YouTube's announcement that it has plans to create a revenue-sharing agreement with the contributors to the popular website is eerily not being discussed by the 'traditional media' even as YouTube has become an Internet sensation and a household name.Is YouTube's latest move yet another a nail in the prepped coffin of mainstream television and cable programming?
As more information, videos, photographs, music and so on premiere on the Internet first nowadays - including announcements from presidential candidates - even regularly scooping mass media organizations on important news, there seems to be no way to stop the decline of traditional media. Can you stop a slip and slide that is in full motion? I doubt it.
In a few years, just about anyone will be able to report over the Internet on breaking news - they only need be in the right place at the right time and have a modern cell phone, which increasingly offer quality, real-time video.
The media cannot be everywhere, but the millions of people who post to the Internet can be. That's going to be the fundamental difference, as it is already playing out.
I remember telling friends and family back in 1995 that the Internet will revolutionize the way we collect and consume news, information, entertainment, and eventually, consumer products.
Few people had any confidence in that prediction even though the writing was on the wall in huge black letters against a white background - "The Internet will change and define news, popular culture and communications in the next century".
I don't know why so many were so skeptical, and a decade later, the revolution continues to change almost everything we do now. It was simply the natural progression of a relatively easy and accessible technology with broad exposure to get your message out for very little money (in comparison to, say, newspaper and magazine publishing).
Creators and users of the Internet are setting the trends for news reporting, communications, commerce, fashion, business, social networking, banking and finance, music, movies and the list goes on.
How will television as we know it fit into the enormous Internet culture of bloggers, web sites, online media and so on? That is still to be seen, but every will ultimately decide what is the best programming and will have 24/7 access to anything they want to read, watch, listen to or download.
How many people will abandon their cable companies because they will be be able to eventually easy and quickly get whatever they want commercial-free from the Internet (connected to a TV or Widescreen) when they want and how they want.
A decade ago, Microsoft introduced what was touted as a revolution in the history of online media.
Remember WebTV?
The service allowed subscribers to surf the Internet on their televisions. However, the service was clumsy and unreliable, and therefore never gained the popularity anticipated by Bill Gates and others at Microsoft. Most damaging to the WebTV model was probably the approach MS initially used, luring people into accepting it's model (or vision) for the future of Internet and computer use. It was, at its best, a novelty.
But in the last decade or more, especially in the past five years, the Internet has become a mass communication channel, the most extensive, widely-used and globally significant communications device in the history of media and communications.
So it shouldn't be a surprise that the natural progression of technology on demand will be the future, and the industries involved will need to adapt or be replaced.
Labels: Google Products, Internet, News, Online Media, Self Publishing, Social Networking, Web Trends, YouTube
