W&L J School Prof.: Media heading for big change

Ed Wasserman is a J-School Prof at Washington and Lee. He writes that the media landscape is headed for a major change with traditional media outlets, including the over-the-air networks and their profitable affiliates, headed for extinction. This was said before.. when Cable TV came around. In fact, my friends in television have told me "I'm riding the dinosaur into the tar pits" for twenty years. But with bandwidth and storage capabilities increasing exponentially, the technology explosion is putting more and more of the stuff in our hands when we want it, in whatever format we want. If Ed is right, there are some uncomfortable times ahead for dinosaur-riders.

Content is still king. Those who control the content that people want will decide what the most profitable methods are to disseminate it. That's what happens now with motion pictures. There are at least five marketing windows for movies: Theaters, DVD, Pay Per View, Cable, Network TV. The NFL has figured this out and the NFL Cable Network is a result. CNN is trying to get us to pay to watch those crappy low bandwidth small screen iterations of their reports with little success. But as more and more of us get higher speed connections, the pictures will get watchable, the podcast concept will migrate from home brew to prime time. And some will make money by dumping content into an aggregator that will throw it on whatever device we desire.

Cable's Video On Demand is a step in this direction, but it requires dedicated bandwidth. The dish guys say that their digital video recorders will let you record something in the background while watching something else. Both cable and satellite will ultimately figure out how to send the stuff people want in the background (ala iPodder). And then it will migrate to the web, where bittorrent will prove it's commercial worth and our subscriptions will be waiting for us on our hard drives. The XM MyFi receiver is a step in this direction, allowing you to record XM content for later listening. If Tivo is smart, they will enhance some features and start co-branding the device as a Ravo-esque radio recorder. We will know when the transition is complete when the Bose Wave Radio (really old technology that brilliant marketing minds have convinced us is both new and worth lots of money) comes with those capabilities.

And what happens to the local TV and Radio stations? Wasserman predicts that, "ex-affiliates will be local-content specialists, with intensely local-news and current-affairs programming the heart of their operations: From micro-coverage via C-SPAN-style narrowcasts of local government, to real-time traffic updates, to aggressive development of all manner of nonfiction programming, including weather, talk, sports, schools, condo and civic association politics, consumer affairs, even local music and arts." (Sounds kinda like Cable's public access, channels which few really watch and even fewer would financially support if given the choice.)

I'm not sure that Wasserman's terrestrial utopia is how it will all play out, but one thing is for sure.. How we get our audio and video content will be dramatically different a decade from now.