BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
27 Aug 2007

Some people would say that I have been a TV bogeyman myself, having penned articles warning TV executives of  impending doom and Armageddon day, with posts like:

- Understanding TV executives Angst and Envy
- Web Video Represents $150B market cap in 2011, but not for TV companies
- Digital Revenues are Never Incremental for Old Media
- Will TV companies face same fate at Print Companies?
- If You’re Old Media, What Would You Do?

and more.  Of course, as a web video producer, publisher and syndicator, I could be accused of trying to instill a sense of paranoia in TV executives’ minds.  Then again, I could simply be voicing that others too see.

Vint Cerf is biased too, no doubt, as VP of google, who recently bought YouTube and became the arch-enemy #1 of TV companies around the world.

Speaking to an audience of media moguls, he said:

The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player.

Yikes!

“85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time,” he said. “You’re still going to need live television for certain things - like news, sporting events and emergencies - but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later.”

(…)

Dr Cerf predicted that these developments would continue, and that we would soon be watching the majority of our television through the internet - a revolution that could herald the death of the traditional broadcast TV channel in favour of new interactive services.

“In Japan you can already download an hour’s worth of video in 16 seconds,” he said. “And we’re starting to see ways of mixing information together … imagine if you could pause a TV programme and use your mouse to click on different items on the screen and find out more about them.”

All to say, some TV companies are making changes to their game plan, others are putting their head in the sand.  Ultimately, I’ll all but given up watching TV. I get 99.9% of my video consumption from the web there days… and Im probably not alone.