Tech: Interesting tech article on new media

Subject: Tech: Interesting tech article on new media
From: katlaughing
Date: 28 Oct 06 - 11:22 PM

Beginning of article:

Fast-Forward Dinosaurs

By Neal Weinstock
        
Much has been written in this space bemoaning the failures of traditional broadcasters to try to grow their businesses into New Media opportunities. But there is a flip side to this failure: Well-justified fear.

As I write, I just got back from the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam. (Yes, it's the junkets that keep us attached to this industry even when the employer-employee bond fails.) A panel discussion there featured AOL's Andre Mika (director, current programming and production), who said something shockingly plaintive and thought-provoking: "Don't think we don't get it. We get it. We know that what users want is YouTube-like video sharing and MySpace-like community. We know that."

But they don't have that. AOL is almost there, almost has it. Certainly they once had it—that is, they had the "it" that was it a few years ago, eons before MySpace and then YouTube became "it." But they don't have it now, and their era of dominance has slipped away, and they may never have it again.

AOL has gone from the most successful Internet company to an also-ran in five years. Among other things this may demonstrate, it demonstrates clearly that the market AOL inhabits is brutally tough. AOL has loads of content from Warner Bros. TV and other corporate sisters, and it is going sideways at best while other Internet leaders boom. Anybody that's got a business plan that leverages Old Media content for a New Media opportunity should be afraid. Very afraid.

New Media evolution is running on a faster time scale than Old Media's decline. This is, in fact, logical. It is both perfectly Newtonian and Darwinian. We're talking entropy here, Second Law of Thermodynamics, interpreted by Darwin into evolutionary theory and, most germanely, by many computer scientists into information theory and many economists (very loosely defined as scientists) into theories of business organization. Three hundred years ago, Newton saw that free energy accelerates along with system breakdown and the development of possible microscopic permutations of the system. These possibilities increase along both the time and spatial scales. (How come 300 and 400 years ago we had Newton and Shakespeare and the world had about 550 million people, and now, with 6.5 billion, we've got...? That seems to be another corollary of entropy.) In other words, not only do we get ever more possible new businesses as we progress into ever-more-infinite media distribution spaces, we also get ever-shorter business opportunity windows, on average.

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