Yes, competition is storming out of every device and connection, and consumers have choices and leverage they never dreamed of. But network television continues to waltz along, attracting advertisers in big numbers. Cable had a great year, and media octopuses like Time Warner and News Corporation continue to find plenty of profits. Big media companies still rely on huge well-entrenched assets that include brands, distribution and capital.
But even if the sky is still aloft, there are visible, portentous cracks appearing. The inertia that has kept consumers from bolting from traditional content providers is beginning to erode as a new generation remakes media in its own image. Device companies and search outfits are intent on manufacturing their own content. And the migration of movies, music and video to the cloud could change the weather in a hurry.
Even as some of the old truisms in media still obtain — content wears the crown and strong brands break through clutter — a few new rules are taking shape.
A SCREEN IS A SCREEN Steve Jobs taught us a bunch before he exited, but one of his most current lessons could be the one with the most far-reaching implications. Content has a price tag, which is reassuring, but the old dividing lines between television, radio, Web and print disappear within the four corners of a tablet. That means, for instance, that CNBC and The Wall Street Journal are not in different businesses anymore, and in fact The Journal is adding hours of live video with each passing month. The BBC and Al Jazeera are no longer regional curios, they’re here. Every cable channel with two nickels and more than a few digital enterprises are financing the kind of narrative television that used to be available only at a certain time on a certain network.
NEW NETWORKS EVERY DAY On Christmas Day, a lot of people will take the ribbon off a Web-enabled flat-screen television, and now the fight for real estate on all those enhanced television screens will be fast and furious. Cable providers will try to keep people from downloading the products of insurgent Web “broadcasters,” but they can’t stop what’s coming. They will have to win by providing value that trumps the now-infinite channel universe of the Web. The $27 billion that traditional media just paid to the National Football League is a hedge, not an answer. So-called virtual operators — Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google and Apple — have none of the legacy or infrastructure costs. Google has unleashed $100 million to seed new programming on YouTube, and Netflix is financing a series by the director David Fincher. That gaming device your children are playing with? That too is a network in the making. Traditional networks and cable providers have the content, but if they hold on too tight, they will miss out on vast new avenues of distribution and revenue.
THE REMOTE AS BRICK The iPad is a screen on your lap that makes it easy to navigate toward a completely personal experience. That screen on your living room wall is going to have to perform the same way to remain relevant. As it has in many other areas of technology, the smartphone will point the way. Our phones — and now tablets — are always on and poised for action. When I switched from the first iPad, which took a few seconds to boot, to the iPad2, which stands ready for duty every time I lift its cover, my use more than doubled. I expect that other devices will greet me in similar fashion. Navigating is as easy as a swipe of the finger or, in the case of the new iPhone, a verbal request to Siri. As for your remote control, well, using it is a little like hitting your television with a stick until it finally delivers what you want. If things go as they should, we will spend less time looking under the couch for the remote and more time telling our television to get us the seventh episode of the second season of “Boardwalk Empire.” And our media identity is becoming ubiquitous, and transportable: some day, I should be able to walk into a hotel in Kansas, tell the television who I am and find everything I have bought and paid for there for the consuming.
CELEBRITY AS COMMODITY The multiplatform and infinite-channel universe can manufacture its own celebrities. Is Scott Pelley a more important asset than Kim Kardashian? You may not know who Rebecca Black is, but 14 million YouTube users do and have spun her ridiculous music video “Friday” to laugh at or with her. Oprah Winfrey, the celebrity with the golden touch, got clobbered when she started her own network. Anderson Cooper felt compelled to do a daytime show to diversify his bets. Keith Olbermann and Charlie Sheen thought their audiences were a movable feast, but big chunks of their followers stayed put to watch Rachel Maddow and Ashton Kutcher in their slots.
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