I’ve been busy this year, between work and preparing my wife and I for our move from New York to Los Angeles at the end of this month. Because of this, I haven’t been able to watch any episodes from the new season (Season 18) of Top Gear (the original awesome UK version, not the shitty US version). Not a big deal I tell myself. I’ll check iTunes.
Nope. iTunes only has Season 17 to download.
That’s ok, I pay out the ass for premium cable television, and we get BBC America, which includes BBC America On Demand, so maybe they’ll at least have the first few episodes from the season up.
Nope.
The BBC is refusing to embrace the innovations the Internet and mobile computing have brought to our lives. Their behavior is representative of the cable industry at large.
The result of innovation is disruption. When you find a new way to do something, you disrupt the existing way of doing it. In commerce, when you innovate, you’re also disrupting existing streams of revenue.
There’s two ways to react to innovation:
– adapt/change your business model(s) and find new revenue streams
– preserve existing revenue streams
By ignoring innovation and preserving existing revenue streams you end up antiquating your business, potentially (inevitably?) ending it. IBM used to make typewriters, then personal computers. Then they sold their computer business to Lenovo and went into the enterprise market. IBM has adapted in order to survive (I know, IBM has more than those few things, but the point is still valid).
By not adapting to the ways people can now watch television, the BBC encouraged me to find other means of obtaining their content. I could probably download all of this season’s episodes of Top Gear from a Bittorrent site. But I don’t want to. I’d rather do it the right way, whether it be through iTunes or some other method the BBC endorses, but so far nothing exists.
What am I left to do?