There’s a phrase in TV news that I heard countless times over my television career: “broadcast quality,” describing a minimum quality threshold for video that can appear on air. Everyone defined it differently, and the larger the market, theoretically, the higher the threshold.
Today, the internet has redefined quality, and it’s even impacted TV — Skype live shots are not uncommon. “The question used to be how to transfer the economics that supported the offline-media definition of ‘quality’ to the web,” writes Michael Learmonth in Ad Age. “But after years of failed efforts, the economics for content have gotten worse, not better.”
And what’s troubling for media companies, many users and advertisers don’t seem to mind. Popularity is increasingly outweighing authority, and brand is mattering less and less. “People have a greater degree of comfort with information from sources they aren’t familiar with,” said Patrick Keane, CEO of Associated Content in the Ad Age story. “To me, quality is moving toward a center of usefulness as opposed to that arbitered by a group of professionals.”
Meanwhile, traditional media is still hamstrung with costly production models, opening up opportunities for companies like Associated Content and AOL that are configured to produce high volumes of low cost content. Many traditional media execs predict a “return to quality” on the web, but perhaps AOL CEO Tim Armstrong says it best: “Today, on the internet, you make a choice of speed over quality, but in the future you won’t have to make that choice — you will get quality at speed.”
