Creating real value for consumers with IPTV

by vergenewmedia on March 19, 2007 · 5 comments

I got into San Jose Sunday afternoon and thought I’d take the camera out and talk to real people (not conference wonks) about IPTV, internet TV. I wanted to see if they knew what it was and how it might create value for them. I was met with mix of skepticism and optimism. Take a look and give me your thoughts.


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Media on the Verge is Jim Long’s look at emerging media.

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  • Thomas Lawrence Long

    Your interview subjects are concerned about time quality (they don’t want to waste a lot of time sifting through junk to get what appeals to them) and media quality (they don’t want to expose themselves or their children to toxic material).

    Increasingly new networks emerge as portals or brokers of media experiences (notice that I didn’t use the term “content”), which requires sophisticated indexing and search algorithms.

    Although ours is a society addicted to distration, we also are hungry for experiences, not just “content.”

    Check out John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business Press).

    –TLL

  • http://www.twitter.com/conniereece Connie Reece

    Well done, Jim. Those of us who work in emerging media sometimes get so insular in our outlook that we forget to consider “the man on the street” and how our work affects the average person.

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  • Tansley

    The question remains interesting, but your sampling of interviewees was hardly adequate…more of just a ‘teaser,’ really…

    The information-saturation complained about by your first subject was irrelevant. Given adequate search tools, one needn’t spend hours looking through guides or channels the way satellite was at its inception. A few well-phrased searches will take the viewer to the subject he or she wishes to examine.

    “Family values,” as expressed by your second interviewee, also largely irrelevant. There are parental locks available to screen unwanted content, and somebody is always going to be putting out material that appeals to the broadest demographic.

    Your third interviewee was the only one worth watching, really, since he understood the potential of the medium. With the correct exposition, it should be possible to bring this level of understanding to everyone who stands to benefit from this shift in the media.

    One particular area you could not have touched on with this piece is the people who’ve obtained their educations and have migrated to the rural areas of the country – and who are limited in the availability of programming. There are people in my region, rural southern Oregon, who have degrees, live well outside any of the local major towns and have no access to cable and can receive only one broadcast station with any clarity. HERE is a prime target demographic for questions like this. VON and other emergent systems offer great promise in such circumstances, and in many cases offer to supplant or render unnecessary any future incursions of cable or dish networks.

    This is major stuff – and a lot of people are going to be VERY happy about it.

  • http://www.vergenewmedia.com Jim Long

    Your points are very useful. But while you have good grounds to disagree with the interview subjects, saying the one you agree with is the only one worth watching isn’t that useful. The others are demonstrative of the misunderstanding and skepticism out there beyond the technorati. I point out in the script that the success of IPTV partly rests on our ability to keep people informed. I certainly don’t have a CLUE about much of this and I’m just dipping my toes in the water. I’m an old-skool news cameraman for pete’s sake! As for the sampling, i stand by it’s statistical validity (kidding!) I really do appreciate your comment and your thoughts on rural applications of IPTV are quite interesting. So yes this was in fact a teaser, a teaser that produced discourse like this. Thanks!

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