When it rains, it pours on this blog 🙂

I see that I'd blogged about artificial scarcity before, and again, it was about media.

The only reason I did not have eight champions league matches to choose from on my TV is that someone's spreadsheet suggested that it was more profitable to remove my alternatives to try to coerce me into watching the single game that was sold to the Turkish CL rights holder.  Well, it didn't work.

This reminds me of the diamond trade, where supply is artificially manipulated to manage pricing levels.  Ultimately, the laws of nature are on the diamond industry's side: there will be less diamonds in the future.  But in digital media, where the marginal cost of increased consumption is almost nil, the attempts at feigning scarcity will lose in the long term.