Written by It looks as if I’m never going to hear the end of my somewhat injudicious and emotional (not to mention tired) question to the DRM panel at 3GSM. But that’s life. I was however hurt by the criticism that I was being sexist.
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I called the panel “big girls”, not “girlie men”, and it was as a commonly-used derivative of the Northern English phrase “big girls blouses”. Word detective calls it “one of those British idioms that are very hard for Americans to grasp”, which is a little harsh. It means wimp, but not in the sense of the Schwarzenegger “girlie men” comment (which has undeniable undertones) but in the sense (as I understand it) of someone slightly puffed out but ultimately empty. In fact, an American guide to speaking English that I found on the web calls it a “nice way of saying that someone is a wimp”.
So there.
Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that the global telecommunications industry will spend about a trillion dollars worldwide this year. By comparison, according to the accountants Price Waterhouse Coopers, the entire US filmed entertainment industry (box office, online, home video and rentals) was $51 billion. Of this, about a quarter is box office, a quarter TV and half is video/dvd (the main bit that would be threatened in the absence of DRM). In other words, the telecommunications industry could use one-fortieth of its annual spending to just buy the entire US filmed entertainment industry video/dvd output and give the stuff away to sell handsets, video players, set-top boxes or whatever else. I must stress this is not an original observation of mine: Andrew Odlyzko started me thinking about this a long time ago in an article for the excellent journal First Monday.
Incidentally, “Hollywood” generates about $10 billion in annual revenues, about the same as the US video game business. Jupiter Research say that global mobile phone game revenue will reach $430 million in 2009. Vodafone and DoCoMo alone have $100 billion in annual revenue.
