HM's Profile

I <3 Sonos. In fact, I'm totally in love with it. And I agree, it combines so many of the things I love about good software with great design elements in the hardware.

In my view though, there is still some way to go though until Sonos completely integrates into the home. I'd like to be able to play video off my laptop with audio coming through Sonos. I hope that soon Sonos will be intuitive enough to know that if I'm scrolling through twitter on my phone and find a video to watch, I may want the option to interrupt the radio streaming and replace it with the audio from whatever I'm now watching.

Thanks for the feedback AJT.

Certainly the strategy being articulated by large broadcasters now is all about ‘social’. I’ve heard countless senior media execs in the past year say things like “it is all about sharing”, that is, we are no longer worried about driving audience to our own site. In my experience, focus shifted to getting content distributed as widely as possible. In this context, the view I heard repeated often is that Facebook is far superior to any other platform, particularly if your focus is video.

You can now see this trend in evidence at most major broadcasters, including the aforementioned investments in Buzzfeed & Vox. Furthermore major networks are now doing tie-ups with Facebook for live-events at Buckingham Palace, or with the Pope.

Thanks for the feedback AJT.

Certainly the strategy being articulated by large broadcasters now is all about ‘social’. I’ve heard countless senior media execs in the past year say things like “it is all about sharing”, that is, we are no longer worried about driving audience to our own site. In my experience, focus shifted to getting content distributed as widely as possible. In this context, the view I heard repeated often is that Facebook is far superior to any other platform, particularly if your focus is video.

You can now see this trend in evidence at most major broadcasters, including the aforementioned investments in Buzzfeed & Vox. Furthermore major networks are now doing tie-ups with Facebook for live-events at Buckingham Palace, or with the Pope.

Great piece.

My question is this: what happens when the content generators collapse? The businesses which are succeeding in this space seem to be platforms, aggregators, or sites like Huff Post which as you point out repackage chunks of content from other outlets.

Coming to this course from the media sector, I often wonder where the content will come from when the traditional brands in both print and broadcast are so crippled they can no longer mass generate content. The vast quantities of cheap & recycled content upon which most new brands are built will dry-up. Will there be a recalibration in the sector? Will platforms start to create content themselves?

It seems to me that native digital news organisations are proving much more successful than legacy news businesses at capturing value in the digital news business. Compare Politico with the big, traditional mastheads which have a huge head-start in terms of reputation, sources, branding and infrastructure. Seems to me many legacy news players still see digital as a subsidiary business, rather than being their core business. This is proving a huge disadvantage.

I also think many of the traditional players are STILL trying to sand-bag audience for their existing print-runs, to prevent the digital dollar-to-dime revenue shift.

Can they keep doing this for much longer in the face of Politico etc? I think not.

A fair point, but wouldn’t you concede that traditional news players are doing much the same anyway? The big traditional players in the market are also including similar paid content within their pages & broadcasts. Additionally, network news broadcasts & serious broadsheet mastheads are all now engaged in the “pop-news” & click-bait content business too. Watch any evening news broadcast and it’ll likely include some viral content, not to mention the breakfast television broadcasts which devote daily scheduled air-time.

It might “seem hypocritical” for Buzzfeed to enter the serious end of the content market at the outset, but the reality is Buzzfeed is making significant inroads with high-calibre correspondents covering major world events. When I covered last year’s war on Gaza for a major brand market player I found myself competing against a journalist from Buzzfeed, who did extraordinary work. Her work received both acclaim and audience traffic. The cat-video history of her platform seemed to mean very little.