The Media Revolution - TV is Dying Before Your Eyes and That's a Good Thing

See my prior post on the death of the media and the prosumer. The death of traditional media is approaching as consumers of television are increasingly watching video online. In the past year researchers tracked a seismic shift in the amount of video Americans watched on the World Wide Web,  up 66 percent, according to comScore. Americans watched 10 billion videos in the month of February alone, said the rating service. "The numbers will climb even higher to huge levels in just a few years," said Adriana Waterston of the market research firm Horowitz According to comScore, 72.8 percent of the entire U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in February of 2008 during the same month, 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube, according to comScore. That's 42.6 videos per viewer.

The television industry, defenders of the old distribution scheme, assert that seventy percent of Internet users who watch TV online say it's because they missed the episode on regular TV, according to Horowitz Associates.Perhaps this gives them some comfort - why then all the rush to get to market with their own channels on the World Wide Web? The truth is that as more people learn of the benefits of relying on the internet to obtain their content, there will be a strong shift away from viewing content because you missed something on television. Yet another battle between the media conglomerates of the old and the evolving revolution.

TV meant limited choice and an inability to control when, where, what and how you consumed content. The realization of this shift from tradiational television to free online video changes consumer viewing habits because it offers better alternatives to TV. Even now, a 9-year-old boy in Georgia will turn to YouTube for new episodes of Japan's action anime "Naruto," which are unavailable on U.S. TV. In Indiana, a viewer who canceled her cable TV because she's fed up with multiple commercials can go online at CBS.com to watch "CSI" -- with fewer ads. On CNN.com, viewers can watch virtually every prepared report that now airs on CNN's TV networks.

What is more profound about this shift is that it represents a change in how consumers of content are changing the way they consume. The shift is to shorter more tailored content, the effect of which will being to become more evident as time goes by.