Essays on technology, media, marketing and politics.
The TV business was once ruled by overnight ratings. Those metrics are becoming less and less meaningful in a world of mobile-first consumers. Online networks such as Netflix and Amazon don’t want or need third-party ratings. They know exactly what is being consumed, by whom, and when. Delivery and analytics are their core competencies. Additionally, Netflix and Amazon own their customer billing relationships, and whoever owns the customer usually wins.
While sales of 4K television sets are spiking, broadcast capabilities are lagging. The irony here is rich. For traditional distributors (cable providers and satellite distributors) to offer higher-quality formats, often they must take on major capital expenditures, upgrading gear throughout the signal chain. For an Over The Top (OTT) provider to offer 4K, all they have to do is consume more bandwidth.
Analysts estimate that by 2030, self-driving cars and trucks (autonomous vehicles) could account for as much as 60 percent of US auto sales. That’s great! But autonomous vehicles are basically computers on wheels, and computers crash all the time. Besides that, computers get hacked every day. So you gotta ask, “Can self-driving cars ever really be safe?”
FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google/YouTube) is about to take a huge bite out of traditional network TV (ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox), and the media business will never be the same.
For the first ten years of the consumer web — circa 1994 to 2004 — internet video quality was laughable. Those of us who predicted that the Net would disrupt television were laughed at. How could a video the size of a postage stamp compete with ESPN? We queued up tiny videos to buffer on […]
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