Introduction
As a digital sort of person, my first head-on exposure to Big TV was at 2007’s MIPTV, which, despite the undeniably clunky strapline of “Capture Content”, is one of the world’s great media marketplaces. Surely – with MySpace, YouTube, adtech in furious growth, user-generated content and so forth - this would be the year of digital here? Right?
Well, not really.
At MIPTV, you realise the sheer bulk of the television business. The hives of the really big players – BBC, Rai Italia, obviously the US firms – were buzzing with deal-making. There’s real money made here, and a sense of professional purpose. In sharp contrast, the technology stands – many of which have products that have been spoken of as revolutionising the media business in the relevant trades – were quiet, the buzz of sharp-end kit and techno-chat occasionally, but only rarely, breaking through the roar of billions of TV dollars rubbing together. IPTV, UGC, to DRM or not to … these questions, outside of often well-attended and even hotly-debated conference sessions, don’t really dent this other, bigger thing. This is partly because – plus ca change – the technologists still struggle to speak media, and the mediacrats – after 10 years of web culture - still struggle to see what the techno-fuss is about.
And yet. And yet. Behind these busy and business-as-usual scenes, Big TV, Big Media and, critically, Big Brands were evidently deeply worried. It’s the not so much the media, it’s the consumers, you see. They just won’t listen any more.
With all this money still swilling, surging around TV, and with the (admittedly rare, these days) heavily-feted and analysed emergence of a “Sopranos” here or an exquisite period drama there, there’s a swell of feeling – most painful in the case of the big fmcg advertisers, who stand or fall by their media – that an ever-stronger undertow of failure attends all this familiar and still-vigorous capturing of content.
To get a feeling of just how far panic can take the media industry as it strives to soothe the ever-more-strident “are we nearly there?” questions of its till-now loyal brand sponsors, read on.
Don’t touch that dial …
A NY Times article in the summer of 2006 reported on a patent application for a new kind of television set and digital video recorder, filed by a unit of Royal Philips Electronics at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The Times stated that "the design appears to threaten the inalienable right to channel-surf during commercials or fast-forward through ads in programs you've taped."
The Times' summary of the patent was as follows: " ... the patent application revealed that the proposed design would uphold the right to avoid commercials, but only for those who paid a fee. Those disinclined to pay would be prevented from changing channels during commercials. If the viewer tried to circumvent the system by recording the program and skipping the ads during playback, the new, improved recorder would detect when a commercial segment was being displayed and disable the fast-forward button for the duration. As a business proposition, the concept appears dead on arrival: what consumer would voluntarily buy a television designed to charge fees for using it?"
So in a nutshell, the patent would prevent people using the new device from changing channels during a live viewing and using the fast-forward button during a recorded playback.
Who could imagine that such a solution – outside of a kind of modern “Through the Looking Glass”, set in media purgatory – could be take even half-seriously by the industry, let alone today’s unsentimental, promiscuous media consumer? The answer of course is, precisely the type of person who sees today’s 2.0 revolution – sweeping through Big Music, gnawing into Big Media, frightening Big Brand and in our time, turning all of commerce firmly on its head – as purely a technologically driven phenomenon.
The real revolution
Many of us remember “the unbundling of the package holiday”, a quiet but still-rolling revolution in the structure and purchasing of millions of family summer getaways, which took hold in the early 90’s, took off in the very early stages of the consumer uptake of the web, and reached a plateau with the success of the Expedia’s, Opodo’s and Last Minute’s, in parallel with the cheap flights (again, extending now into both long-haul and business-class), that we now expect as standard.
This phenomenon was an early sign of the information earthquake to come. The previously tight – a virtual cartel – value chain of the big holiday firms started to unravel. Fragments – an extra or optional activity or trip at the destination, for example – began to break ranks and offer themselves, increasingly for direct purchase, to the holidaymaker. The hitherto unbreakable marriages between flight and hotel, car and local rental office, and most strikingly, brochure and ultimate experience, frayed and separated.
What happened? Like a wolf delighted to find itself among a blind flock of compliant sheep, information got into the package holiday value chain – first with internal systems, then with increasingly networked customer service platforms, finally with the web – and pulled them apart, to create … what?
To create, in fact, an early version of the wild frontier of consumer-dominated eco-systems that now so vex the strategist, the CxO, the analyst. We happily asset-strip the travel business of its juiciest goodies at commodity prices, spend less where we are able, spend most where we really care. Oh, and if we’re not sure about something on the other side of the world, we consult, not our agent, we talk to … each other.
Think TripAdvisor. Or a thousand other opinion sites.
The double bind of technological and social progress
The rolling thunder of fragmenting and collapsing industry value chains is already heard in the music industry – formerly a very inefficient value chain, become a frighteningly effective eco-system, where any pretexts of corporate control have been dropped in dismay – and as I sketched above, media and advertising. Other sectors will fall according to their relative susceptibility to deconstruction (and, we hope, reconstruction) by information. Retail of course has long been under siege from the big e-commerce and auction players.
But what needs most critically to be grasped here is that The Information is only one half – and in isolation, a relatively powerless half – of the real 2.0 revolution. Consumers themselves have come to like, to love, and most of all to expect, the control conferred by the tools that the most successful service providers are offering them. What is Expedia, after all, but a dashboard into the otherwise hopelessly un-navigable travel industry eco-system?
As consumers pick up and use these tools – from travel recommendation right across (like it or not) to file-sharing, not only are they driving Darwinian survival or destruction into every space they touch (more tools used means more tools built, after all). They are changing – and there’s no going back here – their behaviour, their culture, you might argue, the way they think, the ways they’re wired. This (virtuous? Too early to say) cycle of empowering toolkit and empowered consumer is the engine of the real 2.0 revolution.
What this means for the future
To wrap up, what distinguishes a true 2.0 business is not primarily its use of new technologies. It’s simply the degree of consumer participation in the determination, creation and distribution of new value. Where before the lines between factory gate, retailer and living room were as clear and firm as you could wish, this new consumer – empowered (by pervasive information services), connected (to a plethora of interest-driven tribes) and most of all, powerfully “me-centric” (no more languishing at the end of the value chain for these people – it’s a circle today, with the consumer bang in the middle), is so very determined to take control of value, to raise the service bar, and to keep doing so.
A very real revolution, after all.
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