Alexander Cameron writes "IPTV/VoD: The Fall Of Content's Kingdom".

In many ways his views are similar to my own commentary in "The Sky is Falling: Is the Record Industry Ready to Face the Music?". Both music and video industries have powerful and well-entrenched content owners, suffer from piracy that has not and will not be defeated, and must evolve due to the digital world.

The lessons are the same for music and video. Video is different in that IPTV brings in another powerful set of actors - the telcos and cablecos that distribute premium programming. But the result is the same. They will have to make the same accommodations as content owners and evolve in an open and competitive world.

He writes "The question is when, not if, rightsholders will be able to surmount their paranoid fear of cannibalising existing revenue channels to create new ones. The market has made its voice known - it's now a case of who responds quickest, as delay will punish the latecomers and the last will perish outright. The next step in both legal and illegal P2P content distribution is to bypass the PC entirely, and then skip the DVD player too. The next mainstream destination is the IP set-top box or media player, both which can connect to the internet directly themselves or stream video and audio from PCs by proxy. BitTorrent, eMule and Limewire are one step away from their set-top box editions."

This isn't a problem that can be controlled. The only way to stop it is to go head on, and that means holding your breath, rolling up your sleeves and accepting that these new alternative services that need to be developed require some modest sacrifice and co-operation with people outside the normal box. aristotle famously defined the three act structure of a story (in Poetics) that Hollywood uses as its bible today. In pure LA terms, the first act, or problem/setup, is one of limited distribution in a globalised age of digital media. The complication, or middle act, is piracy and the failure of the music industry. The last act, resolution, is yet to be finalised."

"The content industry has a choice now it's up the proverbial tree, having rocks thrown at it (another reference to the three act structure of screenwriting), and its hero's plan has been dashed. The question is how the story ends - whether it will be a glorious feel-good last chapter where everyone wins or a terrible tragedy where the final goodbye is through death by a thousand cuts. Dramatic it will be, but that's what makes the people buy it."