Challenging times for Media and Publishing

When con­sumer becomes the king, the pro­duc­ers may soon be becom­ing paupers.

Falling books — flickr

As tech­nol­ogy advanced by leaps and bounds, many indus­tries had tapped into it and dreamed of an assured future. When Sony won the Hi Def DVD war, lit­tle did it antic­i­pate that same tech­nol­ogy will under­cut its own motion pic­ture busi­ness as more and more view­ers choose to rel­ish the movies in higher end tech­nol­ogy sys­tems in the com­fort of their home and stop pay­ing 10 bucks to AMC Loews. With piracy and ille­gal inter­net stream­ing becom­ing a headache for movie pro­duc­tion houses and music indus­try, enter­tain­ment com­pa­nies have been wary of tech­no­log­i­cal developments.

It is now the turn of old fash­ioned pub­lish­ing houses — as Ama­zon Kin­dle sales shoot up and Barnes & Nobles already announc­ing their intent of enter­ing the soar­ing e-books mar­ket, pub­lish­ing com­pa­nies bet­ter think of alter­na­tive busi­ness routes. The pub­lish­ing indus­try has taken a major hit and when Ama­zon is pro­vid­ing the lat­est best sell­ers for $9.99, who is going to buy $25 hard­cov­ers? For­get the depen­dency on Kin­dles, once Barnes and Nobles puts its col­lec­tion on Google for­mat read­able on iPhones and other phones, the age of paper­backs will be prob­a­bly extinct. This means lower cut for pub­lish­ers and writers.

What is a bit insane though is the effect on jour­nal­ism jobs. Even if pub­lish­ing goes online, we need good con­tent and arti­cles, so why should the mar­ket for smart jour­nal­ists be affected? The answer is the way in which jour­nal­ism is going to be used is chang­ing — we are talk­ing about online arti­cles and 24×7 updates; we are talk­ing about instan­ta­neous video cov­er­age, email alerts and tweets. One can’t solely rely on the pen any­more, the read­ers demand real time and graph­i­cal news. With so many alter­na­tives way to get the infor­ma­tion, it is do-or-die for news­pa­per busi­nesses to keep their online por­tals smartly up to date.

No won­der Apple turned out to be the win­ner by the way it tapped into open tech­nolo­gies and cre­ated its own mar­ket by invent­ing iPods and later iPhones. It did not stop with the hard­ware, it cap­i­tal­ized on dig­i­tal music indus­try, phone appli­ca­tions etc. The key was being pre­pared for the future and that’s where Sony has been lack­ing. Despite lead­ing the con­sumer elec­tron­ics for a long time, you can only wince when Sony CEO expresses his hatred for inter­net and tech­nol­ogy advance­ments. Now, look at Microsoft and why are they strug­gling against more inno­v­a­tive Google and Apple.

One can under­stand Media industry’s reluc­tance of get­ting too dig­i­tal. After all tra­di­tion­ally it has been a paper and print model and has pro­duced movies for those big­ger the­ater screens. The only way out is inno­va­tion. Some­thing like this startup from Col­orado which is allow­ing users to choose the arti­cles they want and let­ting them pub­lish their own cus­tom mag­a­zine. Sounds great to me!

In times like these, tra­di­tions are bound to be chal­lenged since con­sumer has the ‘options’ to choose. So, what should movie pro­duc­tions do? — prob­a­bly pay Brad Pitt lesser for his looks.

img: flickr

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