Davos optimism about new media business models

That's certainly not a headline you could have written in years past when corporate leaders from the IT, Telecom and Media & Entertainment sectors gathered together at Davos, what with file sharing decimating the music industry and digital movie theft presumably not far behind.  But what a difference a year makes. This winter under the gentle snows of Davos, there's a new theme among the old crowd: broadband adoption has reached critical mass levels (at least in the States), acceptable DRM is available at least to solve low-level needs, and consumers have demonstrated they're willing to pay (at least for music at 99 cents a song). So, there's a new spirit of cooperation among the sectors and a little future-gazing that's predicting a break-out year in 2005 for new online content programming.

Comments

[Paul Sagan]

I very much appreciate your point. There is significant discussion here about universal access to networked information, and interesting and promising ideas have been discussed. Several seed projects started by IT executives in prior years at Davos are beginning to bear fruit, including an education-based project in the Mid East and an initiative to identify the critical needs of the currently-disenfranchised in South America. But much more must be done, and the need is not lost on most thoughtful executives here. And I believe many are committed to finding real and democratic solutions.

[dalbert ad]

While the businesmen is happy about the busuness models in Davos, here in Porto Alegre we are talking about information and comunication as human rights, what depends on deeps changes on the system, assuring the acces to information and communication for the people, democratizing the Internet governance and assure digital inclusion for all, but the model that we have now is incompatible with all that.
Communications rigths cant be just a business!