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Pro/Am Tournament: Colloquial Content
Converges in Text, Audio and Video |
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5 July 2005 |
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Today's Web portals abound with text, audio and video
content from both amateur and professional sources the
movement towards content convergence is taking on a grass
roots flavor that few in mainstream media companies would
have predicted a few years ago. Video broadcasters and
syndicators compete with homespun video from newspapers,
corporations, governments and
amateurs, even as podcasting opens up streams of audio
content from more sources than ever before. The mixture of
professional and amateur content keeps the convergence of
media sources increasingly in the hands of users equipped
with more than enough horsepower and storage to take them
all on. In this mix there are no safe niches, only
strategies that can get the right content into the hands of
the right audience. |
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It wasn't
supposed to be like this. Convergence was supposed to be about
major media outlets moderating intertwined streams of text,
audio and video with their own sophisticated packaging and
services. Instead, text and multimedia content created by -
well, just about everyone - is being weblogged, podcasted,
streamed and downloaded while the bigs scramble to capture the
colloquial side of content any way they can. From a Greensboro,
North Carolina newspaper's attempts to integrate citizen
journalism into its online presence (New
York Times coverage) to
Google's
egalitarian new video upload and download service to
Yahoo!'s beta
360 service to enterprise-oriented publishers trying to
capture client content and transactions, the established
content powers are trying to keep abreast of a world that knows
how to publish globally with ease and that sees themselves
increasingly as competent sources of content. The "dot com" era
of t-shirts as business wear may be over for the corporate set
but a new era of "dress down" egalitarian content is bringing
content with and without collars in a wider range of formats
than ever before to audiences everywhere.
With video and audio squarely in the Web
spotlight along with text publishers and producers of all kinds
must adapt across the board to new sources of both amateur and
professional competition. CNN no longer charges for access to
its online video, in part because there's ample competition for
clicks from new video outlets such newspaper Web sites that are
now streaming video from both syndicated sources and from their
own reporters' folksy footage. Both Google and Yahoo!
facilitate downloads of videos from both amateur and
professional sources. In audio the podcasting boom is sweeping
up radio stations and news outlets along with the huddled
masses of amateurs and independent commentators to reach the
ears of mobile audiences on their own terms. And in spite of
ongoing campaigns of lawsuits file sharing thrives as a medium
for an agnostic mix of professional and amateur text, audio and
video content.
In short the "who" of online content is
an increasingly inclusive community employing converging media
formats, a prolific clan that produces and consumes these
products as part of their own Pro/Am tournament, open to
whoever can provide the best information and experiences to
suit their needs. It's not an easy mix to manage for publishers
used to being sole authorities in sole formats, but a mix
that's the future whether it's liked or not. For those hoping
to hold their own in this new pro/am multimedia tour, a few
thoughts on how to keep on par:
- Learn from the lessons of search.
Search engines on the Web allow people to consider
professionally produced content and content produced by
individuals and institutions outside of professional
publishing on the same page. It's in the nature of publishers
to package and filter content for audiences, but lessening
publishers' natural prejudices against content beyond their
editorial control mixing with their own sources is a culture
change that's barely under way for many audio and video
outlets. From this perspective the new Yahoo! 360 platform
provides a handy multimedia personal communication tool but
its segregation from mainstream media sources limits its
usefulness. Putting at ease publishers that are uncomfortable
with the masses by keeping their doings at arm's length is a
short-sighted strategy that will sell short audio and video
as easily as text as content of all kinds converge.
- Adapt to aggregation in the hands
of audiences. From pharmaceutical companies to iPods to
TiVo addicts professionally produced content thrives
most when it gets closest to its clients - especially when it
can mix effectively with their own content. The search
revolution of the past ten years is being upstaged quickly by
the storage revolution, enabling individuals to have local
collections of text, audio and video content that stretch the
technology of only the most persistent consumers and
professionals. Music companies have won their
Pyrrhic victory against file sharing networks in the
courts only to acknowledge that they need to get into the mix
of user-managed content aggregation in order to succeed.
But progress towards this goal from video and audio producers
has been slow in coming, in large part because most insist on
solving their own distribution problems rather than their
clients'. Source-agnostic solutions that allow for the easy
convergence of audio and video sources will prevail in the
long run regardless of what traditional content producers may
impose on the markets in the short term.
- Professionals are amateurs, too.
While instant messaging, portals and other Web-born
technologies have found strong support in many enterprise
information cultures, audio and video oftentimes play a
stepchild to text-based Web technologies for getting out the
word from individuals within major corporations. Corporate
compliance and security issues may be daunting obstacles as
much as cost concerns, but the popularity of audio and video
streams is likely to move them from the carefully controlled
environments of conference rooms and production studios to
desktops quite rapidly over the next few years as tools for
creating and using these media become standard equipment on
consumer PCs and portable devices. At the same time the
proliferation of audio and video streams from major
professional producers and other enterprises needs more
support in enterprise infrastructures to maximize their value
in the context of user workflows and team collaboration
tools. Audio and video is serious content for business,
and getting all the more serious as it starts to accumulate
and converge on enterprise desktops.
Colloquial content is truly the center of the content world
now, with publisher-created sources scrambling to prove their
value to users in consumer and professional roles as media
converge increasingly common storage and retrieval schemes.
There is plenty of opportunity to sustain a higher class of
content at premium prices in this mix, but increasingly it will
be with a mix of professional and amateur sources at its base.
The pros will always have an edge in technique and training,
but the ubiquity of affordable publishing tools leaves it an
open game. Sorry, folks, there's no easy way to keep the
riff-raff out these days...
-
John Blossom
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