Media ownership and the internet...

A few days ago, I stumbled onto Pandora after being referred to the site over and over by friends. It's taken me about two days to teach the site what music I like (No, Pandora, I am not a Coldplay fan but thanks for repeatedly suggesting different songs...) and now it's a steady stream of music that I want to hear. I've got a station, my wife has a station, and today I'm looking at my iTunes library and wondering... Do I really need to keep copies of all of these albums on my hard drive? Especially the ones that I've been keeping around just because I liked a particular single?

My principle problem with radio has always been finding a station that catered to my particular interests, and often it wasn't worth the 45 minutes that I detested every hour, just to hear the three or four songs that I wanted to hear. And Pandora solved that problem... And later today, I'l probably send a third of my music to the trash. I just don't need to own it.

Similarly, four years ago, when I was about half way through university overseas in Rome, I was part of this epic, American expat, TV piracy ring. There were six or seven of us with internet connections fast enough to pull an episode or two of TV off of bit torrent over night. We all had assignments (mine were Lost and Prison Break) and at about 3am on the night the episode aired in the States, we'd comb through the back alleys of the internet hunting for the download. Discs were burned and distributed. And we ran a massive library of current TV out of the university library (unbeknownst to the higher ups) with a barcoding system and everything. Amazon wouldn't ship us the DVDs, iTunes wouldn't let us into the music store due to our foreign IP addresses.

We had well over 100GB burned onto DVDRs. Now we have Hulu. Or we stream directly off of the major network's websites. We watch the embedded ads, and for an episode of House that we'd probably just watch once anyway, we're happy to reclaim our hard drive space. Even if we did want to watch again and again, sitting through the four or five 30 second ads is an easy admission price to pay, isn't it?

Now that I'm sitting on the other side, no longer the viewer but the creator of something that we hope to broadcast around the globe to a worldwide LDS community, we've been putting a lot of thought into how we want to reach out to each of you and more importantly what options we can offer you in terms of viewing and ownership. That's the reason that Todd and I found an internet distributor long before we started approaching more traditional venues (read: local SLC TV).

Having spent most of the last decade cut off from the TV I wanted to watch, believe me, we're not going to lock out anybody internationally. If you want DiVX or WMV or a physical DVD disc, we're going to make sure you get it. Heck, I'll even teach you how to connect your home computer to your TV if you want to stream it from the internet onto your home entertainment center. And if we're lucky, we hope to have weekly showings in a cinema here in Salt Lake followed by live Q&A with the cast and crew.

Your comments so far have really helped us shape our storytelling into something that really reflects your input. Now, if I can ask... How do you want to watch it? Point us toward the channels through which you get your media, whether you prefer to own or watch, and that's where Todd and I going to focus our energy.

And keep checking back.