WarpShare™

Road Construction Ahead

We’ve all seen the bright orange signs warning us about torn-up concrete and ashpalt on the road ahead. We know the ride will soon become uncomfortable and traffic will crawl. However, after time the road is new and improved, the ride is smoother, and it handles more traffic. Media companies have seen these signs posted all over their business since Napster arrived in 1999. Instead of heeding the warnings and learning to adapt, they hassle work crews and erect barriers around the improvement sites. Now they wonder why traffic has rerouted around them.

The ongoing deconstruction/reconstruction of the media biz has been prompted by very fundamental changes in the way people receive their entertainment. For over 50 years, purchase transactions have been tightly coupled with distribution hand-offs. Every time media changed hands along the distribution pipeline a monetary transaction occurred. This made sense when the hand-offs added value to the item being delivered by moving it closer to the customer (e.g warehouses and retail stores) or increasing the convenience (e.g. TiVo shows around individual schedules). Since media has gone digital, it is as close as the nearest Internet device and raw distribution is simply part of the infrastructure rather than a value-add. That leaves us with convenience.

Convenience is not trivial in the digital world. Imagine if the near zero costs of digital distribution applied to newspapers and mail delivery. Hundreds of newspapers and thousands of pieces of junk mail would pile-up in front of your home everyday. As you sift through this avalanche of information, you find items of interest in most papers and even a few mailers. Unfortunately, no single publication satisfies all your interests and you don’t have time to go through this stuff everyday. Your time and attention has become the limiting item. Fortunately, the digital world has been busy building convenient services that save time and attention:

a) Search tools (discovering and culling information)
b) Social sites (co-op of similar tastes)
c) Blog feeds (trusted experts)
d) Sharing networks (trusted friends and general grazing)

These new “workmen” can rebuild our broken media “highways” if we support them rather than hinder them.

Categories: Industry Thoughts

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