Hail to the king – why media and content production will survive
I think it’s incredibly easy: Content is king. Think about all the different media products you consume every day: Newspapers, movies, images, books, tv shows. All of this can be delivered in different ways and those ways will probably change in accordance with technological breakthroughs and ever-changing ways of life.
Still, the screen does not matter as much as what you put onto it.
Hollywood, newspapers and every other media enterprise have a huge problem on their hands: They had a vertically integrated monopoly – from production to delivery -, which is now being upset by technological breakthroughs like the internet. By its very openness, the internet challenges the closed-world business models of media enterprises who see revenues and their importance collapsing.
Seems like a lot of start-ups do a better job at delivering media the way customers want to consume it than old-school media enterprises, as they often tailor their products specifically to their users (read content consumers).
But you cannot hold on to your business model forever. Times change and so do the ways in which media gets consumed. We already consume media very differently than just ten years ago – think youtube and Hulu.
So media gets delivered differently. On-demand, personalized, aggregated. Which sometimes even influences which media gets consumed.
Most importantly though, distribution models don’t change the necessity of content production. It’s all very well if lots of thoughts (in the form of essays, books, movies, shows, music, etc) can be delivered on-demand in a customized way and what have you.
It still has to be produced, though. Else there is nothing to consume.
Oh well, you might say, blogs already had and will have a huge impact. Social networks and live social networks & search are successful.
But their content (and that is what they do – they provide and/or search content) still competes with the old-school content produced by media conglomerates. There is only so much time in the day. People have to make choices which media content they consume – may it be blogs, newspapers or movies.
Media enterprises may have to get rid of some dead ends.
But they still have one huge competitive advantage: They know how to produce things people want.
