Steven Soderbergh is my new hero. By releasing his new movie “Bubble” simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and on HDNet he’s about to change the way content producers control their product forever.
The movie theater chains are boycotting the film and calling him the anti-Christ. Ad agencies that do “movie marketing” are probably crying about their lost revenue from staged release dates, and TV network execs are probably scared to death- that maybe, they won’t have jobs if this keeps up.
Welcome to content distribution 2.0, where the middle-men are about to be cut out as hard as Wal-Mart cuts costs of distribution. Does this spell the end of movie theaters? Probably not- teenagers will always need someplace to go watch a flick away from the kids- and date night just isn’t the same at home- no matter how big your plasma tv is. But what it does do, is give people the option to see what they want, when they want it, how they want it- and that’s the future of all content.
As IBM says- it’s an on-demand world, and consumers are a demanding lot. The only thing truly missing from Soderbergh’s distribution revolution is online delivery. Right now, some cable companies will offer VOD services that will deliver “Bubble”- but a true multi-pronged attack would also allow downloads to your computer- at higher resolution than the iTunes store.
What the current distribution network doesn’t realize is that not everyone is within a 30 minute drive of a movie theater in this country. How many times have they teased the entire country with releasing a movie in only NYC and LA and making the rest of the country wait. Consider this payback time from those of us in the flyover states.
What Soderbergh is doing is delivering content to the people- making it as easy to access as this post- and that, makes him my hero.

See this c-net article