Monthly Archives: December 2012
The TV Industry Is Alive and Well: New @ Digiday
I have a new article about the TV industry up at Digiday this week, explaining why the business is currently more analogous to the pre-iPhone mobile phone industry than to the post-Napster music industry. It’s a relentless drumbeat: The TV industry is dead, 20-somethings are cutting the cord. They want HBO; YouTube will kill cable. Not so fast. The pay-TV industry is not that easy to dismantle. That’s largely because the business dynamics make it a pretty tough beast to slay.Let’s start with the giant bundles of channels you’re forced to take as part of your pay-TV package. READ THE REST AT DIGIDAY
“TV” or “Video”: A Rose By Any Other Name…
It is frequently debated nowadays whether “television” is still the right word for all the video entertainment we watch these days on a multitude of screens, given that so much of it comes from sources other than the main TV networks and is watched on devices other than a TV. The suggestion is that we just start calling all this content “video.” Logically it makes perfect sense. But logic and consumer behavior are rarely in sync. In the mind of the consumer, the people using the product, the distinction is not as easily made. To them, “television” is high production, long-form video content, something that’s worthy of being watched up on the big screen, while “video” is of lower production value and, unless it involves one’s own pets or children, better viewed on a smaller, handheld device. That, and television is always television, no matter where you watch it. Take in an episode of Seinfeld on your iPhone on the way home … Continue reading