TV to Internet or Internet to TV?

Posted by David Johnson on December 2, 2006

The Washington Post has a centerpiece on the back-and-forth of convergence content management and evolving business plans that says it is hard to tell if TV is moving onto the Internet or if the Internet is moving on to TV. Chicken and Egg? Mission creep? Moot point? My designer pals and I used to make a game of finding Web influences creeping into print and TV graphics (seriously, did you ever see a pipe character in print design before online?), but those were in the days when real video g2 made us swoon. Today, my PC has a remote control and my TV is a monitor that has a useless thing called a tuner because all the content is fed through a digital box into channel 3. Now before I slip into my grumpy old man voice, how about some comments on the question.

Dave

Pointless debate. You still get the same result in the end. The reality is that both the tech industry and the tv industry have to change their business models.

Just for nostalgia… Anyone remember “WebTV” devices?
Steve

Hey — WebTV, or MSNTV as it’s now known is the device I’m using right now to write this.
http://www.howardowens.com/ Media Blog

Broadcast as a technology, and even cable, are deadmen walking. In fact, broadcast and cable (as we know them today) will disappear before newsprint does. Digital delivery is advancing so fast, and such a better technology for delivering non-text content, that it will eventually become the sole delivery method for content in most homes. Text is a slightly different nuance, but it has a finite future, too.

Of course, the change will have (and is having) tremendous implications for how and why content is produced, and who controls the means of production.
http://sandlander.blogspot.com Malcolm Thomson

WaPo has been reading Jeff Jarvis, Mark Glaser, LostRemote, Unmediated and, every Monday, MediaGuardian.

The best of all of the above I re-blog for colleagues here in the Middle East. I think one of the problems is our ‘adult’ mindset; we are of generations which like to have things perfectly defined, compartmentalized, unionized and monetized. The kids, the millennials, have no such expectation or even need; they are at home with multi-tasking, happy with niche media, ever ready to move on when today’s hot thing morphs into tomorrow’s.

Television, compartmentalized, is over. Look at the impulses coming from the Digital Signage sector, from people who don’t see themselves as in the television business. Look at the publishers of eZines which include textual, graphical and audiovisual components delivering an increasingly rich communications and entertainment mix.

There is no single ‘next big thing’ we can comfortably define and ring-fence. Let’s settle for radical discontinuous change, media flux, in a constant state of ‘becoming’. And, above all, we need to have fun with it.
thedetroitchannel

you can have fun in the Middle East?