Is the television industry's glass half empty or half full?

The current state of the television industry can be compared to the idiom, “Is the glass half empty or half full? The pessimistic view is that the end is nigh and television is on a steady decline with internet technology as its biggest threat. But there are many who take the optimistic “glass half full” approach and are looking for opportunities for television online.

Television’s once unassailable mass media dominance has been significantly reduced in recent years as networks have been squeezed by falling rates and the fragmentation their once loyal audiences.

Viewers can now choose between a growing number of digital channels, subscription TV and internet downloads of their favourite programs. They can skip the ads using personal video recorders like FoxtelIQ and TiVo, or once gain by downloading the programs.

And that’s not to mention the multitude of other devices competing for viewers attention, especially as new generations are being raised glued to mobile devices and 2 minute videos on YouTube.

The sun has set on television’s glory years and many in the industry lament its steady demise. These are dire times.

Or are they?

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Australia needs to join the high speed broadband revolution

As usual, the current Australian government has done a poor job at explaining the benefits of one of their major initiatives and as a consequence it is being largely ignored and risks being totally abandoned if they lose power. I’m talking about the National Broadband Network.

Unfortunately, the cost of the Australian government’s planned $43 billion National Broadband Network has become the issue rather than the benefits of high speed broadband for the country. The Opposition has focused on the cost, perhaps with good reason, and claim that the project is a White Elephant, yet they haven’t offered any viable alternatives.

Meanwhile the Government has failed to sell the real benefits of the NBN to the public and potentially negate the argument against.

I’m no infrastructure expert and I don’t pretend to know the best way to deliver high speed broadband to the nation but I do believe we as a country must have a high speed broadband network as soon as possible.

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Are we heading towards total media convergence?

I was showing someone through the new Wired Magazine iPad application yesterday and while she was marveling at the animations, video, audio and general interactivity she made the comment, “Its not really a magazine anymore.”

And in a way she’s right. It seems that with increasing broadband speeds and new media delivery devices such as smart phones and tablet computers that host an array of apps, we are heading towards total media convergence.

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Start me up

I have become increasingly fascinated by technology start-ups and the business of launching an online business. With this post I am looking to start an occasional dialogue on the trials and tribulations of starting a new business in the digital economy. We’ll see how it evolves.

In early April 2009, five Australian guys met in a funky bar in San Francisco to compare notes on their respective business ideas. There were three different technology start-ups involved in the conversation, all excellent ideas with bucket-loads of potential, and all three have taken very different paths to realization.

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The last five years has seen traditional media, especially the press, suffering a steady and painful decline. One by one, media business models have been dismantled as the booming digital world has exploded.

In the 90′s it was presumed that the Internet economy would be very similar to the traditional business world and that the existing empires would be able to easily transition online and maintain their dominant place in the world.

Then it was assumed that maybe a new generation of Goliaths would arrive to take over or sit alongside the old players. To some extent that was true as Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Amazon and others grew and grew.

But the reality has been that the old media titans aren’t being toppled by one or two major new players, its more a death by a thousand (or probably a million cuts). Major news and entertainment sources have been replaced for many consumers by and endless array of blogs, microsites and alternative online service providers. Tiny niche content providers are able to provide deeper, more specialist information into anything imaginable and the old media models have no hope of competing.

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NLYZR website analysis tool

I’m very proud to announce that the latest, fully-automated version of our NLYZR website analysis tool is now live.

The team at Sticky launched the original NLYZR 12 months ago and in the ensuing year we tested and reported on over 3000 websites from around the world. Using that experience, we have been able to fine tune and improve our NLYZR reporting to the stage that the Free Web NLYZR is now a fully-fledged web application.

Free Web NLYZR provides a detailed report in around 30 seconds. The report is more SEO focussed than the previous version, covering your site’s on and off site optimisation plus factoring in your results for a nominated keyword search. Basically it tells you how well optimised your website is.

The Free Web NLYZR is just one part of our overall NLYZR Suite. Clients use the full range of tools to receive detailed website reporting and advice such as:

• Keyword selection and ratings

• On-site analysis and recommendations

• Off-site analysis and recommendations

• Rank reporting

• Competitor analysis

We use these tools to assist clients to significantly improve their search rankings, build website traffic and convert traffic into sales, leads and inquiries.

Please feel free to use NLYZR to test your site any time and if you have any questions or feedback we’d love to hear it. The more sites we test, the more feedback we gain, the better the system becomes.

Is now the time for new kind of communications business that connects marketing specialists with corporate marketers?

Its been obvious for a while now that the generalist media era is coming to an end. No longer do a handful of large media outlets determine our news and entertainment the way they did during the last century. Increasingly we are turning to a multitude of specialist media providers to satisfy our many needs. Media consumption is splintering so rapidly that it’s difficult to keep track of the vast array of options available to us.

Marketing "connectors" assemble teams of specialists

One hangover from the generalist media era is the full-service agency. Whilst “everything under one roof” may have been feasible when there were only a handful of media options, in 2010, with a ridiculous number of feasible marketing options available….Free to Air TV, Subscription TV, Radio, Digital radio, Press, online press, outdoor, SEO, SEM, social media, inbound marketing, micro sites etc…. its seems ludicrous to believe that one shop can do it all.

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Marketers must start thinking about apps

The mobile phone apps market is booming and is expected to go into overdrive when Apple’s new iPad device launches next month. For most corporate marketers apps are probably nothing more than a curiosity or a convenience if they have app-friendly devices.

But maybe businesses should start thinking about apps a little more strategically as part of their internet marketing strategy.

Research firm Gartner expects that cellphones will be the most common device used for browsing the web by 2013. They predict the number of browser-equipped phones to exceed 1.83 billion, compared to 1.78 billion old fashioned computers in use within 3 years.

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I can’t help but wonder if News Limited totally miss the point regarding the new digital world or are just spectacularly successful trolls.

Rupert Murdoch, who spent a fortune investing in the like of MySpace only to see it drop away, continually threatens to remove his news content from search engine indexing and seems set on constructing paywalls to access his content.

In Australia, the News Limited marketing boss Joe Talcott toes the company line by unleashing regular diatribes about online measurement. His latest came last week when he attacked research showing that time spent online has outstripped that spent consuming traditional media.

The internet is not a medium, it’s a place where people do stuff. There’s media on the internet, no question. No one sits down to `watch the internet’.

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Apps are another important media touch-point

We recently announced (rather excitedly) that our Inbound Marketing site GetSticky was now available as an iPhone app. A week later I was happy to inform you that MediaHunter had also become available through the iTunes Store as an app.

So what you ask? Good question.

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