Black Friday - The Farce Awakens

So that was the first full-scale Black Friday that the UK has ever experienced.  And what an event it was.

Stories of in-store wars, bargains snatched from the hands of those who waited patiently in line for hours and police arrests for fighting at 24 hour supermarkets have been written about and told over the last few days. The British shopping masses have been shown as a brawling uncultured rabble, who would happily trample others underfoot just to get their hands on a discounted television for themselves... that they probably would not have purchased anyway.

Previous pre-Christmas sales have now been overshadowed by the dark lord of post-Thanksgiving sales bonanzas that we have willingly inherited from the USA...without any of the thanks or the giving we are supposed to have at this time of year.

If this is the beginning of a new saga in retail... then part of me wished I lived a long time ago and far away.

It's not traditional media anymore

I've been struggling with the term "Traditional Media" recently.

I'm not sure why... maybe it doesn't sound right, perhaps the term just doesn't cut it in a fragmented communications world or possibly I've lost a lot of my nostalgic view of newspapers, radio and even television.

Some traditions are great and are quite rightly upheld. Traditions not only show us where we came from, but also serve as a reference point to remind us what was good at a given point in time. 

But now we live in a new world.  An always-connected one where media is streamed, stored, consumed on demand and mashed together across multiple channels and devices.  The consumer of media is now in control and there's really no going back. My 4 year old daughter thinks it 'silly' that the TV doesn't show all the programs YouTube does (perhaps only because I've not bought an Apple TV box yet) and she laughed when I tried to explain that we once only had a TV with 4 buttons for our television... and one of those was for the power supply.

But we now live with those old paradigms, albeit updated for a 21st Century life. YouTube still has 'channels' and streamed digital radio is still referred to as 'stations'. 

So maybe we should change to term from 'traditional media' to something more fitting for a hangover from a bygone age? Perhaps we need a new way of referring to the old ways of media consumption?

Perhaps we should now call them 'legacy' media instead?

Why it is still a social media UK election

The last American Presidential election was really the first recognised social media election, with Barack Obama gaining a groundswell of support via his Facebook following and a legion of tiny donations via his website. And the 2010 UK election to be held on May 5th is now shaping up to be one too.

Sure, mainstream media and in particular television will still have the main influence over the populace, but social media will provide a far more significant input in the lead up to the election than ever before. In fact, 5 years ago at the last election the term social media didn't really exist as we know it today and the ground rules have all changed.

Research from Ovum last month stated that all the main political parties have started to but haven't yet fully exploited the possibilities of social media.

"The parties acknowledge that social media can be used to mobilise activists, engage new audiences, or harvest a long tail of donors aimed primarily at communication and collaboration within the established caste of politicians, journalists, and interest groups”.

But could 2010 be remembered as the last time TV had the major share of election media influence?

Never wrong for long

Happy Birthday to an innovative force in journalism and the TV channel of insomniacs...Sky News is 20 today.

No longer the teenager and now the grown-up, the 24 Hour UK news channel pioneered by Rupert Murdoch has come of age. Its also amazing to see how much TV news has come in the last 2 decades. Previously the news was dished out like my mother's cooking (at regular times during the day, in large portions I found hard to swallow all at once and often more palettable to the server than the target audience).

But now, its news on-the-go; almost drip-fed to the masses in small morsels, delivered constantly, sometimes with little attention paid to quality and with no time to think between servings. This approach often means that mistakes were made, but they are Never Wrong For Long!

However, it works and the format & pace been copied worldwide. Even the BBC followed-suit, albeit almost 8 years later, with their impressive BBC News 24 offering.

But what about the next 20 years?
Well...I do believe the future will be televised! We'll see the gradual convergence of Internet and Broadcast technologies, along with the user/viewer/consumer taking more of an active part.

Perhaps we will eventually see the appearance of 'Gargoyles' as predicted in the book Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. These are people permanently 'wired into the Metaverse' or in modern parlance: someone with a permanent Internet connection. They are a news agent who records everything around them and uploads this data (particularly audio/visual) for its use by agencies or other organisations. The idea being that they get paid for their news-worthy clips and therefore make their living by recording as much interesting stuff as possible.

Strange? Perhaps. But not impossible!

French newspaper must evolve or croak

Well well, one of the last bastions of french journalism has woken up and smelt the expensive coffee of the modern age before it is possibly too late. I understand that French newspaper, Le Monde, has just completed the development of its TV studio somewhere in its offices (in Paris I assume).

This facility allows journalists to produce articles and video clips alongside each other for the different versions of its paper, with the video obviously making its way online to support the electronic version.

Well-regarded print-based publications such as this one have done all they can in the past not to venture down this path, with critics stating this should have been something done in the more media-friendly 1990's. This would at-least have given these publications time to learn their craft and they could perhaps even have taken some of the lower-level TV channels on at their own game back then.

Could it also be a cooincindence that Le Monde is also looking to cut 130 jobs by March 2009, all in the name of cost saving?

Reddit!

(Online) Video Killed the Television Star?

There are two views on how TV and YouTube will get along in the future

1. YouTube is a threat to TV and will become its demise
2. YouTube is an additonal channel to TV and the two will eventually create a hybrid media source

I personally believe that the latter viewpoint is true. My hunch is that the Internet will incorporate more and more video content in time, as:

• Video cameras become more commonplace & cheaper (quality of mobile phone video)
• Methods of posting video content to the internet become easier
• Broadband continues to increase in speed and overall usage
• People find it more acceptable to communicate and interact in this way

Note: This has already been covered intially in my post 'This time the revolution will be televised', so I'll not go into it again.

But on the other hand there are those who believe that Online Video will bring about the death of TV, particularly in the guise of YouTube. So are we right to ask Buggles to rewrite their song? Or is everyone just getting a little too paranoid?..... errr.... YES!

A recent study by IMMI found that 20% of primetime television viewers are watching some episodic television online and that this grou (the majority of them women) don't have the time to catch everything, so use the online episodes as a way to catch-up on the ones they missed live.

Here's their full report: ttp://www.immi.com/pdfs/OnlineViewership.pdf

As eMarketer agree, there is no reason to believe that the increase in online video is causing a subsequent drop in TV viewing:

It does then beg the question of where these extra hours are coming from.... perhaps they've stopped listening to 80's radio stations!