The Future Is Social, Multi-App, Teen And Chinese Heavy

Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.
--Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google.

More here on the profound changes ahead in the way media is shaping

Newspapers are alive and kicking -- in Delhi

So you thought newspapers are sinking? Not in Delhi--look what I clicked at the news-stand this morning...and none of them is Delhi's main paper. Amazing language range as well!

Is social media a threat to journalism?

Here is a piece from Chris Cramer, a BBC and CNN veteran and current Reuters Global Editor, Multimedia, on what social media and "citizen journalism" means to the media. The bottomline: credibility and integrity matter, and profits follow.
I agree with a lot of what he says, having worked at Reuters-- with its commitment for some basic principles. But there is a chaotic universe out there and we need more innovations -in products, services and business models.

Content is King: And Confusion Is Clarity

I have been writing for years now about how online video, Internet streaming and mobile devices will cloud the media, but here is final proof on how confused and confusing the advertising industry and its feeder, market research, have become.
I don't even need to understand the details.
The simple fact is that confusion spells clarity.
Here is how.
For close to a century, we have been led by the thumb rules of the mass media

1. Channel leadership based on high capital costs
2. Television rating points (TRPs) based on prime-time
3. Hype based on a little bit of data and a lot of "relationships"
4. Brands based on broad recall

That era is over, with the Internet and online videos and iPods and all the elements of the Long Tail (including low-investment satellite broadcasts)

Is it any wonder that market researchers are groping in the dark? Stereotyping of the consumer is the illegitimate child of 20th Century mass marketing.
That is ending. Rejoice. Now I can have an old man in Mozambique listening to Britney Spears. And I can have a 20-year-old Peruvian teenager liking South Indian plantain leaf meals.