What's next for the content jungle?

Douglas Rushkoff said in 2001 that “content is just a medium for interaction between people” – relating content consumption to shared experiences. Combine that concept with Rupert Murdoch’s digital immigrants speech of 2005 (people who haven’t grown up with Internet access and mobile phones) and digital natives (who are growing up fast); and it might suggest how content producers and telcos could evolve.

We digital immigrants know the water-cooler moment where we discuss the latest episode (or last in this case) of Life On Mars. This pattern is typical of the lean-back audience – passive content consumers who still buy the Radio Times, watch Life On Mars and talk about it at work the next day. In extreme cases we might call or text a friend to discuss the episode as it finishes. Our diet is composed of linear programmed content from a limited set of sources.

By contrast, lean forward audiences are finding a self-shot video of a man skiing down Angel tube station’s escalators on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFqQOlYE4EE) – which lasts all of 70 seconds – and then creating the water-cooler moment by publishing their comments about the video through any of a myriad of media: blogs, online community websites, Twitter, chat rooms, instant messaging and email. This audience expects to be able to consume content when they want it, from a variety of sources, and online commentaries from peers are becoming a significant part of the content they enjoy. For the benefit of the lean-back audience: today’s newspaper readers are now reading less of the newspaper articles, and spending more time writing their own editorial, as well as reading each others’ editorials.

What does this mean for the content industry? Content producers and distributors have never had it harder; they have to compete with their consumers for audience, and worse, the place they have to compete is the Internet – the biggest medium of all, where content is one search away and crucially, publishing costs start at zero. Traditional content publishers have had to invest large sums into online presences in order to hold their audiences; news agencies have been notable success stories in this sphere, whilst record, film and television companies are the most conspicuous losers. There is one abiding problem with the online outlet for the traditional content producers – the audience is now a step away from them and is loath to pay for content. Indeed most consumers won’t spend anything beyond a monthly flat-rate Internet access fee. This pattern is of course consistent: no-one has ever expected to pay both the author and the publisher of a book, so why would consumers pay for both access to the Internet and the website owners?

These changes to content publishing and consumption have led to some well-publicised purchases as traditional broadcasters have endeavoured to chase their audiences and provide their traditional faire, with at least access to the lean-forward content bolted on. Sky is now no longer just a broadcaster, it is also an access and telephony provider, and through the acquisition of MySpace owns some self-publishing space too; whilst VirginMedia have gone one better on the access front and are offering a quadruple play. I can personally comment on Sky Broadband's teething problems as I've moved from being a happy broadcast customer to a dissatisfied triple-play recipient (still waiting). I should have known better: broadcasting and access are hard, largely unrelated businesses and merging the offerings together is reminiscent of the first converged devices.

Here at Interoute, the future is simpler: the explosion of self-published content moving around on the Internet means we need an ever-bigger backbone network to shift it to our various broadcast/access customers. As an added benefit (for us at least), this content breaks caching models, as the content bandwidth is orders of magnitude greater than ever before, the movement is largely random, forcing TTLs for that content to be zero.

Wither content - we think not, whither the content chain - quite possibly.

If you disagree then join the debate, send us your comments and we’ll post them up.