Today NY Times has two interesting articles that are related to the future of media or video.
One article by Geraldine Fabrikant [ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/business/media/01value.html?th&emc=th ] talks about the future of Media companies — an interesting quote from this article is:
“But as the stocks of Google and Yahoo soar, the media behemoths will come under increasing pressure to behave more like the grown-up companies that they are. And they have little choice other than to strengthen their relationship to the Internet. ”
The other article by Saul Hansell [ http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/01/technology/01video.html?th&emc=th ]
talks about how more people are turning to the web to watch TV. This article shows the importance of IPTV and argues that with increasing quality of video on Internet, TV is being challenged to maintain its uniqu position. At the same time a very important point to remember is that if regular TV programs are made available on Internet, there is really no value-add and hence one must think about bringing advantages of Internet to video.
Obviously many interesting variations of all current TV Genre will emerge slowly on Internet. The most important programs to become popular on Internet are likely to be live programs belonging to the ‘long tail’ category — the programs that do not have mass appeal to be produced and broadcast by popular TV but have enough appeal to attract a good number of people who have no other mechanism to attend it but a ‘folkTV’ production by an enthusiast or maybe a person who has commercial ambition but is a beginner and yet does not have backing of a strong commercial organization. Internet has shown that long tail can result in a sensible business model and in my opinion folkTV will take us in that direction.