PUBLISHERS NEED TO MOVE INTO NEW MEDIA.
Recent developments, both in the USA and Australia, indicate that newspaper publishers are struggling to find their way into the new media world.
Back in the 1980s the publishers were the first to move into the new online era. This was pre-Internet – it was based on the proprietary videotex system. My friend and colleague, Fred Kappetijn, was working at the large Dutch publisher, VNU, and there were exiting new projects, using not just portals, but also interactive cable systems. In 1982 I organised a conference in the Netherlands around an interactive cable TV system, which was planned for 90,000 households in the south of the country.
Yes, all of this almost 25 years ago – the concept and vision were there, but unfortunately the technology wasn’t ready for it.
It was interesting as, at the same time, Australian publishers were lobbying their government to block cable TV in Australia (Davidson Inquiry) and they were also opposing Telecom Australia’s move into videotex. In any case, a change of government in 1983 saw a shift to the online position.
However the cable TV blockade lasted until the late 1990s. Interestingly, this has not benefited the publishers in Australia, and it turned Telstra into a formidable media competitor. If they’d had any vision the media companies would have embraced cable TV and, like their European and North American counterparts, would today be in a much better position on the information superhighway.
They are now being held to ransom by Telstra (Foxtel) and by the disgraceful media policy that has been written by the government with the assistance of the traditional media companies.
Media companies are now struggling to find their way out. They are no longer claiming that the Internet is simply a fad; that blogging and ipodding is something for kids. The reality is that these developments are well and truly eating into their businesses. Google and Yahoo are better positioned to embrace these new media developments than most publishers, and the telcos have cemented a role in the media industry that they are not going to relinquish.
I don’t think they will be overly successful in the content world, but the old infrastructures of printing presses and FtA broadcasting systems are well and truly on the way out.
By Rupert Murdoch’s own admission, it is interesting to note that News Limited was involved in a lot of the new developments fairly early in the piece – but they still failed to grasp the importance of the Internet. They have now announced their latest action, the purchase of the Internet company Intermix, which constitutes a belated effort to catch up in this market.
This is sending shockwaves through the printed media industry. If Murdoch feels he has been caught out, despite all of his interest in the new media, what price those publishers who, over all these years, have never even bothered to look seriously into these new media?
Exhibit 1 – Intermix Media
Intermix Media is an Internet company that owns more than 30 entertainment websites, ranging from games to dating to cartoons.
Its most valuable properties include a controlling stake in MySpace, a popular ‘social networking’ website geared to teenagers and twenty-somethings looking to chat, blog, share music and find dates. MySpace.com generates of 6.5m page views a month, ranking it ahead of Google and just behindHotmail on this metric.
I have written many articles about the lost cause of the commercial FtA broadcasters. They didn’t just ignore the new trends – they very deliberately boycotted them and, with their heads in the sand, hoped it was all a bad dream that would vanish. They are now caught in their own web of bad policies, created in conjunction with their politician mates who are always ready to do something special for their media buddies.
I would say that currently the position of the newspapers is slightly better than that of the broadcasters. Broadcasters have very little content of their own that they can bring to the new media –newspapers at least do have that content.
The content issue is hotting up even further. Latest blockbuster releases in the USA have not brought in the usual numbers (and revenues). The studios already understand the power of the new media and, for example, already have their own VoD service on the Internet.
At present, broadcasters, theatres, video stores and pay TV operators all depend on the various release windows that Hollywood dictates. It will only be a matter of time before these windows are changed. With hundreds of millions of people on broadband Hollywood knows that it can make a killing by having the premiere of a new blockbuster on broadband. They will have very little respect for the release windows. As soon as the time is ripe they will simply change them, and this can only be a few years off at the most.
Publishers in a similar way will have to find new ways to participate in the news ways in which news, information and entertainment will produced disseminated and distributed.
Paul Budde
See also:
Global – Convergence of Media & Telecommunications
