The Future of Media: Like Fred Wilson Said
Fred Wilson shared some observations on his blog today about his teenage kids and the future of media in light of a Goldman Sachs research report.
Other than the fact that his children read books outside of school and mine don’t, his observations are in line with my own. Yes, a small sample size, but nonetheless, the consistency between the media behavior of his kids and my kids is pretty amazing. Besides books,
.TV on DVD
. Games
. Internet
. IPod not radio in the car; music is online.
. Magazines not newspapers
The almost single minded devotion to gaming is old news at my house, especially with my 15 year old. I have no doubt that if the ship was going down he would not count his PS3 as excess baggage to be thrown overboard but would consider it life sustaining.
What is relatively new and something I find kind of surprising here is the purchasing of TV shows on DVD (Fred’s #1) . If we count time in requested Christmas presents (well, it is that time of year), it seems to me that it was two Christmases ago that my now 17 year old son was interested in Jerry Seinfeld DVDs.
I found his fondness for Seinfeld curious but did not regard it as a media trend. Just something we could enjoy watching together. However, over the next 18 months I did begin to observe a trend….boxed sets of TV shows not only being purchased but being borrowed and loaned out to classmates. Last year, Steve Gillmor pronounced that TV was dead.
Is it? Or just being consumed differently? Darren Herman notes that content consumption has become device agnostic. He writes, “Television is evolving into people’s lifestyles contrary to when people had to create their lifestyle around television.” TV content is not dead.
Fred is writing from an investment perspective and because I have 2 teenage sons, I can’t afford an investment perspective; but from my advertising/media perspective which is what supports their consumption diet, last years media consumption diet meme initiated by Jeremiah seemed to confirm the death of TV, at least amongst the early adopters.
Chris Saad confessed to being a TV junkie but said he didn’t inhale in the traditional manner.
Peter Kim noted that the early adopters were engaging mostly with media without advertising, “an inverse relationship to the amount of advertising money being spent therein. In other words, they’re spending the most time where the least amount of advertising dollars are focused….
Of course this is bad news for advertisers and no doubt this relationship is a future trend.
This year as TV moves to the web and “web video” replaces “plastics” as synonymous for the future, there may be something in those teenage TV shows on DVD purchases. We finally have DVR and it looks like what is being recorded is about 1/3 sports, 1/3 movies and 1/3 TV. But when they want it bad and it bigger chunks, they have boxed sets for The Office, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, SNL and I am not sure what else.
Yes, they know its available online, but they prefer the comfort of the sofa, that big screen and maybe even a respite from online.
Maybe, a year later, we should update the media consumption diet meme .
Was the Skype Outage Newsworthy?
Personally, the Skype outage yesterday was a bit disorienting. I use it mostly for chat and only occasionally for phone. But I use it everyday and the outage made me feel a bit out of touch.
Now, I have felt that out of touch/disoriented feeling frequently over the past several weeks as one thing after another that I take for granted disappeared or changed….my Sony Vaio laptop screen got broken and had to be replaced. I had to use my MACBook which was probably a good thing in some respects, but no Particls. Also, no files. Fortunately, I got the laptop back Tuesday.
As mentioned in an earlier post, I moved my blog to WordPress. Feedburner and Bloglines are still messed up. Eventually, I assume everything will be back where it is supposed to be. Oh, Qumana will not post pictures and Faces doesn’t seem to provide a url anymore. Or maybe it is just me.
But, despite my personal inconvenience with the Skype outage, there seems to be some questions being asked about whether or not the Skype outage was in fact newsworthy? As in important past the initial news. Was Skype’s reputation permanently damaged. Is this going to change future behavior?
TechCrunch noted that Ebay who owns Skype lost $1Billion dollars in market capitalization yesterday. I guess that would indicate he financial markets thought it was newsworthy. ZDNet’s Larry Dignan says that whatever the cause of the outage he would “think twice before relying on Skype. tgdaily called it “a permanent wake up call” for Voip vulerability.
Well, I was an early subscriber to Vonage. It constantly went down and customer support was non-existent. The price was right but the aggravation factor was too high. I switched to Charter when they added phone service to cable and internet. Hard to imagine, but although the price was still pretty good, the customer service was worse. I went back to AT&T. Long distance is ridiculously expensive so I use my mobile but at least the phone works and the bill is correct. So far.
All of the phone issues have been annoyances. Voip is buggy. The infrastructure is obviously buggy. But most of us have multiple forms of telephone services….landline out, use mobile and vice versa. However, the biggest inconnvenince to my life over the past few years, personal and business, has been the multiple outages at AmerenUE…..our power company. We have been without lights and air conditioning in the summer and without lights and heat in the winter. And for 2-5 days.
Old fashioned power outage. Now, who do we wake up with that call?
Skype’s outtage was all over Techmeme yesterday and today. It was a top story in tech news at Google news. It made the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It was newsworthy. It just wasn’t fatal.
Tags: Skype, AmerenUE, Charter, Vonage, VOIP, AT&T, NewYork Times, Wall Street Journal, Techmeme, TechCrunch, Particls, Feedburner, ZDNet, Larry Dignan, media 2.0
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