My first job in the cable industry was trekking up mountains in the moonshine regions of Kentucky and Tennessee to find illegal cable operators that were re-selling unencrypted signals off of satellites to local residents without paying retransmission fees.
I thought about that this week as the Supreme Court ruled against Aereo, the startup whose tiny antennas pull in broadcast feeds the company then streams to paying customers - without compensating the broadcasters. Technology changes quickly in our industry, but the same battles are fought again and again.
Aereo's business model was unique, but the trend it tapped is broad. Even with the company's loss, the balance of power in the industry is shifting from content distributors to content consumers. The carefully curated chef's tasting menu of the broadcast and cable eras has been replaced by the 24-hour all-you-can-stream-buffet. More choice equals more consumer power.
These are boom times as well for content producers. There are huge market opportunities available for companies that can develop - or repurpose - targeted content for niche audiences that would once have been written off as too small to matter.
The good news is that much of this content already exists. Studios have millions of hours of film and video in their archives, ready to be repackaged, reused and resold. The bad news is that rights-management issues and other challenges make it very hard to pull that material off the shelf.
My second job in cable was at the network that would become the Discovery Channel. This was at the moment of cable's second great expansion. For our part, we grew from one channel broadcasting in one country to 11 channels in 147 countries in 22 languages, matching the growth that took place across the cable landscape.
To achieve this growth, we had to build a global library of owned content and cleared footage. We couldn't afford to send a new camera crew out every time we needed video of a cheetah mom and her cubs.
Today, the technical limitations of those old libraries are clear. Much of the content is siloed. It's not tagged with unique identifiers that can pick one piece of content out of the overall stream. "Tagging" metadata was all manual, as content loggers all had different approaches to labeling the same material.
The media supply chain is notorious for relying on multiple computer systems that don't talk to one another. An old episode of a TV show in syndication might have different names across the production, editing and library systems.
Because of these issues, only two percent of legacy archive content ever sees the light of day. Media companies need solid, clean data about what they have, where it is and how they can use it before they can even think about monetizing the other 98 percent of content they already own in a new market or platform.
One irony of the current situation is that programs from the golden age of three-network television are especially ripe for reuse in the fractured streaming world. At some point, someone will re-release the 1950s, but to do that they will need a holistic view of their content, confidence in the accuracy of their rights-management systems, and predictive analytics that maximize the return on any digitization investment.
Today's market reminds me of the early days of cable. People asked then why anyone would need 12 new channels. But once they experienced this added choice, suddenly there was clamoring for even more content.
We're in a similar moment of great upheaval, although the market and technology move much faster than they did 20 years before. To the early movers will go the spoils.