Has anyone among us watched an entire half-hour news program recently? How about listening to a radio show?
It’s getting tougher to hang in there with the linear media. The linear media is that which presents its entertainments in a line. That used to be fine until the Internet came along. The Internet allows consumers to access the media they want right now. What if the news comes on and all I really care about is the weather and sports. Do I have to sit through a half hour of “news” to see the two features I’m interested in?
Probably not going to happen. I can punch it up on weather.com.
The linear vs. 3D battle has immense implications for marketers and where they spend their money. Certainly, radio was going south before the Internet came along, but the Internet has hastened its demise. Listeners used to gather around radios for the intimate experience it provided, mostly tuning in the local DJ playing the greatest hits. But the industry consolidated, and so the local DJ is becoming a dinosaur. Now AM radio is migrating to FM, a media consolidation that will have the AM band eventually used for cell phone traffic and wi-fi.
“Radio aggregators”–think TuneIn radio on the iPad–offer as many as 30,000 stations on a distribution service called “Shoutcast.” Instead of local stations battling it out with 12 competitors, they now have thousands of competitors which means market shares are getting smaller. Radio aggregation has been credited with saving the medium, but it will probably have something to do with killing the medium too, since it’s becoming harder to assemble an audience.
TV is suffering through the same phenomenon, but will always have a leg up on radio because of pictures. But, TV has experienced its own downsizing, partly due to cable and partly due to the Internet. After all, cable TV invested billions of dollars to assemble the 300 channel universe, right before media choice exploded in the 90s. In essence, TV went from being its own culture–”Thursday night must see TV” on NBC–to being a box on which anything can be played.
Some think TV and the Internet can be combined, but the results are so far mixed. NBC was out of the box with Hulu, but Hulu requires a subscription fee and consumers wonder why when they are already paying for cable. Some TV manufacturers are boasting Internet ready sets, so that You Tube, for example, would be an app that comes up on your TV.
It’s safe to say that TV and the Internet have not yet been successfully integrated–do the network execs who provide programming to TV want people surfing around You Tube? Probably not, but then they’re not in control anymore.
The role for linear media will become that much tougher as marketers discover they’re more likely to make hay pinpointing their audience, as opposed to shining a flashlight over it.
If you require further information or have any specific questions, don’t hesitate to give a member of the GoPromotional team a call on 0800 0148 970 or simply email us today.
