Elegant Content

I have always wanted to be a scientist. My extreme boredom in high school (leading to poor grades) and early adult focus on being a professional musician deprived me of the opportunity - although being an entrepreneur in the age of the Internet is certainly a voyage of discovery that seems just as fulfilling most of the time.

I often feel the need to feed my desire for the scientific voyage. I spent yesterday doing just that by watching PBS's "The Elegant Universe" with my two sons. They were, as I, enraptured with String Theory, M Theory, Parallel Universes, the struggle of Einstein, Michael Green, and countless others to find the unified Theory of Everything that reconciles the fundamental mathematical conflicts between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

But what struck me, and what I'm posting about here, is the excellent content repository that PBS (in this case Nova) is creating and sharing on the web for free. I know this is public broadcasting, and as such is supported by sponsorships and end-user donations rather than commercials, but this freeing of content is, I think, the wave of the future. Recent partnerships between content producers like NBC and Apple is the beginning of the end of TV's stranglehold over video content.

Once freed from our cable boxes, satellite dishes, and (in some cases I'm sure) rabbit ears - video content distribution is going to change forever.