Who Will Survive In The New Networked Media Oceans?

Media companies used to exist in their own separate waters. The newspaper industry was the newspaper industry. TV was TV to cut a long story short on to cut a long story short forth. Each of these unconnected territories had a few super-predators that were top of their respective food chains, untroubled by the small fry. This was as well true of innovation and telecoms. Still, in recent years, the tectonic plates have shifted to reveal a single networked media ocean into which all media, innovation and telecomms companies are by degree being drawn. The result is a gory realignment of the food chain as these corporate animals, so used to roaming their own backwaters as unchallenged predators, thrash around to establish who will survive. Some will maintain their status. Others will be usurped by sleek new species and left to wonder where it all went wrong. The tectonic shift was, clearly, driven by rise of the Internet and the Web, and more recently the Moore’s Law-powered growth of online computing power aka the cloud. The reason the undertow is so powerful is because, increasingly, this new networked media ocean is the sea to which consumers themselves are heading. Now why didn’t every big media and research beast notice the plates were shifting to create this vast new habitat? Simply because they had...

The time the press barons realised what

By the time the press barons realised what was happening it was too late. Murdoch battled with Google for a during, branding Messrs Brin and Page ‘parasites’ and ‘tech tapeworms’, earlier throwing up his paywalls to try and re-establish the barriers to entry that a rising tide of networked media had by degree washed away.

Likewise, the music industry at first viewed peer-to-peer sites, just as Napster, as geeky irritants best dealt with by lawyers. In reality, P2P was another portal through which an industry’s content would flow into the world’s single networked media ocean. Now Big Music’s super predators as well didn’t notice until the damage was done. They were left feeling very alone in waters ruled by pirates who paid no attention to their legal eagles. In the long run they sought refuge in the arms of an apparent saviour, Steve Jobs, who promised a Brighter, Whiter, Lighter haven away from the bands of pirates. It all sounded great until the music moguls came to realise that the price Jobs was charging for his protection was control of their industry. However the former killers of the music business are labouring away below deck powering the good ship iTunes across the networked media oceans.

The telecoms backwater

In the telecoms backwater, it was the vast networks and carriers that sat on top of the food chain. At first, Skype, using the P2P principal that had worked so so then in music, tried to open up the industry to the wider waters, by letting people talk to each other using clever VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) products. Once again, the telecoms whales basked in their alpha status and largely ignored the small fry. Nevertheless, Skype entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis were just the vanguard. Spotting that rich pickings were being sucked into the world’s networked media seas, Apple realised that if it added some real computing power to weedy mobile phones, it could take on the telecoms’ carnivores. And to all intents and purposes it did, launching the iPhone and eating the lunch of several former super-predators, earlier they realised that their habitat had changed for good.

For some telecoms alpha-beasts, including networks and carriers, the key to survival was to recognise the power of the new predators by giving up some territory and agreeing partnerships with Apple and Android. During others, just as Nokia, who refused to come out from pursuant to this agreement their rock, became greatly weakened and are looking like prey for research-driven hunters.

In recent years, TV has as well been drawn into the new networked seas. For a good during online TV was a or rather sad, lonely experience. But, once the power of the broadband network grew and the cloud began to take shape, major players like the BBC were able to dip their toe into the waters and show what was possible through projects like iPlayer. Even this service at first seemed like a product only for geeky early adopters. On the whole, with the benefit of hindsight such innovations, along with early IPTV projects like Joost and P2P services Bittorrent and Limewire, were similar forces to those taking grip in newspapers and music. They marked the beginning of TV’s content flowing into the networked media waters. And during last to be drawn in, the introduction of TV looks set to make the greatest waves and create the biggest battles for the most prized feeding grounds.

Finally, the other alien aspect of this unchartered networked media ocean is that much of it is already controlled by a new powerful type of predator. Giant schools of consumers and individuals roam the networked media ocean in the shape of blogs, social networks, video-sharing sites, forums and online communities. And the top-predators, so used to scooping up consumers like whales feeding on plankton, find they can’t get their jaws around these new entities quite as easily as they used to.

Maybe, just like as not, it will be these new consumer beasts that top the food chain in the new networked media oceans. Taking everything into account, there’s little doubt that they are evolving faster than the other super-predators around them, finding ways to navigate and survive in this vast, unpredictable new world. And even though not as vicious as some, without their support even apparent new monsters, just as MySpace, can quickly sink without a trace.