Nico Lumma hat in seinem Blog das “The Cord-Cutters Manifesto“ vorgestellt. Die Thesen finde ich allesamt so wichtig, dass ich sie hier 1:1 wiedergebe. Denn man kann es gar nicht oft genug wiederholen, es muss endlich Schluss sein mit der Gängelung der Konsumenten.

In der letzten Woche machte passenderweise ein Comic von The Oatmeal die Runde, der sich genau mit dieser Problematik beschäftigt: “I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened!” Ein User will sich auf legalem Weg die Staffel der Serie besorgen und endet dann, in Ermangelung eines Angebots, bei einer Tauschbörse. Die Geschichte ist eigentlich zu traurig um wahr zu sein, aber leider heutzutage immer noch Alltag. Aber nun zurück zum Manifest und den fünf Wünschen.

1. We would like to watch the TV shows we want when we want on the device or screen we want. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? We all know as cord-cutters that nothing is ever that simple. You often have to wait a day, a week, a month or a year to see a show that aired last night. Give us the shows we want when we want them and we’ll be willing to pay a fair price. Without a cable subscription.

2. We will pay for the shows and sports we want most. This is a business model you understand well: pay-per-view. Some people will pay $4.99 for a movie that just left the theaters and others will pay $50 for a top-flight boxing match. Just move that model over to TV, so that some people pay 99 cents for a regular season show, $1.99 for a season-ending show and $9.99 for a season’s pass. iTunes already offers this up, but this needs to be broken out of Apple’s closed system for everyone. Without a cable subscription.

3. End the blackouts for sports-on-demand. Ah, the most difficult one for you to pull off because of multibillion-dollar contracts between sports leagues and the TV networks. But consider the new revenues that would come in if everyone in the nation (or maybe the world, if you do it right online) could pay $1.99 to watch each New York Knicks game with Jeremy Lin playing. Or if you’re a fan of a hometown team, you could buy a season’s package to watch the games at home. We repeat: Without a cable subscription.

4. Yes, we mean one service that plays on all devices. If we rent or buy a show with one service, we expect to watch it on our big-screen TV, our smartphone, our tablet, our computer monitor, and on whatever invention comes next that has a screen. You’ve already been building such a system, called “TV Everywhere” or Xfinity (at Comcast). It’s great, but it assumes only people paying for cable can watch. All you have to do is come up with a fair fee for non-cable subscribers, and we’ll be hooked.

5. Good shows swim; bad shows sink. The argument from cable providers is that the only way to support quality programming is to have everyone pay for every channel. If they switched to a la carte programming, everyone would choose a few channels and we’d lose the diversity. And who would pay the “Mad Men” their escalating salaries? Guess what: The good programming would rise to the top, and the bad programming would go away. If the current crop of actors can only survive on $1 million per episode, we can probably find a new crop of actors who can survive on $10,000 per episode. More likely, the less middlemen who are involved in TV production and distribution, the more money that actors will get directly from fans.

Kann ich alles genau so unterschreiben. Und um es noch mal ganz klar zu sagen:

1. We would like to watch the TV shows we want when we want on the device or screen we want.

2. We will pay for the shows and sports we want most.

3. End the blackouts for sports-on-demand.

4. Yes, we mean one service that plays on all devices.

5. Good shows swim; bad shows sink.

So! Aber es muss wohl erst wieder ein Unternehmen wie Apple um die Ecke kommen und den Markt neu ordnen. Und dann wird wieder gejammert…

Folge mir auf Twitter:
@guidobuelow folgen