When I joined the Program on Information Resources Policy (PIRP) at Harvard in 1979, the message that we were delivering to the media companies was that of convergence. It was a tough—no, make that almost impossible—sell. We tried to explain that the future was in digital. And in digital, text bits and video bits and audio bits, graphics bits—they all looked the same. The folks who ran these companies couldn’t understand how television would be any more of a competitor than it already was. They did rally when they saw AT&T make noise about doing an electronic Yellow Pages, but they won that battle (though not the war).
Although there were profound implications for business strategy, we had our greatest impact in the telecoms sector, where the regulatory ramifications of the change from analog to digital were more immediate and the stakes higher. (Anyone here recall Computer Inquiry II? III?) The just mentioned e-Yellow Pages proved just how high the stakes were for classified. Can you say Monster? Craig’s List?
For the media folks, they were probably right in largely ignoring our message, at least in the early 1980s. A few newspaper companies, such as Knight Ridder with Viewtron, made a stab at exploring digital products. But all the technology and economic pieces were not yet in place. Timing may not be everything, but it is important.
Skipping ahead 20 years in one swoop and we can now see the shape of real convergence. Web sites of enterprises that heretofore have been called newspaper publishers are offering the same mix of text, video and audio as are being offered by sites from television stations, cable networks and, yes, radio broadcasters.
Look at USAToday and CNN. The Virginia-Pilot, a newspaper based in Norfolk, VA, has incorporated its HamptonRoads.TV into its site, with its own production capabilities, not just replaying clips from AP video feeds.
And now we even have radio, that last bastion of single sensory output, ramping up for video on its Web sites. “The nation’s commercial radio stations have seen the future, and it is in, of all things, video,” observed an article in yesterday’s New York Times.
“Audiences in Los Angeles, for example, will be able to tune in today to Power 106 for an annual Valentine’s Day event called “Trash Your Ex,” in which jilted listeners are invited to put mementos from past loves in a giant wood chipper — and to let it whir while the disc jockey, Big Boy, urges them on. And for the first time, audiences everywhere will be able to watch streamed video of the event, to be held in a parking lot in Pasadena, on the Web site power106.com.”
Radio, as with other legacy media formats, has had to deal with an erosion of its audience. Of course. The time you have spent reading this entry—multiplied by the millions of people clicking on millions of other Web sites and podcasts—takes time that otherwise may have been spent using traditional media.
To be sure, radio has perhaps suffered less than newspapers and television broadcasting because radio has long been a second medium, used in the background while we do other things. Still, with mp3 players and the like offering some of the same benefits as radio, the amount of time spent with radio has fallen by 14% over the past 10 years (see accompanying chart).
So here is where convergence really starts to get serious: With digital TV sets proliferating, more of what is available on that screen will come via the internet (or perhaps more generically over some TCP/IP-based transmission).Wireless devices, whether 3G or Wi-Fi or Wi-Max—the technologies are not important but the certainty of widely available wireless broadband is—we will increasingly have news and information as well an entertainment and transaction provided in a highly competitive landscape.
The winners and losers are far from being determined. But what is inevitable will be, first, greater fragmentation of the audience over a wide variety of players aiming for sometimes mass and sometimes niche markets. We will see advertisers faced with a greater dispersion of their budgets. And eventually we will have to see a new wave of consolidation to help create some economic rationalization of this scenario. It will continue to put stresses on the regulatory regime, which has been slow to respond to the implications of the changing technologies and media strategies.
I hope to be around to have another retrospective look in 20 years.
