Acceptance of my kids’ advanced sense of hip reminds me, life is like those moving sidewalks in the airport: walk or stand still, you’re being carried along–walking the wrong way will only keep you in one place.
My kids call me “so fifteen minutes ago” when I share my understanding of current hipness which they’ve long since digested or spit out. It’s all moving and we’re being carried somewhere…
So, if NOW is so fifteen minutes ago, what is still fifteen minutes AHEAD? Hang on to your carry-ons and grab the Advil, passengers: here comes IPTV.
Heralded as a Trojan Horse to the media fortress, this new technology is going to shake up changes in television we’re still coming to grips with now.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Diane Mermigas says, “Ready or not, dominant gatekeepers — from cable and satellite operators to telephone companies and television networks — are about to confront a new competitor: open-sourced, real-time, stored digital video on handy Internet-connected devices that play by a different set of rules.”
IPTV could do to TV what the Walkman and iPod did for/to music retailing: personalize and decentralize it. As they learned in Troy, walls of a city are more easily torn down from within. When consumers take control of content without regard to what will soon seem a narrow-band channel of distribution, choice will indeed go critical mass.
This end-run will put enormous pressure on your messaging: it has to be relevant, real and compelling. If you think the effectiveness of broadcasting is declining due to fragmentation now—wait fifteen minutes.
[Originally published 11 Oct 2005]
