Broadcast Paradox

So Where is AdSense for Newspapers ?

  ... asks Mark Cuban refering to a guest opinion piece by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt in the Wall Street Journal.

And where is AdSense for cable? I think it has a chance to catch on - as soon as cablers refine the technology to deliver targeted advertising at the set-top level.

Related:
Congress to Hold Hearing on Cable Advertising (4/22/09)
CableLabs: tru2way
Canoe Ventures: In Forbes (6/18/09); Canoe Ventues Home Page

Pretty As A Peacock; The Almost Broadcasting Company

In an unusual alignment of the moon (currently full) and the rest of the univers(al), it looks like GE and Vivendi have agreed on how much ($5.8 billion) NBCU is worth, paving the way for the media giant's sale to Comcastic.

Over at the Meatball network, the move backward toward it's first incarnation, the Almost Broadcasting Company, continues with the confirmation that Mike Shaw, the President of Sales and Marketing will be stepping down from his current role at the end of the year.

As both these events occurred on the same day, I should be saying that media divergence continues, but the first instance is a big fish eating a little fish and the second instance is just what happens when you have a "mature" business. (Just read that as "past it's prime.")

Robert Peterson's Plan For Survival

In response to Diane Mermigas' Media Post blog entry "(Paul) Sagan: TV Survival Means Hyper-Local Online Video", Robert Peterson proposed:

"I am starting to think that station managers need to split their organizations into two parts. Today the new hides in bits and pieces throughout the old. Make a new organization that is all about the new and put the best person in charge. Work out what it has to achieve and how to measure.

"At the same time make a coherent organization out of the old. Do your costs cutting here. Make this organization as efficient as possible. In a way Greenfield it - do not accept any assumptions about "we always have done it this way".

"Now you have a portfolio of the new and the old. Both will have to perform. Resources in the end will have to move over time to the new."

At least one TV network is already doing this...

An Unsteady Future for Broadcast

The departure of Oprah from syndication and bumps in the road in the NBC / Comcast merger led a peg for this article in the New York Times business section.

"Most analysts and many executives agree that the economic model of broadcast television — which relies much more heavily on advertising than cable — is severely fractured. What they are wondering now is if it is irreparably broken" says the article.

This doomsday scenario is not new, but as upfront revenue declined for a second year in a row, the situation appears dire.

But there might be some ways to postpone the inevitable.

This Is The Last Season of Network Television

... Said Master of Ceremonies Neil Patrick Harris and Emmy presenter Julia Louis-Dreyfus:
"Amy (Poehler) and I are honored to be presenting on the last official year of network broadcast television."

They were joking, of course. But it's much closer to the truth than any of us would care to admit.

From Brian Stelter's NY Times Emmy Blog:

"In the Emmys sketch, Dr. Horrible declared that “television is dead,” only to suffer the cliched fate of many a Web video: streaming lag-time and pixelated images."

Television -- As We Know It -- Is Finished

http://www.thewrap.com/article/part-1-thewraps-series-television-we-know-it-finished_5215

The Future of Local Is Personal

Lots of people (including me) have blogged about George Kliavkoff at the NY:MEIG breakfast last week. But no one I know of mentioned what I thought was George's best quote "The future of local is personal."

View the three minute version of George's Q&A at AdAge or the full version at TV Worldwide. (or here if it errors.)

Way Over The Top: Data To Your Home

With Sony's announcement of an IPTV module for its new sets and the Media Center features built into Windows Vista™, a lot of people might soon be watching streaming video on their TV, not watching those channels that our cable companies charge us way too much for.

So what's a cable company to do? Continue claiming that its internet service is faster than the phone company's or throttle back the bitrate and charge you extra for those streaming IPTV shows? Stay tuned. (Or should I say - logged-on?)

(Remember - in our digital world its all zeros and ones: your phone call, your TV show, your e-mail. It's time to stop thinking of it as a wire and start thinking of it as a pipe.)

Son of WebTV

Some analysts just don't get Media Divergance, (like Todd Chanko of Jupiter Media) even though there are lots of people paying to watch last night's TV on their iPods. When asked by TelevisionWeek to comment on how Microsoft Vista will promote integration between the computer and the TV, he said: "They are searching for a problem that doesn't really need solving."

Young geeks are all over Slingbox and Xbox. Buy one Media Center PC and a bunch of Xboxes. Feed your recorded TV shows all over your house, the whole dorm, the whole world. With Sony's announcement of an IPTV module for its new sets, gee - it might be a good time to start an Ippy TV network!

What's All This About Ippy TV?

There's been so much news on the IPTV front recently that even Roseanne Roseannadanna would have heard about IPTV by now.

First was the announcement by a consortium of Japanese TV manufacturers announcing their push for an IPTV standard. Then there was Apple's peek at their iTV product.

And lots of little things as well...
MatrixStream began shipping their 1080p capable IP set top box in June. NeuLion has their own box and content management platform - just add your own channels.

All this hardware... If the boys from Japan can get some momentum going on a box standard, this IPTV thing might just take off.

Makes you want to start your own channel. How about the Emergency Responders Channel? Reruns of Adam 12, Rescue Me and Justice Files 24/7 ! (And how about a comedy block with Car 54 Where Are You?)

And if you don't think that I Pee TV isn't going to be big, just check out the article in the New York Times Circuits section on 9/27/06 !

That'll Never Work

Gee, I wish I could see into the future. Well, maybe I can. When I saw, then made, my first QuickTime™movie I thought it was, well - useful. But beyond making video previews, I didn't think it would ever be as big as "full motion video."

When AVID came out with 'AVR24' resolution and called it 'broadcast' I laughed to myself. "That may fly on cable, but it'll never air on network TV!"

And cell phone video, how great is that ?

Well, my 2 year old computer does a decent job at playing 720p video at 24fps. George Schlatter Productions used AVR24 to edit skits on his 1994 series "She-TV". And YouTube is getting lots of hits with it's cell phone camera and webcam uploads. So what's next? Nah, downloading Hollywood features over the internet will never be big. Right !

In 1996, GENE JANKOWSKI, the former President of CBS, told an interviewer from the BBC:

"The Internet I associate more with cable and with phone companies. It has nothing, the Internet has nothing to do with why people want to watch 60 Minutes or ER or Dallas. In the last couple of years there's been a tremendous amount of attention focused on technology and the new equipment and digitalisation etc and so forth and my attitude is that we cannot lose sight of the fact that it's not technology that gives value to man, but rather it is people with creative ideas that give value to the technology. We don't go out and buy a VCR just because we want to own a VCR, we buy it because it gives us the opportunity to see the creative programming that we can play through our VCR."

Sign of the Times ?

This week while waiting for the commuter train I overheard T.C. Mits* say "I'm going to watch it on the web." I'm not sure I had the context right, but from the snippets of conversation I overheard, it appeared they were talking about something that they had missed on TV. Divergence continues...

(* T.C. Mits = The Common Man/Woman in the Street.)

The Unbundled Newsroom

This web article has been around for a while, but today I came across a link to it in an e-mail I had sent a friend a few months ago:

" The Unbundled Newsroom" by Terry Heaton

Convergence?... No, Just Evolution

To those of you who thought we'd all be watching TV on our computers (or using keyboards on our TV's) - the future is coming into focus, and it's divergence. Here are the some of the signs:

• Craigslist is cutting into classified advertising revenue in Bay Area newspapers.
• A news aggregator (Yahoo News), not a news gathering organization is the top news website. (Source: Nielson - Net Ratings)
• People are paying to download last night's TV shows to their iPods®.
• Beginning January 3rd, ABC News will use its Evening News anchors to anchor a Webcast.
  

And some signs of desperation as entertainment / media companies scramble to retain share:

• Good Morning America will have a satellite radio edition.
  http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=1409392 
• Everyone and their mother is doing VOD cell phone deals, HBO is the latest.
  http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/cingular/23356/ 

At one network, the left hand said one thing but the right hand did someting else.

So, just as radio news changed the newspaper business and television changed the radio and motion picture businesses, technology is changing the way we consume media. OK, that's obvious... but a seismic shift? No, just evolution.