A High-Bandwidth Media Boom Begins
Anytime you introduce a new distribution channel into a media landscape it disrupts the old media order. We saw how that played out with the text-based Internet in the 1990s. In the early part of the decade, the incumbent print players, like newspapers, largely resisted migrating to the new medium; entrepreneurs saw the emerging opportunity and positioned for the shift, and many early adopters, particularly young people, started experimenting. As the medium developed further, more people migrated to the Internet, the new companies took off, the incumbents reluctantly followed, until by the end of the decade, virtually all print media had a web presence and had evolved their offline offerings in response.
This decade a very similar development is happening with high bandwidth media. Within the last year, the numbers of Americans with access to broadband Internet crossed some critical thresholds – more than half of all adults have broadband access at least through work and well more than one-third of all American homes now have it too. That seems to be the magic number for many companies and so the fall of 2005 saw a flurry of deals and new initiatives to finally do what had been talked about for years – start to seriously deliver digital video over the Internet.
The migration of high bandwidth media to the Internet means all the rest of media, including that mother of all media, television. Text and photos are low bandwidth media. Audio media files, which include music and audio like radio and podcasts, are the next largest digital files and so have been the media with the most activity to date. But now the systems are in place to start to handle what might be best called “motion media,” what anachronistically is labeled television and film, after their original formats. Increasingly, all motion media will evolve toward digital video, and the Internet is now ready to effectively and efficiently move it.
That does not mean that the traditional mediums of broadcast television, cable television and movie venues will go away. They will remain the main conduits for motion media for some time to come. However, the new entrant of the Internet will draw away a significant amount of content, and the “old media” will be forced to evolve its traditional offerings in light of the new competition. And if you think very strategically, in the long run, the Internet is much more about what the 21st century core media conduit eventually will become. That kind of interactive, on demand, tailored media is much more of what the future inevitably will be.
