Case in point, I received one of those family-spams last week that listed the sad state of the world, as it related to technology taking things like our beloved TV and landline phones away.

I wanted to take a moment to break this family-spam down and turn, if you will, that frown upside down.

The Post Office

First, outside of getting passports and buying collector stamps immortalizing the Apollo Space Program, I don’t find myself visiting the post office too often these days. And with grandma texting; everyone (and their mother) on Facebook; and the proliferation of e-card companies, I don’t see society returning to snail mail greetings anytime soon. But on a serious note, how can we demonize the financial industry for its lack of fiscal responsibility while continuing to allow our tax dollars to be fed into a dead business model?

The Check (or Cheque)

So, the UK is planning to make physical “cheques” obsolete by 2018. Are we next! Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I wrote a check. These days I am all about the Debit Card. If I did write a check it would be because I didn’t have money in my account and was simply trying to buy a couple of days till payday. So, I guess what I am saying is, save the trees!

The Newspaper

One of the arguments here is that younger people just don’t read the newspaper these days. When I was young I read comic books and other things I hid under my bed. When I was in college, I read schoolbooks and journals. These days, I get various RSS feeds to stay in the loop on the things I care about. To that point, the word “News” comes from the word “New.” At 2pm there is very little that is new in a paper printed that morning. By the way, save the trees!

The Book

Just use some positive feedback and say to yourself over and over, “I lived through the transition from the LP Record to the CD. I lived through the transition from VHS to DVD. I survived the loss of the iOmega ZIP drive and have come to embrace the joys of USB dongles. I can survive this!”  If that doesn’t work, the good news is that bookstores aren’t going away tomorrow. You still have time to enjoy the sweet smell of paper and dead trees!

The Telephone

Seriously. Is anyone really waxing nostalgic about landline phones? Keep a corded trimline phone in your closet, and when society and our electricity fail, you can plug it in and get 911 for free. But if that happens, you better also have a more relevant trade skill ready such as metalworking or midwifery.

The Great Music Industry Corporation

If a lone guitar player struck a power cord in the forest would anyone hear? Producers have been pushing packaged music talent out to consumers since the dawn of the gramophone disc. The reason? The industry is filled with people “that just want to make art, man” so there is an inherit need for people that understand and expect to be paid for the business side of things. To make more money calls for more promotion (or exploitation). The digital world may make this more complicated for marketers, but it’s a hell of a lot less expensive and more immediate than pressing DVDs. Besides, if this really bothers you, you don’t need to buy it. And there is a lot of new music waiting to be discovered on any number of college, independent and Internet radio stations (support www.radioparadise.com!). Unfortunately, since everything is digital either way, none of this will save trees.

The Television

TV as we know it is dying. And that’s a good thing! Terrestrial TV is still free (for those that can get in a good DTV signal), but that isn’t helpful if trying to access all that great, original programming produced on HBO, Showtime, FX, etc. To get these channels today, you need to pay for dozens of channels you don’t want. Here is the good news. If you don’t want to pay for cable, satellite or FiOS, and have a little patience, then you can legally get access to great content via iTunes, Netflix and a number of online portals. This may not satisfy your need for MTV’s Jersey Shore or live sports, but you can always stop spending $4.05 per day at Starbucks to help pay the $50 for basic cable!

Innovation is an amoral and pragmatic force. It’s both sad and wonderful depending on where your standing. Yesterday, scribes lost their jobs to the printing press. Today, printing press operators worry about the impact of eBooks.

j'aime Le Jersey Shore

And tomorrow…we’ll see!

The one silver lining I just discovered while editing this blog, is that you can watch full episodes of Jersey Shore for free on MTV.com. But you can also use parental controls to block the site — if that’s how you roll!

The “818? 310. Nice.” line in the movie “Swingers” was classic, but 13 years later it’s beginning to show its age.

This isn’t just because the real estate market has moved all the good girls to The Valley in Los Angeles. It’s because as more and more of us cut our land lines (at home and in the office), move from job to job and city to city, we have started to cling to that one number that can follow us anywhere: our cell phone number.

In fact, since I moved to Seattle, I have met half a dozen people that live here but have decided to hang onto their out-of-state cell numbers.

I can relate. I am keeping my old, out-of-state number too! But my decision was based on the fact that where my cell phone company could give me a new and shiny area code, they couldn’t put a message on my old line to let callers know my number had changed. I have a lot of long standing media relationship, and having them get a dead line wasn’t going to work.

Well I just nabbed my new Google Voice number and this is all going to change. I now have a single number (with an area code of my choosing) that I am putting on my business cards. One number, and each caller (friend, client, media, wife, bill collector) will be routed not only to a special message, but also to any number I choose.

Here are some of the things it can do:

• Screen calls before you accept them
• Hear voicemails as they are being left
• Automatically transcribes voicemails and deliver them to you via text, email, etc.
• Allows you to automatically forward both calls and texts to any phone number
• Allows you to create separate greetings depending on who is calling (e.g., my wife is from Germany and her family gets a special voicemail from her in German)
• Most importantly, gives you the ability to separate your business and professional lives with one phone number (and one cell phone)

To get a Google Voice number — go to www.google.com/voice and sign-up for a phone line. If you don’t mind having a random area code, you can put in words or expressions to see if you can nab a vanity number. I won’t put my number here, but I will say that it includes the words: ski and fun.

While I agree that this is ultimately a losing scenario for cable companies, I think that the majority of Americans are still in the rosy glow of HD programming and HD On Demand that there is still time for cable companies (or telco companies) to look at changing how they do business. But how should they evolve?

Telco companies are certainly evolving to bring more choice into the market. But as much as I love AT&T UVerse, at the end of the day (no offense to the engineering marvels here), it’s just an IPTV version of what cable is offering. Same content, same channels, but with some nice multi-room DVR controls.

But it’s still just a box. A box that does not play well with other content services — not to mention my own personal content.

So I have a TiVO and the future promise of a hacked Apply TV to solve some of these issues. However, I am not a case study for the average American.  Most American are still discovering the joys of time shifting with their cable (or telco) DVR.

So there is still time to evolve. But not much time. As more and more of the Gen-Y are getting jobs, their first apartments, and getting married, there better be some changes — because they will  will gladly choose iTunes On Demand to get their shows pushed to their TVs than pay for 200 channels they don’t want.

When Cable first arrived, people never thought people would pay for what they got for free (read this great article on the history of cable television). Well they did. And over time, the networks have lost a lot of power to the original “paid” programming offered by Showtime, HBO and others. And cable became the 800 pound gorilla in content distribution.

So what’s keeping things from evolving as fast as we are? When talking about cable companies, a lot of this is technology driven, a lot of this is copyright (see my previous post on copyright/drm and content), but a lot of it is that the modern cable company is a giant network of regional operations, mom and pop acquisitions, and nightmare processes for rolling out new programming — not to mention the customer service issues. It’s a monster with many heads where even something simple can not be simply integrated.

This gives a leg up to AT&T, which has brought to market the first IPTV offering with its remotely controlled home network. A network that update itself and easily role out new services. Lets give them a chance and see what happens!

There is no doubt that AT&T gambled (a lot) and won (a lot) with their bet on the iPhone. So let’s call it a success and move on.

What I think is a more interesting question to ponder: when will AT&T better leverages its quad-play (home phone, cell, Internet and IPTV) offerings to begin really owning the digital home. I am not talking about discounted package deals and single billing statements. Yawn.  What I am talking about is going into an AT&T store seeing a big, beautiful HDTV and getting it for free or near free (say $20 per month) for signing a 2 year commitment for new IPTV and Internet service.

When this happens, AT&T would not only drive up subscribers, but drive HDTV sales and services through the roof. I love going into Best Buy, but if AT&T was willing to off set the cost of a new HDTV like they do for cell phones, I’d be the first in line.

If you are a tech-nerd like me, take a step back before you blast me on the disadvantages of bundling. I know the customer service issues needed to be dealt with first! But most people don’t want to be CIOs of their house. They want a simple solution to bring everything together. And think — what’s the next logical step once all these things are connected together? Access to advanced content and services. Not just movies, but critically needed services such as remote home network management, off-site file back-ups (documents, movies, photos and videos), managed DRM so you can move content from one device to another (legally), and much much more.

I am not the first to prognosticate about the future of telco and cable companies (sorry satellite), so believe this isn’t a matter of if this will happen, but when. And when it does… that will be a hell of thing to be able to promote. Much more interesting than bundled billing!

Having said, this is a vastly complicated issue that requires action on the part of the owners (including their agents, lawyers, managers, promoters) 3^rd party sellers, their various intermediaries, and even all those artist unions. It’s an alphabet soup of crazy.

This is why intellectual property rights are the single biggest issue facing digital content distribution. Until it’s figured out, we’ll continue to get access to only a small layer of available content. This is why the channel line-up and on demand selection appears to be exactly the same whether you download it on your laptop via Amazon or access it via On Demand through cable, IPTV or satellite, et al.

With all that said, I was a little disappointed with Jonathan Miller’s (News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer) answer to a question about copyright at today’s Tech 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Q: Talk about copyrights.

JM: We need to have copyrights that are expected. Even in China they realize that. They have a budding content industry too. They’re very interested in copyright and piracy. I think we’ll have an Internet that respects copyright.

I get that News Corp owns a lot of content (you’ve heard of 20^th Century Fox, right?). We get that they have more freedom to move their own content around on their various holdings. But what the world needs now is more open debate about a global standard focused on letting people decide for themselves how they want to consume content.

For example, with mobile broadband speeds increasing, the need to side load content (move it manually from your computer to your mobile device) is becoming more and more unnecessary. In the future all this content will be managed in the “cloud,” and you will be able to simply push pause on one device, such as your TV, and push play to continue watching on another device, such as your laptop.

Does this mean that when we figure all this out that consumers will stop using the Internet, peer-to-peer services, usenet groups, etc. to get their content for free? No. But as any consumer survey will tell you, the vast majority of people want (and will) pay for digital content.

The industry needs to work together to figure this out. They need to focus on finding new ways to make more money, not obsess on the certain possibility that some people — people that would never have purchased the content legally anyway — might get access. It’s like a grocery chain closing down because they have a few shoplifters.