I predict that movies and music now found to the hills on net will gradually
disappear or either become “Elite” stuff because it will become unviable to
offer them freely due to the risks and number of control methods/restrictions
that will come.
Hardware devices and software will continue to deploy new means to restrict,
track and fight copyright infrigement. The Anti-P2P business is here.
The giants from the movie and music industries in the profitable classic
media business (CDs, DVD, VHS, etc) have got tired from seeing every
15-year juvenile with a computer sharing their stuff for free and
many Internet companies being unable to manage surviving just from
banners or advertising have decided this is the moment to migrate
their customer bases from free to low cost paid services (to later
migrate these to more expansive services).
It’s also part of the strategy of some groups that entered the Internet
business to offer free or low cost services just to attract people,
generate content and create a customer base.
Once that base becomes solid everything will be charged. Free services will
become rare. Time based charges are previsible for games, movies and music,
and not very distant from that is the charging per E-Mail message sent (with
a huge impact on Spam). In what it plays to content you will be expected to
pay for image, music, video and text.
All that will cause a huge impact on people who consider certain services
or even the whole Internet a superfulous thing and will simply leave (ie. there
is still beer, sex and TV arround), and a number of unsatisfied/angered users
that will yell and in long term may give origin to private clandestine groups
and networks in the style of old BBSes, launch attacks, etc.
These groups will probably be treated like ‘content traffickers’ and/or ‘digital
terrorists’ with severe penalties.
It’s had to tell if the The Coin Model will be successfull or fail but I think
that it will be a troublesome future for both users and companies (TV took up to
35 years to evolve to a paid subscription service and still not everyone adhered
to it).
