The Boulevard of Broken Dreams Wednesday | View Article
By Mark Hachman

I'm at the Connections 2007 conference in Santa Clara, hosted by Parks Associates. The biggest challenge is finding time to sit down and turn what I've learned into either a blog post or a news story; no Twitter for me.

I attended the lunch keynote presented by Dan Scheinman, who is a senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Media Solutions Group. And while I haven't had a long sit-down with him, listening to his talk tells me that Cisco sees lots and lots and lots of money in Hollywood, and is elbowing its way toward the Tinseltown Teat.

Cisco's made some smart purchases in the last few years; it owns Linksys (personal routers) Scientific Atlanta (set-top boxes) and a host of other companies, including Five Across [edited to correct company name], sort of a white-box service for social networks. You can see the strategy here: surround and own the network, where "network" equates to (as Scheinman says) distributing, discovering and connecting to content.

So far, so good.

I guess where I started becoming a little uneasy was when Scheinman started talking about how users shouldn't search out content, but that content should find users.

I can understand the concept of community, what Scheinman calls the "me-we" era: "TV shouldn't be a Sunday-to-Sunday experience," Scheinman said. "People should want to be in the Desperate Housewives community, to want to see what Phil from Cleveland says."

But what worries me is when Scheinman says that he spends a lot of time down in Hollywood, and so he's familiar with what the moguls are thinking. When he brings up examples of how CNBC put up 15,000 videos on its Web site, when Viacom added a number of 3- to 5-minute clips of content. When he talks about an on-demand future.

The last question Scheinman was asked was whether Cisco has a content strategy. Well, of course not -- or at least that's the way he interpreted the question. "We're not going to compete with cable companies and telcos," Scheinman said.

In the crush of people following his talk, I asked him what was probably a bit of a "meta" question: does Hollywood think of content as a product that can be owned, or as a service that can be delivered? What I was implying -- and what I think he understood -- was that a product is bought on a one-time basis, while a service is renewed over and over. His answer? "I think a bit of both."

I don't have a problem with some content as a service: if I want to hear a specific U2 song, I want to be able to search out the song that I own, and play it. But if I want to hear 80s pop, I can seek out either an FM or Internet station to play me a random selection, or one that is tailored to my preferences. That's a service.

For me, music is somewhat ephemeral simply because of its duration. A song plays, it's over, a new track begins. It can be background or mood music. A movie or television show demands your attention.

I'm somewhat comfortable with Hollywood (and Cisco's Scientific Atlanta division) facilitating a "Mark Movies" channel that knows what I like, what I've seen, and suggests a movie that I haven't seen. But I'm also worried that Hollywood sees access to those movies as something that itself can be monetized, and that worries me.

I'd like to believe that I can actually buy and own a piece of content, and do it what I want. Abstracting content on an IP network allows for an incredible level of convenience. But what worries me is the price: a monthly fee for the rest of my life.