One of the odd realities of life is that those who are supposed to have a handle on what's coming usually don't. History is littered with great leaders who didn't really believe their enemies could defeat them, or the peasants would one day have had enough and rise up with their torches and pitchforks.
The whale oil industry didn't think much would come from the discovery of petroleum. Record executives didn't believe file sharing would be a challenge after they got rid of Napster and nobody in the film business believed a low budget movie about a war in space would revolutionize what kind of movies fill up the multiplex in Summer.
And now the Canadian TV industry and many of the Guilds employed therein are convinced we can continue making television as we have for the past couple of decades. No matter how many Cassandras at film markets and symposia for the last years have preached that "content is king", touted the future of streaming or implied there is no longer such a thing as a protected territory -- they thought they knew better.
They didn't recognize the disruptors as legitimate competitors or realize how quickly they could become too big to fail.
This week a new player arrived in Canada. Dazn -- which bills itself as the "Netflix of Sports", offers to stream to any and all of your devices for $20 a month the same all-inclusive NFL package Bell or Rogers will sell you for $50 -- while also providing you with pretty much as much other sports programming as you can fit into your day -- instead of endless panels of ex-athletes and poker.
Meanwhile, Netflix released numbers indicating that, despite the number of movie channels Shaw, Telus, Bell and Rogers are willing to package for you at ever increasing prices, 5 million more people in the last year have chosen to subscribe to their service instead.
The one thing you can be sure of in life is that change will come. Make that two things -- the pundits will not see it coming. And -- okay three things -- it'll all happen quicker than anybody thought.
For a complete explanation of how all that works -- so you can do your best to prepare yourself, spend a few minutes with Tony Seba, a guy who studies disruption.
And -- Enjoy Your Sunday.
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