Why The Internet Is Not A Broadcast Medium

from the realizing-this-slowly... dept

Despite all the stories about broadcast content providers looking for ways to take their content and repackage it for the web and for mobile phones, some are beginning to realize that the internet is not a broadcast medium. Certainly people will pay for some types of content, but they're not looking for their internet connection or their mobile phone as a replacement for TV just yet. While places like Major League Baseball still believe that streamed video is a replacement for TV, they need to realize that people use the internet and their mobile phones in very different ways. As the first article above points out, smarter content providers are realizing that non-TV devices can be used for complementary services, rather than as a way to repurpose TV content. Of course, the article also says that one of the reasons for this is that offering streaming/downloadable content can get expensive as more people use it - something that isn't necessarily the case if the content providers ever discovered broadcatching. The real issue is that content providers need to learn that the internet and the mobile phone is not simply a replacement for TV. Users don't see it that way, and are much less likely to use it that way. We already have TVs. True connectivity lets us do more, and if the content providers want to get users interested, they need to learn to fit within the medium - not dumb it down to a second television.