Above is a picture of Dale Abbey monastery in England. Or at least all that's left of it. Monasteries were big business in the 15th century, at least until Henry VIII got hold of them. The monastery's monks worked for the pope, and the Catholic church was all that there was.
Under the leadership of the pope in Rome was the repository and source of all science, teaching, commerce, religion, politics, money, writing, ideas, publishing and just about everything else.
You can think of the 15th century church as a kind of combination of the power and learning now held in the big multinationals, institutions and others: Apple, Exxon, Harvard, the Pentagon, Microsoft, NASA and Prada all rolled into one.
And it looked like it was going to be that way forever. After all, who could take it down? Who could threaten such an institution? Threaten Apple and they'll take you to court, threaten the Vatican and they could excommunicate you, which might mean an eternity burning in hell – arguably worse than years of legal bills.
Prior to Henry's time, books were extremely expensive things to publish and the cost of buying a single book in those days was about $45,000 (£28,000) in today's money (for this bit of information I am grateful to NPR and to the federal funding, which still exists... at least so far).
The reason books suddenly got so cheap was that Gutenberg's printing press made it possible for anyone with an idea to publish and distribute their ideas at almost no cost. That was a real revolution. One of the people who cottoned on to the Gutenberg thing (an early adapter) was Martin Luther, father of the Lutheran church.
That was 500 years ago. Now, it is happening again. This time through the web. Information is now much more readily available to everyone and anyone, and for free. On top of that, anyone can publish any idea they have (or TV show they think would be cool) and distribute it worldwide... for free.
Once a single book cost $45,000; today it costs $40.00. That's a pretty steep price reduction. Now, let's apply that maths to the cost of producing a TV show.
Once it was thought that it cost $250,000 or so to make a half-hour show for cable. But at that technology-driven rate of change it should now only cost $223. So break out your iPhone, start shooting, cut on FCPX or iMovie and I think we are about there.
Michael Rosenblum is president and chief executive at RosenblumTV
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