"Content is King" "Content is not king"

"The Internet will surely have a major impact on the content industries.
This may mean that writers and artists will get a bigger share of the pie. That appears to have been the trend over the last few decades, with movie actors and professional sport stars increasing their share of the revenues their work brings in.

Content is King, and Content is not king.
They are both true and both false.

The truth is that Content is changing.
Better: the broadcasters are changing.
Content is not king in the sense that the traditional broadcasters are not kings anymore.

The Internet is a disruptive technology, it does have unprecedented ability to emulate other delivery mechanisms, and we are already seeing rapid growth in music delivery on it.
There will be continuing competition to traditional media, as well as increasing diversity of delivery mechanisms for content. This may mean that writers and artists will get a bigger share of the pie.
It is less certain whether carriers will manage to improve their share of the content pie to the same extent. There will certainly be a shift of revenue towards broadband services, but content distribution may not be the largest contributor to it.

That real-time multimedia traffic would not dominate the Internet has been predicted several times in the past. It is an obvious conclusion from the rapid increase in traffic.
The discussion above is futurology. We cannot be certain how the Internet will evolve. However, history teaches us several lessons. One is that the growing storage and communication capacities will be used, often in unexpected ways.

Another important lesson is that the value of the myriad social interactions has often been underestimated.
Sociability was frequently dismissed as idle gossip, and especially in the early days of the telephone, was actively discouraged.

Yet the most successful communication technologies, the mail and the telephone, reached their full potential only when they embraced sociability and those "useless calls" as their goal [Fischer]. That seemingly idle chit-chat not only provided direct revenues, but it encouraged the diffusion of the corresponding technology, and made it more useful for commercial and other applications. Such social interaction frequently function to grease the wheels of commerce.

Whether content is king or not has direct relevance for the question of whether the Internet will continue to be an open network, or whether it will be balkanized. If content were to dominate, then the Internet would be primarily a broadcast network. With value proportional to the number of users, there would be few inherent advantages to an open network.
Content has never been king, it is not king now, and is unlikely to ever be king. The Internet has done quite well without content, and can continue to flourish without it. Content will have a place on the Internet, possibly a substantial place. However, its place will likely be subordinate to that of business and personal communication."

Andrew Odlyzko.

Nevertheless Content IS the Internet.
The first and massive "Broadband boom" came with Napster and file sharing.
The real Mass Market of connectivity bloomed when there was content to deliver.
And in "pure Internet style" was not a central broadcasted content, but an "end to end" broadcasted content.
The Internet for its nature is an "End to End" network and the very succesful broadcasting will be an "end to end" broadcasting.
High compression, multicasting, new generation Set Top Boxes, will see the dawn of a new way of broadcasting, the birth of a new figure of broadcaster.
The content will be a copyrighted Mp3 or the last electronic song of the unknown artist, or the last song of the famous singer.

We will see the dawn of the new Era where the publishers, the Music Labels,the movie distributions will slowly either disappear or change their role.
The artist will earn the biggest part of his creative production.
The Internet will allow him to sell his creation at a fraction of its actual price with and increase of his profits.

The profit will be close to the revenue, so close as to have almost the same meaning.

Patrizia