Jeff Jarvis on his BuzzMachine blog has an interesting post which meshes with the ranting I’ve been doing lately.

It comes in the form of a quote from Peter Chernin of NewsCorp:

“We won’t allow people to create for profit platforms on our platform…. the Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow people to sell ads on their platform.”

Jarvis continues:

That’s the essence of the old media architecture: ‘I own the platform (read: distribution) and you don’t and I will get all the benefit from it and you won’t nya nya nya.’

The new media architecture: the more you help others benefit — which includes making money — from your platform, the more they will distribute it for you and develop and extend it for you. YouTube. Google. Openads. See Seth Goldstein on whether Facebook will become the social platform; he says it all depends on whether developers can benefit from building on it.

Although they are discussing the news media (particularly print) it applies to the overall approach we are seeing from the old guard of the Telcos and Hollywood.

There must be some type of Aesop’s Fable that can be applied to this but I have to dash and get free beer from my pal, Kit, who produced a direct-to-DVD show with me in it as a mad scientist. Mmmmmm, free beer.

Cheers.