Barry Diller: ‘Of Course People Will Pay for Content’

Joining News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, longtime Hollywood executive and Internet entrepreneur Barry Diller thinks the time has come for paid content.

Interviewed along with fellow Daily Beast co-founder Tina Brown, Diller tells CBS News anchor Katie Couric that the notion of free content began in the earliest days of the Internet and has persisted to this day. Some quotes:

“The Internet was started by tech people. …In the early period (there was) this mythology that the internet was free because the tech people couldn’t have cared less about content. They cared about plumbing. …All these tech people said, ‘Who cares about copyrights? What we care about is bandwidth, availability’…

“The result of that was, in this early period, if you thought you should get paid for something, it was kind of against the ethos. Guess what, that is changing.”

I’m not sure it’s changing as much as Diller thinks, but certainly the need to monetize content has grown more urgent. What kind of viable revenue structure will emerge from that, we’ll have to wait and see.

Here’s the video:

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