Abhishek Tiwari

Back in April Accenture conducted a survey of 110 senior media executives (TV, Radio, Music etc), where they see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business.

Some of the stats were:

• 57% of the respondents identified the rapid growth of user-generated content — which includes amateur digital videos, podcasts, mobile phone photography, wikis and social-media blogs — as one of the top three challenges they face today.
• 70% of respondents said they believe that social media, one of the largest segments of user-generated content, will continue to grow, while only 3 percent of respondents view social media as a fad.

Just last night lonelygirl15 had the season finale of their web special series on MySpace. MySpace has also bought the rights to the second season. Such shows are just the begining of an growing phenomenon.

Now bloggers are also jumping on the bandwagon by moving to full video as form of blogging (Scoble, Om Malik, Webb Alert etc). I posted an article over the weekend with some ideas in this space. Now all this is definitely scaring the media execs. Let’s see what some of they can do (and are doing) to leverage this to their benefit.

Don’t Resist, Embrace the Long Tail
Content production, editing and distribution has become simpler and cheaper over the past few years. More and more users are able to create rich videos. Media networks are used to high quality produced content which brings in paying advertisers.

Networks must capitalize this phenomenon and enable methods for users to see them as easy distribution channels. CNN is already leveraging such methods and has launched a service called I-Report. Also with new technologies emerging in the set-top box space, they could look into introducing additional interactive mechanisms for the viewers.

Share the Love
Networks have to realize that in order to motivate the users to see them as distribution channels, they have to share some of the revenue. The revenue share model has not yet been perfected by the video sites. This is where networks can excel.

Network shows like AFV have been doing this for a long time. Its time to bring that business model in the 21st century.

Leverage the Internet as a Channel
Networks are only now beginning to understand the value of the web as a distribution mechanism. Only after the success of YouTube and iTunes, they have realized the value proposition. NBC recently launched ability to view full episodes on its websites.

This is just the start. Networks should look into simultaneously broadcasting on the web. Also having an On Demand interface would allow them surface previous shows for its viewers. Not to mention that they can maintain the same TV like advertisements on these web distributed shows.

To me this is a very interesting space and next few years will be very interesting. The old dinosaurs of the TV networks will have to evolve or wither away. Stay tuned.

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