Evolution Confusion

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by: Gary Hayes

Following my previous post about the big changes that are happening at the moment in many areas of media (and life for some of us!) this article from Times Union provides yet another perspective on the confusion in the traditional TV marketplace.

By 2010, the very definition of what people will call ”television” could be different. If you get a local TV newscast over your iPod, is it still TV? If you can pick and choose video news stories to download in any order you choose, is it a newscast?

Perhaps 2010 is a little early to redefine what we mean by television, after all there are 4.2 billion people with TV sets so video delivered to that device will still be called TV for a while yet! Perhaps 2015 is nearer the mark! The article focuses on how local news is being hit by the fragmentation of platforms and how local broadcasting is becoming irrelevant in a noisy cross-media market…

The timeline might be hazy right now, but such a change is coming. ”Eventually,” WRGB News Director Beau Duffy says, ”there will be some kind of shakeout.”(snip)
In addition, there are the non-news stations: WNYA Ch. 15 (UPN), WEWB Ch. 45 (WB), WYPX Ch. 55 (i), as well as PBS station WMHT Ch. 17 and several low-power outlets like WVBG Ch. 25. With the exception of WMHT, all compete for advertising dollars with cable, satellite, radio, Internet and print media.

It all comes back to advertising dollar (or pounds depending on which english speaking market your in). But as Martino of Reinvent TV points out in his recent blog “Connecting Dots” the power of the current model of TV advertising is going to take some shifting

For anyone interested in why advertising is the mother’s milk of the television business: the average cost of a 30-second spot in "Desperate Housewives" is $439,499, while the same ad in "Lost" costs buyers $333,166, according to Advertising Age’s fall pricing chart.
Thats a lot of downloads

referring to Apples $1.99 per iPod Video episode. What we are really seeing is the slow erosion, death by a thousand pinpricks of the old models. Commercial TV isn’t dead yet, just beginning to itch its toes as the cross-media ants crawl around its feet.

Original Post: http://www.personalizemedia.com/index.php/2005/11/15/evolution-confusion/