A website called What’s Next: Innovations in Newspapers (part of a media consulting agency) has some photos of newsrooms at different media companies including CNN, Reuters and the Toronto Star — as well as some shots of Al Jazeera’s new TV studio/newsroom and one of the new London Telegraph newsroom, which incorporates newspaper and Website.
There are a few different threads weaving through the blogosphere related to the evolution of media — not just TV but all different kinds of content. One thread is the Bear Stearns report by Spencer Wang, in which he looks at how the TV content business is changing, and the rise of “user-generated content.” You can tune into a conference call, or scroll through a PDF version of his presentation on what Om Malik calls the “fat belly” of the Long Tail.
One of the interesting points to me was that 75 per cent of the top 20 videos on YouTube on one particular day were “user-generated content” of some kind, which goes against the standard argument from people like Mark Cuban and Nick Carr that the majority of popular videos on YouTube and other sites are copyright violations. As Rafat Ali at PaidContent succinctly puts it, the point of the presentation is that “aggregation and context” are the key.
That leads to another thread, which came up while reading Steve Rubel’s Micropersuasion, where he pointed to a new Christmas gadget-shopping hub put together by Federated Media and Best Buy. The site has gadget reviews written by bloggers for half a dozen different websites, including Uncrate, Oh Gizmo, Gadgetopia and PVR Blog. It’s not clear whether the reviews were written specifically for the site, or are taken from the participating blogs, but it’s a pretty smart idea.
Then there’s the New York Times story about Philips sponsoring the entire newscast of NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Obviously that isn’t new media, but it’s an interesting move by Philips to cut through the clutter of TV advertising, as Techdirt notes — just as Best Buy is trying to cut through the clutter of Web advertising. In other words, aggregation and context.
In what amounts to a “dog bites man” sort of story, the BBC is reporting that online video is eating into TV watching, according to a recent survey. Gee, ya think? For every sign that building relationships with viewers online increases their loyalty to a particular show — which CBS said recently appears to be the case with some of the shows that it has released into the wild on the Internet — there are signs that overall TV viewership levels continue to decline.
What’s also happening, of course, is that any TV watching that is going on is happening very differently. I don’t know how many conversations I’ve had over the last little while with people who not only don’t watch as much TV as they used to, but watch it primarily with the use of a PVR, whenever they want to, and without commercials. All of this requires that TV networks and advertisers think about what they are doing in different ways, as Mike Urlocker points out on his blog.
TV still exists, obviously, and many people continue to like sitting around in groups watching “appointment television” shows like Survivor or Gilmore Girls or whatever (for me it’s Heroes). But it is also increasingly being sliced and diced and served up in a myriad of ways online, through YouTube and Revver and through the websites of the networks. More and more people are watching bits and pieces of shows instead of the whole thing. And as David Brazeal notes, quality doesn’t matter as much as we might like to think it does.
In other words, TV isn’t dying but evolving. What is it evolving into? Who knows. But the TV and the Internet are effectively becoming one thing, just as the Internet and the telephone are becoming one thing, and just as the Internet and the computer are increasingly becoming one thing.
The Lost Remote guys (Steve Safran and Stephen Warley) have posted a fascinating repurposed presentation they did at the Streaming Media conference, in which they talk about some of the TV shows and networks that are really thinking outside the box (sorry). Hat tip for the link goes to Will Sullivan of Journerdism, who is interactive projects editor at the Palm Beach Post.
That includes the producers of Lost — who make extensive use of forums, blogs, websites that are extensions of the show, podcasts and so on — and shows such as 5 Takes, which drops five travel journalists in a city without any resources and then has them interact with the audience to decide what to do, where to go and so on. They also look at how some of the networks are encouraging their audience to upload their own videos.
The two Steves also do a pretty good rundown of some of the things they heard at the Streaming Media conference that are wrong, including a) “Our core business is television”; b) “We need to drive people to our site” and c) “If we control the information, people will come to us.” A refreshing take on the future of TV (my apologies for the poor quality of the screen grab image included in this post).
