Articles by John Barrett

With every passing week, reports on box-office receipts come with the same anxiety as industry watchers, film companies, content owners and theater managers assess if the current year will meet or exceed the previous one. Successes like "The Hunger Games" are tempered by disappointments like "John Carter," and embedded within each lackluster debut is the hope of compensatory revenues through later release windows, including cable, streaming, VOD, DVD/Blu-ray, and now "cloud copies."

New technologies are changing the way we watch video. DVRs, VoD, and online video are freeing us from the broadcast schedules that previously dictated when we could watch programming. The latter two, combined with an ever-growing number of channels, are dramatically increasing what we can watch. The revolution in video habits is not yet complete, ...

Roughly 50 million households in Western Europe have adopted broadband services over the past three years. Regulatory reforms in the UK and France in particular have helped boost penetration by creating strongly competitive markets. As a result, a large and growing number of households can now view video online, and the door is open to alternative forms of video distribution. ...

At the end of 2004, it appeared the home networking phenomenon was bypassing Europe. Penetration rates were far behind North America and Asia, and only a few households (less than 5 percent) were interested in a home network. Broadband adoption was likewise lackluster. In many of Europe's leading markets, just one-fifth of all households had high-speed access, and without broadband, home networks are of limited utility...

In his new book, "The Cult of the Amateur," Andrew Keen publicly and pugnaciously says many of the things people were quietly thinking about Web 2.0. He refers to bloggers as a "pajama army" wreaking cultural havoc from their parents' basements Let me provide a few highlights:...

In 1998, Napster took college campuses by storm and quickly ushered in an era where anyone could download any song they wanted without paying for it. The record labels were caught off guard and spent years debating the best way to respond A flurry of lawsuits directed against consumers generated plenty of ill will and bad press but did not stop th...

I'm an early adopter. I don't just analyze technology from the safety of my own cubicle; I bring it into my home and live with it I find that by doing so, I gain a perspective that would otherwise be lost. I thought I would share some of that perspective with you today....

Economics teaches that the market for some goods and services are "natural" monopolies Take telephone service, for example. A telephone service is only really valuable if any person with a phone can be connected to any other person with a phone. For this reason, the market will "naturally" coalesce around a single, monopoly provider unless the gove...