The Shaw acquisition of the broadcast division of Canwest has people taking about the convergence of content and connectivity once again. Jim Shaw must be dreaming of the untold riches that this deal will yield, just like what happened with AOL TIme Warner, and Bell Globemedia. Oh. I forgot. AOL Time Warner was a disaster of epic proportions and Bell Globemedia has not lived up to the promise of Jean Monty’s vision. I guess Jim forgot his history, or maybe the world has changed over the course of the past decade?
I would go with door number 2 – the world has changed. Devices have evolved at a rapid clip as have the networks that support them. The application space has been as busy as well – social networking applications (Twitter, Facebook etc…) did not exist, and Youtube was still 5 years away from hitting the planet.
Let’s consider a fairly normal family, with a mind to understanding what they use.
1. 7 year old boy – He uses the MAC in the basement. He does not use email often (only when someone tells him to send something to an aunt or uncle), but he does watch lots of Lego Starwars and Hockey highlights on Youtube. He sometimes plays Flash games on Treehouse.com. His social networking activities are zero (for now…).
2. Teenaged girl – She ‘speaks’ to her circle of friends via email, text messaging, Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. She has not met half of the people in many of her circles. She accesses this stuff via the iPhone she got for Christmas or via the Mac in the basement. Although not the Mac so much because her dumb brother can see what she is doing. She uses the camera on her iPhone frequently and posts pictures and the occasional video to Facebook and Myspace.She watches alot of Youtube videos that people have sent her way.
3. Business guy – Chained to his Blackberry. He uses it for email and viewing attachments on occasion. He is afraid to use it for too many personal things because he is sure the IT department is watching everything that he does. Thankfully he has an iPhone that is 6 pages deep in applications from Facebook to Twitter to Angry Birds. He access his Gmail account from here and often visits Youtube. He also uses a work laptop (again, no personal stuff) and a Mac at home. A lot of time is spent downloading Torrents of old TV programs and movies that he wants to see, but never seems to have the time to watch. He likes rugby and English Premiership football. As a result he subscribes to iSetanta in order to stream games to his television (using his laptop). He covets his neighbours iPad.
4. The wife – Mom has been at home for what seems forever raising kid 1 and then kid 2. She is a heavy iPhone and Mac user. She spends time sending email and monitoring her Facebook account. She watches videos posted on her SuperWall and playing ‘Words with Friends’ on her iPhone. She also likes to watch Mexican soap operas on Youtube.
The thing to consider is this – the only thing these people would have been doing 10 years ago was email and the only content most people thought about came in the form of PowerPoint decks and an occasional digital photo. No video games, no Youtube highlights, no Torrents – nada. The picture in another 10 years will be even more distorted, and will no doubt consist of services and applications that ride over devices that we have not even begun to contemplate. People will be demanding more content over these devices. We ain’t seen nothing yet.
It seems clear that that the business model used by content distributors must change, and change radically. The internet gives people, if they chose, to watch what they want more or less when they want. The advent of Video on Demand, DVRs and content distribution via Torrent, services like iSentanta, iTunes, Youtube etc etc has changed the playing field. The world is not returning to the content distribution model that made Shaw et all the companies they are today. I think that the end result is that ‘owning’ (and that can mean a lot of different things) content will be more important as we go forward. The key is figuring out how to monetize it in a brave new world…
