A colleague found an interesting document from IBM’s consulting practice – Media and entertainment 2010, [PDF]. They identify the power of open media standards, the importance of companies offering different ways for consumers to interact with content and the need to “manage attention”.
BUT they still assume a role for the “trusted media brand” as intermediary bundling up the various bits of content from producers and marketing it to the consumer (albeit a wired-in consumer with lots of choice and the ability to interact with both the content and the intermediary).
Tim Oren (a Silicon Valley VC) offers an alternative view on this – Dissecting the Media: Trust and Transactions. As Tim says:
…But what of my original premise, that on the average the reader would prefer to avoid the granular choice or purchase of content? If the winds of change have blown apart the legacy media bundles, can the value of transaction cost reduction be recreated in another fashion, and revenue extracted for it? …
In other words if there are media intermediaries in the future they probably need a different business model.
A related story that popped up yesterday – this BBC News report [via The Obvious?] on studies with US musicians which suggests that despite the RIAA’s aggressive tactics of sueing file-sharers musicians have a far more ambivalent or even positive attitude to the internet – again it’s the intermediaries that are suffering more than the content creators.
