If its not Blogs, its Bittorrent. Media’s death has been
proclaimed so many times, it might be time to question the diagnosis. Without
doubt the game is changing. Audiences, content creators and advertisers are
being thrown into bed together. A situation – which as you might expect – is
not to everyone’s comfort. And that really is the point. Mediums don’t die. The
economics just change.
I recently gave the keynote speech to the graduating students of the Australian Film, Radio & Television School. It was a great honour to be able to both address the topic - the future of media - and also the audience which included Kim Williams (CEO, Foxtel), Chris Chapman (Head of ACMA), Brian Rosen (CEO, FFC) and Kim Anderson (CEO, Southern Star Entertainment). Somewhat nervewracking as well. Read on for the transcript and the videocast.
Charlene Li from Forrester posted an interesting argument today about the future of media arguing that:
In
the future media companies will generate the bulk of their value from
serving their ability to aggregate and serve audiences better than the
competition. It doesn’t matter if the media company actually creates or
even controls the content...
I'm not sure that I entirely agree. Media has always been about aggregation.
Its funny to see some of the feature fighting tactics, so popular in the first portal cold war during the late nineties, coming back 2.0 style. Then, like now, portals continually played an escalation game over functions like chat, mail, and personalisation - mirroring each others' feature sets until a kind of lukewarm median had been established. This time, although the buzz is about social networking, video uploading and tagging - the logic is pretty much the same. New toys, same problems.
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