The defining characteristic of the past decade in the media business has been expanding Choices of distribution channels for content.
In the past I have saved articles like these for the trend thread as if they
could be significant developing alternative channels of distribution (even if not immediately). In the coming months and
years efforts like this have great potential to serve the Era of Choice since pay TV is increasingly
shifting the burden of slowing ad sales to consumers....while still running long
commercial stop sets anyway. I see no mention of this dynamic anywhere in the consumer realm.
The NYT wants and needs a pay model
but ads continue as an important a part of their culture now as ever.
Cable companies want more and more money for the most basic TV but commercial breaks are as long as they've ever been on prime time shows.
The Era of Choice is being ignored whenever convenient to do so. Is it possible that the lessons of the record labels are pertinent as to why this is dangerous? This position is less my opinion and more an observation that reflects the single minded determination to do business one way; the old way.
Silent customers do not mean happy customers. An Xbox distribution platform is a long shot outlier
right now but, if and when present dynamics change in the market for content, it
may move up to "definitely worth the effort". Indeed, if it serves Choice it is already is worth the effort.
Is it unrealistic that many content distributors hopes remain pinned
on a national recovery in disposable income that won't come for years**...and that will then only
spur the changes demanded by Choice deeper into our behaviors as consumers? Xbox is demographically skewed and therefore remains a limited threat. It is not a far stretch to imagine downloading a movie to your smart phone on the way home at a good promotional price just for that night and pointing it at your home system to watch. How far away can that be?
The Era of Choice is media's dominant trend in the US and other places too. Cable's business model is rigid and inflexible in an economy where the supply and demand (for content) has shifted forever. So it is easy to see how distribution channels will continue evolving and in the short to medium term (2-5 years) and will be a dominant theme.
What are the other facets of the era of Choice? Choice is a broad idea that reflects our shared values and will expand beyond new distribution models. Ultimately, the new two way street in the media universe is telling us that solutions can no longer be two-dimensional. The real obstacle preventing media's new business model is its existing business structure and the relative inflexibility that public ownership presents. I suppose if we are perpetually stuck looking back over our shoulder, then you can just heap blame for this on the gang from Wall Street for transforming media companies into stock owned entities(back in the late 90's)....yet again....hey, they are used to it by now.
I submit that it is all part of a larger social correction where we examine our allocations of our available social capital (and other kinds of capital) in many directions at the same time. US media companies have become risk averse at a time when experimentation is demanded. Beyond this fact is a key question: Just how much of our national economy is leveraged toward selling content for profit and how beneficial is this allocation to our future? Yes, that's a deep question. Maybe a better question is this: In an era when barriers to entry no longer exist as they did in the past, can we rightfully expect content to be valued the same when there is five or six times as much available? And if your answer finds you quibbling about quality issues, isn't it up to the consumer to distinguish what is reasonable?
The Era of Choice will not be denied; any part of it. It will, however, reveal other changing shared values that will go beyond who, what, where, and when. Two or three years after the tipping point in "social media", the drum beat from the market keeps throwing ever more ways to get content of all kinds from every conceivable source.
The key question is; what's missing? Is it really all about price?...the latest cool gadget? Limiting Choice (or availability) is the antithesis of the Choice trend. It seems like a very good time to revisit the 4P's.
** 15.6 million unemployed in December & 26.5 million underemployed in December...with these kinds of numbers how long will even a slowly recovering economy take to put the fundamentals back in good shape? Link here (the link suggests at least five years, if it doesn't get worse before it gets better)
