Television is over.
Radio is, too.
Like the walking dead, these two mediums still stagger around. They’re useful to people who don’t have fast Internet access. But television and radio, as we know them, are antiques — quaint relics of a bygone era when huge companies controlled all access to the masses. Clever people in these industries had better see the handwriting on the wall.
Radio and television both deliver a commercial-laden product according to a schedule established by network executives. In order to maximize profits, the programming must appeal to the broadest possible number of viewers. The result? Overwhelmingly mediocre content, sprayed out like buckshot, at a time of someone else’s choosing.
An entire generation, raised on the Internet, thinks differently about information and entertainment.
We don’t watch commercials (and we resent people trying to force us to do so) — instead, we depend on recommendations from like-minded individuals we find online.
We want to see the shows we want to see when we want to see them (thanks, Tivo). This business of asking us to wait a week for the next episode (or a year for the DVD collection) annoys us.
Now that we have a pipeline the size of a broadband connection, we don’t have to depend on network-controlled airwaves to get the shows that interest us. And, frankly, savvy producers, realizing this, are already coming to understand that they don’t need the networks to get their products to us.
We are living in a new age. Podcasts bring us the radio programs we want to hear in a portable format. The Internet is postioned to bring us more of the programs we want to watch, when we want to watch them, piped to our homes directly from the people who create them. Micro-programming — shows produced for and supported by the relatively small communities that value them — will make it possible for small, personal, unique, and intriguing ideas to flourish. We’ll see new voices, new visions, and new programs unfettered by the tyranny of suck-up network VPs, focus groups, and the (completely useless) FCC.
Slow, expensive, advertiser-dominated media is dead, dead, dead.
Add comment