The New New Thing is…Television
About a year ago, Doug Weaver from the Upstream Group and I were talking about what a “post-broadcast” world looks like. Both Doug and I like to make up names for things and, if I remember correctly, Doug came up with the phrase post-broadcast to describe the networked world after the decline of broadcast media. His point was that advertising had become synonymous with broadcasting, one-to-many, intrusive communications and that the time for that had passed.
I agreed then and we see the supporting evidence of that now.
Doug had started his career in media sales and I in advertising creative so the risk of pronouncing things to be “post-broadcast” were colored by the possibility that we were two middle-aged guys declaring the world had changed when, in fact, it was us who had changed. Perhaps both are true but I believe he was on to something.
There is a fair amount of evidence that has appeared just in the last year alone to support the concept of a post-broadcast world.
The Mumbai attacks were covered faster and more thoroughly on Twitter than they were on CNN.
Facebook has become the world’s addressbook. On the campus of Virginia Tech in November I overheard a student ask another student if he wanted another guys phone number and the reply was “Nah, he’s on Facebook.”. That’s a networked world for you!
This brings us to the most curious thing to come out of CES2009 this year: the announcement of Yahoo! Connected TV Widgets.
I used to work with Andrew Frank a few years back in New York and, like Doug Weaver, I found him to be a consistent font of insight and clarity. Andrew says that Yahoo! “took a pole position in the Internet-TV convergence race by partnering with Intel and securing deals with Samsung, Sony, LG and, Vizio to include the Yahoo! TV Widget engine in TV sets scheduled to hit the market this spring”.
This hastens the post-broadcast world in very real and meaningful ways. Andrew goes on to say, “Yahoo! also augmented its “open strategy” by revealing an open TV widget developers’ kit (WDK) and ecosystem that will allow any developers to create TV widgets, have them reviewed by Yahoo!, and (if appropriate) get them listed in Yahoo!’s (or anyone else’s) on-screen (PC & TV) directory. ITV is here at last.”
Andrew’s excellent post, The New Face of Convergence at CES can be found here.
The takeaway here is that the next big Internet-driven disruption in media is that bastion of broadcast: television.
It’s a post-broadcast world. Welcome.
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Thanks for the encouraging words and pingback. Let’s hope TV can learn from the music industry experience.
Does broadcast ever go away??
No. In a book I recently read, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” by Clay Shirky, the author makes the very good point that broadcast continues but publishing changes from a model of “one to many” to a model of “many to many”. This change is enabled because of cheaper tools and more outlets.
Publishing (of which broadcasting is a subset)used to be restricted only to those who could afford it. The cost of a TV studio, FCC space on the airwaves and other necessities or the cost of printing books allowed the industry and hence the information to be controlled only by those who could afford it.
Now, tools and outlets are cheap. That means that if I want to publish, I can. If I want to “televise”, I use YouTube. If I want to publish a book, I follow the self publishing route or put it on-line as a PDF document.
The reason that “The Mumbai attacks were covered faster and more thoroughly on Twitter than they were on CNN” was simply because the media was cheap, available and there were enough interested people who wanted to share what they saw (and I suppose enough interested people to care!)
So now what… does CNN go away and become a relic? The problem with the “everybody is a broadcaster” model is who do you trust? Do I trust the guy in Oskosh who says that he is an “eyewitness” and posts on Twitter or do I trust CNN?
Imagine how interesting it will get when I see a Yahoo Twitter widget on my screen next to a CNN broadcast from Mumbai.
What I see as the post-broadcast world is a world where and enormous amount of unfiltered information is available and is no longer tied with a time period.
I (or CNN or anyone else) publishes a “broadcast” and parks it somewhere until an interested party picks it up. I ran into this last week in a fit of “unproductivity” when I decided to watch an episode of “The Office” on Hulu. I run into this every day when I timeshift NPR programs by downloading them to my iPod and listening to them when it fits my timeframe.
The post-broadcast world is shaped by me… for me…. the way that I want to consume it.
That is something exciting.
I’ve also learned that media is additive.
Radio didn’t replace newspapers, television didn’t replace radio, and digital communications are not going to replace the preceding media. Just more, as you say, tools and outlets.
Hmmm, I like that: Tools & Outlets.