributes, it could, at least  
theoretically, wield more power over how that content reaches viewers.  
In buying NBC Universal, for instance, Comcast would gain a stake in  
Hulu, whichNBC owns with ABC and Fox. It could impose limits or even  
fees on the shows streamed through that popular Web site.

Such opportunities reveal the conflict of interest that’s built into  
the TV business. The companies that supply us with pay-TV  
subscriptions — not just cable operators like Comcast but telephone  
companies like AT&T and Verizon— also tend to be the ones that provide  
us with Internet service. By blocking or slowing certain Net  
transmissions, they could shunt us toward their own programming and  
prevent us from viewing alternatives, particularly free ones. If my  
Internet provider degraded my Netflix signal, I would almost certainly  
go back to watching more cable programs.

That scenario is not as far-fetched as it may sound. In 2007, Comcast  
was caught throttling back its customers’ links to BitTorrent, a file- 
sharing network often used to trade bootleg copies of TV shows and  
movies. Comcast argues that heavy BitTorrent users were taking up too  
much bandwidth, to the detriment of other services. Looked at another  
way, Comcast was using its Web-access franchise to protect its pay-TV  
franchise.

But, as the company soon found out, impinging on “net neutrality” —  
the principle that Internet providers should treat all data the same —  
is a good way to make enemies. Internet purists went ballistic.  
Consumer advocates denounced the move. The government began an  
investigation. In 2008, the F.C.C. decided that Comcast had broken its  
rules, and it ordered the company not to impede access to BitTorrent  
and other such services. Comcast is appealing the ruling.

Under its new chairman, the Obama-appointee Julius Genachowski, the  
F.C.C. is becoming even more aggressive in defending the openness of  
the Internet. Last month, it voted to begin preparing regulations  
aimed at giving net neutrality the force of law. Though controversial,  
the commission’s move will be welcomed by most Web users. I know that  
I don’t want my Internet provider to control the sites I visit or  
services I can use when I’m online. Unimpeded access to the Net has  
come to feel like a right.

In the end, and whether they gobble up content producers or not,  
network operators like Comcast may be fated to be in the plumbing  
business. They’ll turn tidy profits by maintaining the pipes through  
which we get Internet service, even if we use those pipes to bypass  
their pay-TV offerings. We’ll go on gorging ourselves on free Internet  
video. We, the viewers, will be the winners.

Or will we?

The smartest, most creative TV shows, from “Deadwood” to “Mad Men” to  
NBC’s own “30 Rock,” tend to be the most expensive to produce. They  
have large, talented casts, top-notch writers and directors, elaborate  
sets and generally high production values. If the changes in our  
viewing habits stanch the flow of money back to studios, producing  
those kinds of programs may no longer be possible. In their place,  
we’ll get more junk: dopey reality shows, cookie-cutter police dramas,  
inane gab fests. The vast wasteland will become even vaster.

Even “free” has a price.

Nicholas Carr’s new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to  
Our Brains,” will be published next spring.