Paul Carr doesn't buy the vision of Web as king:
The spectacle of Oscar night has also prompted me to consider the received wisdom that one day the grand Hollywood dream will die. That piracy will finally claim victory over ticket and DVD sales and the only people able to continue making films will be children with Flipcams and indie documentary makers with trust funds (imagine a very tight Venn diagram). One day, we’re told, all entertainment will be free, and quality will be replaced by quantity: magazines by blogs, newspapers by tweets, movies by clips, stories by SEO. For those of us who care about storytelling and spectacle and five years of hard work for 120 minutes of screen time, it’s a depressing future, but it’s one we’ve been warned to expect for some time. Laugh it up, Hathaway, your days are numbered.
And. Yet. ... The truth is that the grand idea of the web as a content platform has failed. To make money on a web it’s all about grabbing more and more eyeballs to compensate for plummeting CPMs. On that web there’s no place for quality, and in five years time we’ll see the medium for what it really is: a brilliant advertising platform, and very little else. ...
But I won’t care I’ll have long abandoned the web for my entertainment needs, as will anyone else with even a modest amount of disposable income, a dedicated media device or two and a hankering for the uninterrupted pleasure of watching a good story, told magnificently with nary a hint of SEO.