The best days of the digital frontier are still well in front of us and broadcasting will still have a respected place if we insist that connectivity be considered an essential commodity.
The challenges associated with developing this critical national infrastructure cannot be subjected to the limitations inherent with consolidations of power that create new pipeline oligopolies.
The very promise of this era of Choice is that high quality programming will be sought based upon the value delivered in the programming and not the availability. Broadcasters, of all kinds, have already been challenged by massive new layers of content competing with their programming but over time we are seeing how quality of content is rewarded consistently even as we move through a period where experimentation also shows how lesser forms of content can produce temporary traffic that has little stickiness. Good content clearly moves consumers to schedule engagement. It is the new fringe times for content consumption that is distracting so many much like carnival barkers on a boardwalk as we all move toward our daily destinations.
The core competencies built over many decades by all forms of broadcasters, local and national, are just as valuable as ever. Quality is regarded and rewarded but only today do we see turf wars resulting from the disorganizing effects of uneven digital connectivity.
The addictive allure of retransmission fees has clouded the longer outlook that clearly demonstrates how available high quality programming will attract large audiences and that these payoffs are somehow the only way to make a go of it in today's complex programming environment.
In the last post here I offered how I believe that content distribution platforms will continue to evolve with both technology (and especially) how people value their own convenience in getting exactly what they want and need.
Search engines give us all a form of Choice but it is clearly limited. Different forms of high speed connection are setting themselves up as modern day clearing houses that will collect the tolls that seem absolutely vital to making high quality programming possible.
I have also expressed previously that I do not think unlimited channels of direct distribution are likely to produce the kind of concentration that will be easily monetized. So what, then, should come next?
If it seems like every post I write here comes back to Choice over and over that is because it is the overriding concern in markets for content. Period. No matter how you deflect it, or choose to work with the social forces of Choice, it will be expressed until a Choice friendly market is in place where a more reasonable balance is achieved between consumer and content producer. And since technology will continue to evolve, this is liable to be a moving target.
People want high quality content choices available to them wherever they are and when they choose. Content producers need a reasonable rate of return that is sustainable and consistent with quality (as measured by the consumer).
The biggest problem, by far, is how we value the engagements with all manner of content. It is fragmented in so many ways as to be made to seem inconsistent across media and modalities. Moreover, sampling expenses associated with national audiences are burdensome and part of an inefficient (pre)digital approach.
Ultimately, Choice and census quality data will go hand in hand. The two are both necessary and attainable and when they begin to emerge, will allow untold amounts of productive capacity to be directed towards new efforts that make our digital infrastructure return impressive productivity gains. This is not idealistic. How can you see that to be the case? Just know that Choice has a very specific intention and there is a specific series of business solutions to make the needed trade offs happen. Reasonable profits follow fulfilled needs in healthy markets.
As the population spread west in the 1860's very quickly you could see how towns followed transportation routes. These towns were distribution points that allowed more growth and settlements to happen incrementally and that has continues up to today as cities saw suburbs as a result of mass ownership of cars.
The potential of this current revolution is how these limiting factors and mistakes previously made can now be avoided. In this case, that means avoiding bottlenecks and false scarcity associated with oligopolies controlling connectivity.
If we free up spectrum to create a competitive marketplace for high speed connections, then the real focus will be switched back to high quality content and how to measure it effectively so that value can be harvested efficiently. This is exactly where our efforts need to flow now because the benefit of doing it this way will exceed the benefits in a decade of allowing fiefdoms to control appetites for variable levels of quality created by false scarcity. I will even take this another step further: if we do the right thing now, brand new forms of valuable content will continue to develop that might not otherwise come about because margins will be reasonable enough to prompt the right kinds of speculative efforts.
The promise of Choice is that it can deliver meaningful returns for those creators of variable kinds of content that motivate people on all levels of their life...not just entertainment. So much noise is made today about how expertise is being devalued somehow by the digital environment. I would argue that the (all too frequent) appearance of expertise is very different from actual expertise. This point is magnified greatly in the era of a "like" button. I will end on this point: Expect this period of time directly ahead to make a sharp distinction between the appearance of expertise and the real goods. For instance: clicks were very informative 16 years ago. They seemed to take us from eyeballs and impressions to action of some kind. Initially, they were a revolution. Today, they tell us a lot less about what we really need to know today in order to make good business decisions.
If we collectively focus on Choice (in the fully American sense of the idea) we can move to an entirely new level of meaningful interactivity. In that digital world, both national broadcast and local focus that are of high quality will realize interactive values not previously achieved. Why settle for what we have now when so much more is possible?
