Here are my notes from Paula Le Dieu's Emerging Massive Media, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Paula is the outgoing head of the BBC's Creative Archive project, which will turn all the material in the BBC's archive into stuff that can be remixed and reused by Britons. She's now taken on the gig of running the International Creative Commons, though she will still be working on the Archive.
Audiences are acquiring media under their own terms, or more
frighteningly for the incumbents, acquiring it from their own
suppliers on the networks. Broadcasters broadcast to active,
self-commissioning audiences, who decided on their own the what
where when and how.Prosumers are becoming the mass media — but what about the
massive media? How do they compete with their audiences for
attention?For many massive media orgs, the competition is viewed as heavily
weighed in their favor. Every time Wikipedia trounces yet another
massive media org (e.g. the NYT yesterday) it creates ripples of
doubt in the massive orgs.Last year Joi Ito gave a keynote at a TV con, to international TV
execs: he said: "Re DRM: you will win. You will convince your
audiences not to use your content." When Patrick Kennedy VP of
Sony Digital Networks said, "Get your stuff out there any way you
can, youngsters don't even know who you are anymore. Worry about
the business model later." Massive media orgs aren't comfortable
anymore.
