Sorry to keep saying this but the blog has moved over to a dedicated website at www.mediangler.com. Could you bookmark that and go there?
Archive for July, 2006
Change of Address
July 17, 2006Change of Address
July 17, 2006I’m still getting dozens of people turning up here but the site now has a new address. Sorry for the inconvience. Please go to www.mediangler.com.
IPTV Growth Guess Clueless
July 14, 2006This strikes me as an underestimate giving scant recognition to the fact that IPTV will offer a range of buddy like services that powered myspace to 30 billion hits a month recently.It comes from a Diffusion Group report.
IPTV deployments in several key European countries are on schedule, with new launches expected in smaller Eastern European and Nordic countries. For these reasons, the EMEA region is expected to top 14 million IPTV households by 2010 with France, the UK, Italy, Spain, and German accounting for 87% of the total.The number of North American IPTV households is also expected to near 14 million by 2010, with the US accounting for 80% of these subscriptions. While the majority of 2005 and 2006 IPTV deployments have been executed by small rural operators, TDG expects the new deployments by Verizon and AT to greatly increase subscribers starting in 2007.
Change of Address
July 4, 2006I’m still trying to shift the blog over to a new address. Would you mind bookmarking this. http://www.mediangler.com.
Changed Address
July 3, 2006Please go to:
The Long Tail
July 3, 2006
Chris Anderson is touring the UK right now promoting his Long Tail book due for publication this month.
I’ve interviewed people who are tied up in the race to supply IPTV and related technologies to the unknowing public and to a man and woman they endorse the Long Tail thesis, that the future lies with millions of micro-niches.
Interesting then that Anderson is giving private briefings to the BBC and Reuters as well as Google. I’d have thought in the case of the BBC they could work it out – long term erosion of audience.
In fact just about every large content producer I talk to these days says the same thing. There’s a palpable sense of dismay around, as if these guys with audiences can do nothing to protect their legacy of monopoly and oligopoly.
The decent course of action for a public service broadcaster would be to begin taking the pile of cards down and leave the way open for new enterprises to grow. That is not going to happen. Big Media is like Big Tobacco, determined to keep growing whatever the cost.
But what are they going to grow? That is the bit they cannot yet answer. What’s actually happening is more edgy and contrived than a mere shift in economic forces.
Like alll theses Anderson’s is overplayed, at least in the minds of media moguls. Most media organisations are still highly profitable, one way or another. There may be high profile exceptions but what we are seeing is a significant downsiing among staff, putting people on the street (who can take up Long Tail opportunities), cutting frelance rates, and renegotiating the terms of trade.
There are few media organisations who really see a future where revenue will not cover cost. But there are many who are content to use the current Long Tail kerfuffle to rationliase a new round of lay-offs and renegotiations.
The question still remains though – for what? In mainstream business the strategic objective is always to be up there, to be in the top rank of companies in a sector, to have the best brand. Which traditional content producer has a really coherent plan for doing more, better?
