Comcast’s purchase of TV network NBC and movie studio Universal seems backwards to older media veterans who remember the ascent of upstart cable versus the powerful Big 3 TV networks in the 70′s/80′s. It proves that media itself has become a commodity to be digested across a panoply of distribution channels. It just so happens that cable, with its reliable subscription revenue streams and multiple channel assets, now has more financial clout than advertising based network TV and with it, the ability to finance programming through a movie studio as well.

Moreover, TV/cable and Internet are merging towards display across a common TV/monitor display platform. Cable channels pay significant syndication fees to broadcast relevant programming. They are curating content for their audience. However…

Social media facilitates the same content curation done by cable channels. Justin.TV allows anybody to broadcast hit movies (illegally) like a Showtime channel and now, personal broadcasters can get paid for it as a pay-per-view affiliate:

Obviously, copyright issues on Justin.TV seem to fall by the wayside just as they have done on Youtube (Google no longer seems diligent in deleting uploaded copyright content). This tolerance becomes a moral hazard that makes copyright protection unenforceable.

Like other content, video has essentially become free and curatable. For every Hulu, there will be copycat channels. Even Hulu’s exclusive licensed content are easily replicated by screen scraping video software like Camtasia.

Justin.TV’s pay-per-view channels will be the first of a new video revenue model that YouTube (which already announced this intention) and other video channels will follow. Why? Because everybody wants to be a broadcaster.

This week’s Time declares on its front cover ” Jay Leno is the Future of TV”. By parading Jay’s new show at 10:00 to compete with expensively produced dramas like CSI: Miami and other scripted shows, NBC is beta testing whether live content will be as attractive as or more cost effective than canned content.

What’s the revolution? PC monitors are already used like TVs for on-demand programming. Add time-shifting digital video services and Tivo, and it’s notable that TV no longer can provide instant programming gratification with the touch of the ON switch. Canned programming is more efficiently watched by time-shifting to one’s own schedule.

So what is TV good for?  Real time news… breaking news… sports… programming relevant to the here and now. Jay Leno will break the mold to see whether a TV audience will tune into live programming just because it is not canned. If it works, the cost of paying Jay Leno playing talk show host for 5 hours per week is a magnitude lower than producing a series of 5 one-hour dramas. If it works, scripted content will go direct to big screen, YouTube or Hulu, and TV will be littered with sports, talk shows, news shows, reality shows and talent shows, all designed to force people to set an alarm to watch them. Then social media converges with TV because everybody sitting on their coaches watching a national football game or Dancing with the Stars can participate live with others, and make that experience relevant to their lives.

Conclusion: PCs became TV proxies, and now TV is going the route of emulating the real time relevancy of PCs. This is simply a manifestation of media convergence; in fact, it’s cross-convergence.

Why are print newspapers shutting down presses, and book publishers decrying where their readers went? Today’s NY Times essentially says this:

(Charts, of course, not based on actual statistics; for descriptive purposes only)

Consumers are increasingly avoiding newspapers — and books, too — because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.

The video mode has been reinforced by the rise of YouTube. In December, almost 100 million viewers in the United States watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos, according to comScore. Tellingly, YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership — it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen.

Web 2.0 hasn’t demonstrated any viable media business models beyond advertising. The dilemma is advertising is the print media’s business model, and publishers have been hesitant to cannibalize their 1.0 advertisers by moving them to the less profitable 2.0 platform.

Mitch Joel at Twist Image pens a fine article about the newspapers’ inertia to progress on a Web 2.0 model. He points to a New York Times article excerpt to describe the dilemma newspaper publishers face:

“Many current and former Mercury News executives say that a lack of investment by Knight Ridder and MediaNews has given the paper a fairly ordinary website that has been slow to adopt practices that keep readers coming back many times a day, like publishing articles online well before they appear in print, updating them frequently, blogging and posting videos.

‘The answer for newspapers has to lie in building their websites better and better, and promote, promote, promote,’ said Mr. Riggs, who was the Mercury Newspaper publisher under both companies. ‘We haven’t seen that.’

Mr. Butler, the editor, said that with money tight, Web improvements have to wait. ‘Until or unless we see that those things pay for themselves, we make a serious mistake in focusing too much on that,’ he said.”

The recession’s negative impact on advertising and the demise of print due to budget cutting will begin to force publishers to focus on their online presence and connection with their community audience. It’s not only newsprint, local TV and radio are now competing with online print and must also focus on developing their online audience. Radio is particularly vulnerable as their audience discovers that online radio like Last.FM, Pandora and Blip.fm provide a more customized, less commercial listening experience.

So, can embattled media management surrender their 1.0 business model mindset, eliminate print presses and distribution, downsize their news gathering budgets, and rejigger their well known media brand names to become respected online brands? Tall order.

Why do I have such a low regard for TV advertising now? Because almost every sporting event or TNT action movie I watch on TV with my two young sons have Cialis or Viagra commercials.

I just have to cringe, and that invalidates advertising in my eyes. Don’t you agree?

(NYTimes graphic)

Anyway, today the NY Times posts that TV networks have run out of higher paying “quality” advertisers and started to run infomercials in prime time. Infomercials get the deep discount rack rate, so TV networks are hurting.

The sad part is Viagra, a Pfizer product, is considered “quality”, but the good news is pharmaceuticals are cutting TV ads (hence more infomercials). And I admit my kids like the PediPaws commercial.

Related article: Cute Video on the Death of Advertising

Eventually all Internet-based video formats will easily play on an HDTV screen. Until then, YouTube will continue to increase the size of their player to begin to replicate a TV watching experience. It has now graduated to 16:9 960 pixel width, about the same size standard adopted by video competitor Hulu.

The killer app seems to be the connection between the HDTV and the PC. Now, I attach the HDTV and the PC using a VGA cable. Why don’t TV manufacturers develop a Bluetooth application that replaces the VGA cable. A quick search engine check of Bluetooth-based HDTV reveals only a 2007 released Samsung model that doesn’t seem to have this functionality.

Anything else out there that makes internet video watching as easy as turning on the TV?

Wired magazine’s article last month Twitter, Flickr, Facebook makes Blogs look so 2004 posits the “death of blogging”.

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Blogging used to be about creating content. Today’s mainstream blogs are about distributing content. The “blogs” now garnering much of the traffic – Huffington Post, Engadget, etc. – have become mass media digests.

It’s the portability of content that now matters. Online presence can be measured by where and how often your name and word show up across the Internet. The more entities distributing, reblogging and retweeting your content (including mass media publishers who use blog syndication services like Blogburst and Newstex), and the more services chronicling your activity/content (Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) the more renowned you become. And that can lead directly to celebrity, position, or just a business break.

The mainstream media now gets this. Once the principal creator of “content”, they are firing their journalists/reporters, and moving into news and data distribution. They realize they can still capture eyeballs by republishing, aggregating and delivering content and data, created in-house or user-generated. It’s not a lucrative as before, when MSM controlled the content and viewership, and charged SuperBowl rates, but then the wave of user-generated content forced their hands.

At Transparent Real Estate, I’ve postulated how blogging is changing in real estate because the objective of a real estate blog – lead generation for the real estate professional – is inconsistent with the act of writing a blog. The average real estate agent just wants to get a blog up quickly while doing as little work as possible. Now, creating exhaustive content isn’t the methodology, it’s distributing the real estate data and information that’s already out there quickly to their constituency. It makes the act of “blogging” much easier when you don’t have to write original and compelling content, something that is hard to do on a real estate blog. (Most real estate blogs discuss hyperlocal issues, which is essentially irrelevant to any reader who lives outside that real estate bloggers’ domain).

Related articles:

Is Blogging Dead?

Nine tips for real estate bloggers on the “new blog writing”

YouTube has huge media advantages over mainstream media:

1. It’s free. Buying airtime is way expensive.
2. It has global reach. Airtime only reaches a regional broadcast area.
3. It’s viral. Anybody can embed YouTube messages like I’ve done.

It’s time to call YouTube the uber-network, it transcends TV and cable. Barack Obama has endorsed it for his weekly addresses to the people:

The auto industry, care of GM’s PR group, has also made its plea on YouTube:

Note that Barack and GM have followed the “sound bite” rule – 4 minutes tops to keep our peripatetic consumer focus.

Final thought: Advertising can be served up free on YouTube and other online video services, and people can comment on them freely. Multimillion dollar national TV ad campaigns become budget-challenged in this economy, and ad agencies start looking like candidates for disintermediation.

Three snippets of recent buzz about Hulu:

1. Hulu has attracted advertisers used to the TV advertising model (Alley Insider 11/10/08)
2. Hulu is easier to use when searching for TV and movies. YouTube is a mess (NYT 11/10/08)
3. YouTube is playing catchup to Hulu by offering brand name content – announces MGM film distribution deal (Wired blog 11/10/08)

Six observations about Hulu:

1. Hulu is a replica of TV. No user-generated surprises, all programming has been broadcast traditionally.
2. Strange to say, but Hulu’s success is based on copying the old world broadcast TV business model. This reinforces the fact that advertisers like the plain vanilla advertising model.
3. Hulu gets complete support from the media industry because it’s one of them. YouTube / Google is still sparring with Viacom in court.
4. Hulu is evolving naturally as a mass media, not a social media, model. It says a lot that the masses will go to Hulu when they are tired of the amateur quality of social media.
5. Cable companies, a natural play for developing their own Hulu-like content distribution systems, hesitate to break their lucrative cable subscription fee model. Online media is perceived as a threat, just like newspapers thought last decade.
6. Consumers have gotten used to fighting content distribution bottlenecks. Hulu delivers what they want free.

When mainstream TV producers want a creative spin by putting their characters on Twitter streams, I’m assuming they recruit their corporate marketing departments to produce creative. Yes, some folks in marketing may be creative, but a slight corporate feel pervades the exercise. Here’s how AMC TV have “Twittered” out their MadMen characters. The exercise works because the characters Twitter with their fans and engage them on a personal level. I give it an A for originality.

It’s odd the Mad Man blog doesn’t mention the Twitter exercise.

A few of the many Mad Men characters on Twitter:

Betty Draper

Paul Kinsey

Frank OHara

Francine Hanson

Jane Siegel

Ken Cosgrove

See previous article: Social Media Satire – User Generated

UPDATES Oct. 9, 2008 9:10am PDT

I must admit, I didn’t realize how clueless AMC was that they tried to stop Twitter- based user generated marketing, but it doesn’t surprise me at all. Corporate marketing rarely gets social media correctly the first time until it hits them on the head, then they try to take the credit.

Related articles:

AMC to Twitterers – please don’t market Mad Men for us

Twitter, AMC wise up, restore Mad Men accounts

(h/t Nice Fish Films)