Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Waiting for Media Convergence

Hello Readers. Andy Angelos from Venture Midwest visiting CONNECTIONS blog once again. After reading the recent post entitled "New Models for Personalized Media Distribution," the Angelos brainstorm turbine ignited with notions surrounding the convergence of personalized media. Internet to TV, TV to phone, music to phone, tv, and Internet, text anywhere - digital convergence is creating an endless tail of consumer decisions. However, overwhelming choices for media consumption may be responsible for the following statistics:
  • 84% of American Businesses consider print media their most important information source
  • 40% of American Businesses rely on information from podcasts or webcasts
  • 32% of American and European mobile phone users use the web on their devices and only 34% of the group is willing to watch mobile ads in current form

Yes, these statistics are from 2007...not 1997 and are courtesy of Publishing Executive - a monthly print publication. Despite the increasing tail of media options, the average consumer continues to interact with the traditional triad of media outlets - print, radio, and television. The print may be online, the radio may streaming, and the TV maybe Tivoed, but the experience remains essentially intact and therefore, separated. Dismal sales for AppleTV reiterate the continued mainstream preference for isolated media experiences.

Digital media adapters, such as AppleTV, are still nascent utilities. Hopefully, improvements like the release of OCAP tool kits from Motorola will enable further integration of media devices.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

An interesting topic. I would agree with this input and when you say "the average consumer," what factors must be considered to that particular reference. I think that one of the reasons for the aforementioned statistics for choices of media consumption and poor sales performance for new digital media have a lot to do with the baby boomer consumer (say that five times fast). The boomers, which represent a large portion of U.S. consumption may feel that convergence is unneccessary for their ways of utilizing the different types of media.

Anonymous said...

40% of businesses relying on podcasts or webcasts for information is astounding considering print is like a trillion years old and podcasting was invented less than five years ago.

andyangelos said...

The 40% statistic is impressive considering podcasts are a product of the nascent file sharing culture. Inclusion of webcasts in the percentage, however, create perspective - newscasts from CNN, MSNBC, local outlets viewed on the web are included.