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.