@ NATPE 2006: Disintermediation: Consumer As Programmer/User/Producer

Call it disintermediating, disrupting, discombobulating — whatever the verb, viewers evolving into programmers, users and producers are changing the game. Adam Bain, who is involved in strategy at FIM, talked about it during “The Future of TV I: Programming Cross Platform Content” — describing the status quo as TV on a pedestal with all content flowing down and the changing TV world as content coming up. I asked him to elaborate a little after the session. Bain: “The story about what’s happening now in the media business is definitely one of disintermediation. You are either disintermediating someone, or getting disintermediated. The trick is to figure out which one and by who. But the real story is that consumers are disintermediating everyone else to get to each other.” Of course, he offers FIM’s MySpace.com as the prime example but the wildly popular site was raised by numerous other execs throughout the week.

I’m always intrigued by what other people glean from sessions like this. Two takeaways from Bain:

– “The mechanics of combining selling, tracking, reporting and billing across all platforms are severely lacking — it could be one of the largest gaps that exist right now in our business. The content currently may be cross-platform, but the focus on the money surely is not.

– “Device limitations will be minimized. Human limitations won’t. Time
will be the major human/social limitation in the future. The view that ‘devices are platforms’ also will eventually become less relevant. The old view is one of ‘Device Forms’ like Cable TV, Radio, Internet Webpages, Podcasts, etc. The new view will be ‘Media Forms’ of Video, Audio, Text, Photos.”

NATPE conference coverage is sponsored by Brightcove.

Comments have been disabled for this post