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Has anyone besides me considered the apparent paradox of some of the recent innovations and announcements coming from the new and old media and their suppliers?
• For decades we have been lusting after larger television screens. In the 1950s, a 9" screen was common. By the 1990s, the 26" screen had become the standard living room set. It sort of stuck there until today, when the 42” plasma screen is evolving as the sweet spot of the living room media center, with 50" and 65" units widely available. So why is it that there is so much apparent excitement about announcements from Apple and Sprint and others that we can now get video on 3" screens?
• Second, the media is full of the apparent sudden wisdom that advertising revenue is a workable model for media. Google has shown the way, we are informed. Microsoft is at work revamping a version of Office as a Web-based application that will be free—except for advertising. Advertising supported media is all the rage. But wait! The traditional television networks and their radio predecessors, invented the advertiser-supported free-to-the-consumer model 70 years ago. But while the pundits herald the Google model, the broadcasters have suddenly found religion in user-revenue. As if discovering a new lode of gold, they proclaim, “Let’s sell yesterday’s show for $1.99”—to view on those 3” screens.
A digression. In 1994, Tony Oettinger, my former colleague at the Program on Information Resources Policy at Harvard, described the coming of the “agony and the ecstasy” in the age of digital media. “There’s ecstasy,” he wrote, “among the sellers of information products and services because huge markets have developed that didn’t exist fifty, ten or even five years ago…. There is agony…among these same sellers because, as their markets have become huge, they have tended to become both highly competitive and increasingly fragmented.”
This observation from more than a decade ago explains these apparent contradictory trends, as you no doubt have already started thinking about. They are a factor in the phenomenon that I wrote about last week, that the media must get used to being in a permanent state (for now) of discomfort. But the small screen/big screen and advertiser/consumer support dichotomies also illustrate the opportunity available for media players. Broadcasters have been beholden to a single revenue stream since day one (although now programming they own also have a life as DVDs). Today, the Internet and broadband and on-demand technologies being implemented by their one time cable operator nemeses have provided an avenue for more options.
Meanwhile, although small screens may seem like a step backward, combined with extreme portability and increasingly with wireless connectivity, they actually expand the market for video: on the bus, the beach, waiting at the doctor’s office—the possibilities are endless. Maybe the folks who should worry are the magazine publishers who paper those offices with free magazines and the newspaper publishers who have held on to the portability of print as being a benefit that, until now, wasn’t possible with television.
Oettinger concluded in his 1994 essay: “There’s ecstasy in contemplating the many attractive new and open roads ahead. There is agony in choosing among them.” Large screen, small screen? Ad supported, customer supported? Paper or plastic? Choices for consumer, high stakes options for players.
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