Media shift continues

According to a recent PR Week story, the Top 10 media trends to watch are:

1. Portability of video content
2. Blogs
3. Media transparency
4. The rise of celebrity weeklies
5. The growth of Hispanic media
6. Business woes for newspapers
7. Digitization of print media
8. Media consolidation
9. Source agnostic/disintermediation
10. Refining media measurement

Let’s continue to focus on #1.

As I’ve commented in this space before, the portability of video content is going to cause a major change in the way we consume media.

Today there is a story in the USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2005-12-06-nbc-ipod_x.htm that announces that NBC Universal Television Group has reached an agreement with Apple to sell its television shows for download to video iPods and other electronic media players.

There is also currently legislation in the United States to force cable companies to allow consumers to choose the channels to which they’d like to subscribe a la carte rather than in packages or bundles. (Can satellite radio be far behind?)

We will soon be at a point where all of our media is highly personalized and we will seek out only the media we want to be exposed to. We are “self-regulating” ourselves to get rid of media clutter and only consume what we want.

While some will argue that this will cause polarization of opinion and narrow mindedness, I believe it will cause media companies to finally, truly become marketing-led organizations.

Consumers will dictate what they want to see, when they want to see it and how much they want to see. Consumers will also “test drive” many other options to expose themselves to a more diversified pallet of opinions and points of view. They will seek these alternative "channels" when they are most open to fully considering other points of view.

I also believe that consumers will reward advertisers who find ways to support the new media model by making conscious decisions to support those advertisers who make it simpler, more enjoyable or cheaper to obtain the media. They will also support those advertisers who support content that is in tune with their own world view. Welcome to the free market, democratized media and advertising model.

The digitization and distribution shift of news and entertainment content continues to be revolutionary. While the widespread adoption of digital content consumption continues, traditional broadcast media will continue to face challenges and so will advertisers. Advertisers will have to become niche marketers because our channels will be, in and of themselves, niches.

I think we will all be better for it.