There is No New Media: It?s All New Consumption

By Om Malik | gigaom.com

So, now television broadcasters are blocking Google TV from getting access to the content they're putting online. They want to make sure they don't lose their advertising dollars. News flash: The cat is out of the bag. All information (including your precious television shows) are nothing more than bits on one network to rule them all - the Internet.

The knee-jerk response from the television industry and media to services like Google,Apple, Amazon and Netflix is a typical reaction from institutions of the past century, and a result of limited and short-term thinking. Unfortunately, the broadcast industry aren't the only ones.

Every so often, you hear executives bemoaning the demise of the newspaper business, the declining fortunes of radio networks and the crumbling of the television industry. There's talk of the music industry being at the point of no return, and one could probably add Madison Avenue to this gloomy outlook.

When I look at these industries and the failure - or impending failure - of these institutions, I see a fundamental mistake on their part to understand their own core businesses. They fail to see the world in a larger context, and instead, choose to focus on maintaining the status quo. If they took their cue from Apple (everywhere computing) or Amazon (any content anywhere), they could have found answers to their problems.

The trouble with print media (newspapers in particular) is it has never forced itself to look into the future, even though its employees were amongst the chroniclers of the future. Newspaper executives never really focused on the reality that as the Internet became pervasive, the idea of a daily newspaper was going to become the subset of an information business -- part of an amorphous goo we call MEDIA. From Facebook to Google to Twitterto blogs, we are all part of a bigger "information" business.

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