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.

See, I told you? Video Entertainment in 2013 Will Be Less Than 50% Traditional TV

More market research in the US reveals more about Life After YouTube (and Hulu, and broadband, and mobile video!).
TV is fading away in the sense we know it.
Mediapost, quoting Solutions Research Group on a study covering US media consumer behaviour, says: "While daily time with TV will remain close to 4 hours, traditional TV's share of the total video entertainment pie is projected to shrink from 63.9% today to 47.1% by 2013, given the overall increase consumers' in total video-based entertainment consumption"
It kind of validates a lot of stuff I have been writing on this blog since it began in 2005.
Am I supposed to say: Watch this space?

Crime is hot on Indian TV, but it will not pay for long

If there was statistical evidence needed for the overkill that Indian news TV channels are doing with crime stories, especially the Arushi Talwar murder case in Noida/Delhi, it is here.
An article in The Hindu's Sunday magazine says: "A study by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) says that six channels beamed news and special programmes on the double murder for 39.30 hours out of a total 92 hours prime time — from 19:00 hrs to 23:00 hrs — between May 16 and June 7."

Here is my prediction. In the next six months to one year, there will be a dramatic shift away from crime news.

A lot of this had to do in my opinion/interpretation with the prices of television and cable connections dropping to points where TV sets and satellite TV became affordable for millions. This class, which I call the "neo-TV-literate" was wooed with stuff that turned them on in the TRP game. At the same time, the cost of launching new channels and the imperatives of winning market share generated a cycle of "competitive populism" in the space from the supply side.

The cycle is playing out like an IPO boom in the stock market and something -- as they say -- has gotta give.
I do not expect gross TRPs to rule the roost at all and we will have an ordered play of TV news channels. I am not going into the ethical, social and responsibility-related issues here. Some of them are valid, but I don't believe in rantings passing off as informed discourse.