July 27, 2006

The “Not-So-Bright” Future for Media

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the future of media. No doubt some of this has been spurred by all of the discussion of Chris Anderson’s new book The Long Tail (which you must read if you’re at all interested in where media is headed). The question on my mind these days is what exactly is the future of media?

Media disruption is happening at a ridiculously fast rate. The best example of this is YouTube. I was walking back from lunch yesterday with my brother and was mentioning that YouTube was disrupting media consumption even more than TiVo did. You see with TiVo you still had to know when something was going to be on and decide whether it was good and TiVo-worthy. With YouTube you no longer need to worry about that. Just wait for everything to air and then wait for something like Digg videos to let you know if it was worth watching (like this awesome Colbert clip).

Then there’s music. The fact that Yahoo is pushing hard to make music available DRM-free (as discussed here) speaks volumes about how far we’ve come in the last few years. More and more companies are getting the fact that DRM doesn’t help anyone and they are willing to roll the dice on business models that don’t assume that DRM offers the protections it pretends to.

And then there’s this whole Long Tail thing which is pushing content to the edges. Your media discovery no longer comes from the aisles at Sam Goody or Blockbuster. It comes from your friend’s MySpace page and some blogger’s del.icio.us account. You use Pandora instead of Rolling Stone to find new music and can’t even remember what network your favorite television show is on because that doesn’t even matter anymore.

Lots of big media companies are frightened by this scenario. And they should be. The gatekeeper mentality toward media is rapidly eroding. It’s being replaced by user-generated content, disintermediation of publishers and AI-like discovery and personalization tools. I’m not saying anything new here. Just making some observations of what I’m seeing and what others are talking and blogging about.

But what does this mean?

It means that if you’re stuck in a 20th-century model for media distribution then you’re toast. Sure, maybe not now…maybe in a few years or maybe you’ll hang around even longer. But you’ll eventually be moved out of the way (sometimes not so subtly) but what’s coming down the pipeline. By the kid in the garage who just invented the next-generation media app that makes your content ridiculously easy to get. By the media discovery device that can’t reach your content and therefore can’t share it with people who are looking for it.

So what do you do?

First, you deliver incredible value to your consumer. You make it so easy to buy your content at a reasonable price that dealing with Bit Torrent or something else of that nature isn’t worth it. You deliver the files in a non-crippled format that is at least the equivalent of what people can find on the Net for free. You make user experience paramount. You make consumption of your media incredibly painless.

Second, you build community around your media. You create passionate fans of your stuff who want to pay you for your stuff (even if they could get it for free elsewhere). Our buddies over at Integral Naked have done this. People pay them money because of the content but it’s not just that. It’s also about the community that forms around the content. Accessing that is just as important for many subscribers as the media itself.

Third, you are willing to innovate and understand that your revenue model is going to change. Hanging on to the way you made money in the past is, to throw out a bad cliche, like polishing the brass on the Titanic. The ship is going down and while you might make some money in the short-term by doing this you do so at the risk of the future of your company. We’re moving to an all-digital world really, really fast and if you’re not prepared for that you’re putting your entire company at risk.

How do you innovate? You take chances. You try new things. You realize that some of the things you do won’t make any sense in the short-term but will return you millions of dollars in the long term. You embrace the youth because their behavior will be indicative of what everyone will be doing in a few years. You watch how people are consuming media and let them dictate to you how they want to consume media vs. the other way around.

What does this have to do with LearnOutLoud? Nothing…and everything. We’re trying to forge new ground with media delivery and consumption. And we’re working with a range of people, some of whom really get it and some of whom don’t (note: we prefer the former). And as much as this rant seems like it’s focused on content producers it’s equally important to consumers. Your world is shifting too and you have an opportunity to help forge this new future by voting your time, attention and hard-earned dollars towards the companies that are willing to take chances on new business models.

So maybe the future is bright after all. At least for those willing to embrace the tidal wave of change that has just started. A year ago nobody knew what YouTube was. Three years ago nobody knew what MySpace was. Six months from now there’s going to be a new company that everyone will have heard of that no one has today and that company will be disrupting things all over again.

Bottom line = pay attention. Media shapes our lives and we’re at a very cool point in history where we have the opportunity to really shape media. Just a little something to be conscious of…ok, back to your regularly scheduled, er, time-shifted programming…