It’s one of the great paradoxes of The Networked Age.  As digital piracy explodes, bandwidth is practically free, and the price for a terabyte hard drive is under $400 bucks, massive personal media collections go the way of the Dodo bird every day.  People just don’t back-up their files.   And when it’s gone, it’s a long road back.

So I urge you, do not ignore the Prime Directive of Digital Content: 

“If your data is not stored in more than one place, it does not exist.”

Companies who play the digital content game can learn a valuable lesson from the “two places or nowhere” directive.  One corollary is this:  Distribute or die.  If you think you can run a proprietary network that will create the largest audience possible, forget it.  Ask Gary Vaynerchuck of Wine Library TV which exclusive video provider he uses.  Think it’s Viddler?  Not at all.  Just like the vino he sips, his content flows across YouTube, Metacafe, Viddler, and iTunes.

If you want your content to live, you have to be everywhere you can be, not just where you want to be.  Your company no longer lives on your website (if it wants to live).  Nobody should be in the “let’s build an exclusive channel” game these days, especially if their model depends on being the “exclusive” provider of niche content.  All of the equity resides in content, and online, content only continues to exist if it lives in more than one place.

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