The End of TV

From Tao of Mac:

One thing's for sure: This is the end of TV as we know it. It's been heralded time and again, the BBC has been running their little trial, etc., but even if Apple somehow fails to leverage their lead, the media industry will never be the same - again.

Rui's opinions are always informative and worth reading. It'll be interesting to see what the BBC do as a part of this, though they seem to understand that media is moving towards a long tail, narrowcasting model, and that even the big hits will have to adopt the networks and paradigms that are slowly taking hold. Mark Cuban goes just as far, and a little further perhaps, especially in detailing how this paradigm shift might work economically.

Its not inconceivable that just as DVDs have surpassed box office in revenues and the theatrical release has become a commercial for the DVD sale, the network TV broadcast could become the commercial for the download sale.  I dont see download sales surpassing advertising revenue, but I do see it as likely that the download sales could more than compensate for any advertising market weakness brought on by ratings erosion and / or changes in how ads are delivered on TV. I also think it wont be long before we see an ad or two in front of the show that will further increase revenue.

I'm just about losing count of the industries that this will affect, but I'd bet that Education will be one of the first. Though it's typically slow to adjust to paradigm shifts, this one is just too efficient (and clearly monetised) to ignore. Apple didn't invent distibuting video in this way, and there'll be a lot of players (the iTMS is hardly the only way of getting music, or even podcasts, onto an iPod), but 200 million copies of iTunes and a lot of iPods in students' pockets is pretty hard to ignore.

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