Don’t miss Jack Shafer’s follow-up to previous pieces about Michael Crichton’s 1993 predictions of the demise of mass media. It’s a worthwhile read:

As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.

Crichton’s 1993 prophecies shocked the media world at the time, and he was certainly off by several years. Nevertheless, I agree with Shafter that it’s “advantage Crichton” at this point.

The “mass” is the problem, because the ability to communicate on a large scale has been separated from the “special” application formerly required, as former FCC Chairman Michael Powell so brilliantly observed in a 2004 Silicon Valley discussion.

Now to be a phone company, you don’t have to weave tightly the voice service into the infrastructure. You can ride it on top of the infrastructure. So if you’re a Vonage, you own no infrastructure. You own no trucks. You roll to no one’s house. They turn voice into a application and shoot it across one of these platforms. And, suddenly, you’re in your business.

And that’s why if you’re the music industry, you’re scared. And if you’re the television studio, movie industry, you’re scared. And if you’re an incumbent infrastructure carrier, you’d better be scared. Because this application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and will change things forever. . . . I have no problem if a big and venerable company no longer exists tomorrow, as long as that value is transferred somewhere else in the economy.

Powell was referring to the telephone business, but the paradigm shift about which he spoke applies to every form of communications today. Couple that with the rise of personal media and you have Crichton’s disappearing mass.

This is why it’s so important for all local media companies to understand what business we’re in. We’re not newspapers, television stations and radio stations; we’re all in the information and entertainment business. If we approach tomorrow “only” as a TV station, for example, we’re living in the problem of disappearing mass and, therefore, completely missing the possibilities.

A new web application called Flowww (warning slow loading) is out that’s generating discussion in the tech world, and I think it may have possibilities for media companies in the future. The developers are going to have to do a lot of work before it gets my full endorsement, but the nut of a really good idea is there.

Flowww takes the browser view of a page of content, turns it into a Flash image, and makes those images available in a simple click-and-flow experience. If you want more, clicking on a page image takes you directly to the page. Think of it as an RSS feed that looks at the actual pages of the feed instead of just a headline or headline and text. The beauty of it is that the ads come with the browser view, and that’s what intrigues me most. You have to use your imagination, but think of a page specifically designed to be distributed this way. Nice.

TechCrunch has an excellent write-up, and the comments are interesting, too. They’ve even created an example of what their site would like like presented this way.

I’ve been preaching unbundled media for a very long time, but the resistance has always been the loss of control over ad revenues. RSS advertising companies like Pheedo have helped with this some, but not enough to make it universally acceptable to distribute content in this manner. Flowww has the potential to change that.

As I said above, the developers have a lot of work to do before this can become viable, not the least of which is to fix the slow load time. Assuming they’re successful, this might be something to watch.

The unveiling of Google’s new “Friend Connect” program this week is very big news that must not be overlooked by local media companies as we work to become more web-centric. Friend Connect is the latest from Google’s “Open Social” project, which is designed to allow users to aggregate and take with them various important aspects of social networking sites. The logic is simple (and typical Google): the walled-garden approach to the Web is archaic. What’s needed is portability.

So as MySpace and Facebook duke it out to see who can gather the most users, Google says “let’s make it possible for people to take social elements with them wherever they go (if they wish).” To Google, the Web is the platform. To Facebook, for example, Facebook is the platform. This, Google argues, is limiting, so the Open Social project is a natural extension of the Google model.

Open Social treats elements of social networking like widgets (Google’s term is “gadgets”) that can be moved anywhere. Software developers can use the “open” aspects of the project to create gadgets that can be used by anyone on any site anywhere. Friend Connect makes this possible, and local media sites need to jump in as soon as we can. Google is moving slowly with the project, they say, so they can study potential privacy ramifications, among other things.

Google provides the code, which can be embedded anywhere on your pages via iFrames (code that displays, essentially, a site within a site). When completed, users are able to interact with your content socially by inviting others within their established social networks into your site, ranking stories, sharing comments, and meeting new friends. Publishers who use Friend Connect don’t have access to the data involved, but that shouldn’t stop people from using it. In its introductory materials, Google concludes by saying “Everyone wins in a friend connected web:

• You, the site owner - Google Friend Connect gives you a snippet of code that, when put into your site, will equip the site with social features, including the ability to run third-party social applications. Moreover, it enables your visitors to log in with existing credentials, see who among their friends is already registered at that site. It also gives them one-click access to invite friends from their existing friends lists on other sites, such as Facebook or orkut.
• Your site’s visitors - Visitors no longer need to create a new account or develop yet another friends list just to use the social applications on your site. We create the infrastructure that allows one login to be used across multiple sites and the ability to reuse existing friend relationships that the visitor has already established elsewhere.
• OpenSocial developers - With Google Friend Connect, any website on the web can become an OpenSocial container. Their social applications can now run on social networking sites and anywhere else on the web that uses Google Friend Connect. By placing these applications on sites where users already visit, these application will be seen and used by more users more often.
• Social networks - With Google Friend Connect, social networks thrive as hubs of activity while giving their users more opportunities to bring their friend relationships to other websites while simultaneously bringing their friends and activities from outside the social network back in — with people having the ability to publish their activities across the web into the activity streams of their social networks.

However, not all observers are impressed. Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web thinks the Google initiative simply buries social connections in a “dark little box” and dismisses privacy concerns along the way.

Google could have worked with other large companies and with the creators of these standards (some are in the Data Portability Working Group that Google joined, for example) to tackle the hard questions around data exposure, integration and privacy. Instead they are pushing their Open Social standard around in an iframe. Easy is very good, but co-operation could have come up with something better than this.

Kirkpatrick and others are also noting that the service isn’t widely available yet and that Google is limiting access in order to let others help them build it.

Still, it’s hard to argue with the essence of what’s taking place here, and Google’s involvement will accelerate the work of others in developing social portability. MySpace (Data Availability) and Facebook (Connect) are both trying to accomplish similar goals, but both want to be THE platform leading the charge. Google (again) takes a bigger view and says the Web itself is the platform, describing Friend Connect as a form of “social plumbing” for the Web.

And the message to media companies is clear: we need to be in this space in ways beyond providing simple content widgets that can be swapped and shared. We need to be developing gadgets under the Open Social standards, so that we can participate even beyond just bringing “social” to our sites.

After all, “social” is still largely “local,” and that means opportunities beyond that which the big platforms currently provide.

Sarah Perez has a great post over at Read Write Web that is a must-read for the serious student of New Media. Called “The Conversation Has Left The Blogosphere,” it takes a serious look at how new applications are making it possible for people to discuss issues, ideas and memes taken up by bloggers away from the blogs themselves. Oh no! You mean the original conversation lifters are having their conversations lifted? What’s the world coming to?

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren’t on found on the blog itself.

It is ironic, to say the least, that the blogosphere — the place where stories were lifted from the mainstream press for “discussion” — is now faced with the same issue that mainstreamers have been fighting for years.

Sarah’s post offers tips on how to keep up with all the dismantling, but it doesn’t offer solutions for ways to prevent it from happening. That’s because bloggers can’t stop it any more than the mainstream press could or can. We live in a world of unbundled media. Deal with it.

This will be interesting to watch.

I’m getting ready for a series of meetings, but I wanted to make a brief comment about news today that Google has launched a new “local news” application for its Google News page. This is pretty huge, folks, and it spotlights the need for everybody in the local news business to adopt best practices when it comes to unbundled distribution. Your content won’t show up in Google’s local news application (initiated by simply entering a zip code) unless it is available in unbundled form.

Let’s repeat an old theme. Your portal website doesn’t matter anymore, because people are hanging out where they want to hang out and expecting us to bring our products and services to them.

(This was first published this week in our Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

Scanning the headlines of media trades reveals a blur of stories about this company or that one positioning itself for betterment within the world of the Web. This “positioning” comes at the expense of others who are also bumping elbows within the glut of new ventures, each screaming for the attention of the Holy Grail: audience.

NBCU wants to set the prices for downloads of its programs, so the network pulled the plug on its relationship with Apple’s iTunes, where a recalcitrant Steve Jobs wants to keep the price at $1.99. NBC and Fox have launched Hulu, a really nice site for streams, etc., with the not-so-small exception of severe restrictions on how those downloads can be used (only by you) and how long they’re available (five weeks).

Meanwhile, the RIAA is running out of gas in its efforts to sue its customers, and Mark Cuban is doing his best to stop pirates from stealing videos. There are arguments about user-generated content, and the New York Times editor is continuing to do his best to separate the professional from the amateur in terms of journalism.

Lawsuits here and there, take down notices for YouTube, Comedy Central loading a complete archive of “The Daily Show,” and on and on we talk about how this new medium can serve us and our business needs.

And then comes a headline like this:

Nokia Predicts 25% of Entertainment by 2012 Will be Created and Consumed Within Peer Communities.

Okay. Think about this for a minute. While we’re fighting for our rights and our business models, people are playing with media tools that used to be the sole purview of the professionals. And what are they doing? Entertaining themselves and each other. And Nokia thinks this will grow to one-fourth of entertainment in five years’ time. And get this: these don’t give a ripple chip about the things mentioned above that are attracting all of our attention today.

Eyeballs are not an infinite resource, so the problem is how will value be sustained in a world where 25% of entertainment is home made?

“From our research we predict that up to a quarter of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what we call ‘Circular’. The trends we are seeing show us that people will have a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media,” said Mark Selby, Vice President, Multimedia, Nokia.

You see, folks, the rise of personal media — fueled by fluid outside pureplay companies — is the real threat to traditional media, not applications that steal copyrighted material or otherwise interfere with the way things used to be. We’d better get onboard this “revolution,” or we risk real irrelevance downstream.

Gordon Borrell says it best, “The deer now have guns. What do you do when the deer have guns? Get into the ammunition business.”

Ask yourself this: What am I doing to make sure that I have a place at the table in the rise of personal media?

So I was wandering through espn.com this morning and thinking about a post on the NFL game tonight and how most of the country won’t see it. I thought of embedding an ESPN video in the post, which caused me to pause and think about how many companies are catching onto the whole unbundled media thing. But then, I got sidetracked by an eTicket piece on Bo Jackson, only to find that this lenghty, magazine-style piece contained — are you ready? — an embedded YouTube video. That’s right.

And then I thought, “We really have come a long way.”

New York Times writer Brad Stone rightly set the stage with his summary of hulu.com’s private beta launch today:

Since March, when the broadcasters announced their joint effort to bring free, ad-supported television shows to the Web, critics have pounced, predicting the venture would be doomed by diverging agendas, technical challenges and an all-powerful enemy: YouTube.

Skeptical bloggers even slapped Hulu with a derisive moniker: “Clown Co.”

Now the defense is ready to present its case.

As any viewer of “Law and Order” will tell you, the defense is often not about guilt or innocence, but about the presentation of reasonable doubt. That’s what hulu has done with its highly-controlled press presentations on this, the launch of its private beta.

The NYT header says it best: “Hulu Readies Its Online TV, Dodging the Insults.” Over at TechCrunch, one of the site’s biggest pre-launch critics, the headline is just the way hulu wants it: “Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions.”

Since I’ve been one of those critics — not of the presentation but of the strategy — I’ll admit that I’m naturally going to be skeptical of what I’m reading. Launching in private beta means you invite some people in to kick the tires. I’ve found nothing yet today from any such person, which means all of this positive coverage is coming from the information and screen grabs that hulu is feeding them. That said, everything looks very nice on the surface. The videos look well-organized. The player is portable, and they’re touting the ability of users to clip programs and embed those clips elsewhere. These are textbook unbundled media tactics, and they should help spread the monetized videos across the Web.

(You can view hulu vids via AOL Video. If this is the best they can do, it’s not saying much.)

There are two problems immediately. One, the videos don’t play anywhere except in the U.S. This is the result of trying to provide an application that lives by all the industry’s rules. Rights, you know. Secondly, the television shows that are offered stay online only five weeks. So think about this for a minute. Why would anybody embed a hulu clip if it couldn’t be seen in other countries and would disappear after five weeks?

The idea of a portal for “legal” videos is a good one, but 1.) all content creators must play in the same space, and 2.) the reach must parallel that of the Web itself. Hulu may work these things out eventually, but right now, those are big concerns.

Moreover, hulu further erodes the already damaged network-affiliate arrangement by making first-run show videos available after midnight, Hawaii time (nice).

In the Times article, NBCU head Jeff Zucker goes out of his way to position hulu as an entity separate from NBCU, and this will either be its greatest strength or its biggest weakness:

“At a minimum it’s another way for us to offer our content to users and get paid for it,” Mr. Zucker said. “If the site itself does well, that will be gravy on top of it.”

This distancing himself from hulu is interesting, because it was Zucker who made the original announcements and led the original cheerleading. So now hulu is just another company that’s distributing content created by NBCU, which means if it crashes and burns, it was THEIR fault. Nice.

But this isn’t what we get from NewsCorp president Peter Churnin, who takes credit for the idea in the Times article and is a bit defensive about the criticism. “I think there’s a snarky desire to say this is big dumb media and this is a big dumb joint venture,” he said, adding that he thought of the idea as a way to distribute Fox programming. So is it a joint venture or a stand-alone company?

I guess it’s both, but the question is important in judging its viability from here. If it’s a stand alone business, will it be able to sustain itself without more investment money when the costs go up? That’s a fairly significant issue. If it’s a joint venture, then NBC and NewsCorp will foot the bills, and then it becomes just bad strategy and a drain on resources.

There is one distribution partner in this that really intrigues me, and that is MySpace. If hulu is to succeed, it would help to be THE application that exposes this content to people who don’t already watch it, and that basically is the definition of MySpace’s core demos.

Stay tuned.

Texasism: “Dumber than a bucket of hair!”

NBC Universal continues to make absolutely boneheaded moves in its effort to insist that scarcity will work online. Hulu.com apparently launches in private beta next week (”private beta,” for the uneducated, is short for “help us fix mistakes before we let everybody see how incredibly stupid we are” and not to be confused with the public beta launch strategy made popular by Google, who doesn’t really give a crap about being perfect before letting people play with the goodies), and to properly tee it up as a web “destination,” NBC pulled its YouTube channel. After all, if you want the teeming masses to march willy-nilly into your trap, you can’t support alternatives, or so the thinking goes.

Seth Freilich at Pajiba (one of my favorite sites) nails it:

While they may not have seen any direct revenue from the YouTube channel, what about the tons of free advertising they got? I mean, I’ve used NBC clips in various round-ups on countless occasions, essentially giving “The Office” or “Scrubs” or “30 Rock” free prime advertising real estate. I posit that something like the “Dick in a Box” or “Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia” phenomena wouldn’t have happened on some proprietary NBC site, and much like its decision to separate from iTunes, I think NBC is being incredibly short-sighted.

Not satisfied with the marketing given to them by people like Seth (and they are legion), NBCU wants more “found money” for its “content.”

The gamble NBC is making is significant. Will people, who are quite happy with their YouTube, thank you very much, go elsewhere to view clips — with ads — that they can record and share with their friends for free?

CBS continues to impress, meanwhile, by striking deal after deal with any site or system that wants to serve their content to an audience that CBS cannot get on its own. This is the right strategy in a distributed media world, and one that both NBCU and Viacom would do well to emulate.

CBS boss Les Moonves told PaidContent.org in Cannes (Rafat must have a big budget) that their arrangement with iTunes has been good for CBS.

“We enjoy our relationship with them–we find that it is found money for us. We are getting paid a decent amount of money for everything. Weeds does extremely well because Weeds is only in 13 million households in the United States - therefore there are a lot of people who get that show only through iTunes because they don’t necessarily get Showtime. Do we have questions about the price point with iTunes? Absolutely. (But) we feel iTunes is very good … promotional vehicle for CBS products” We do not quite feel the same way as NBC does and we plan on continuing that relationship with iTunes and we’re very happy with it.”

I think CBS has generally been on the right path in acknowledging the distributed nature of media, and this statement by Moonves is an example of right-thinking, IMO.

I had barely pushed “publish” on my last entry when Apple decided it wouldn’t wait until the NBCU contract expired in December and announced that NBC’s fall line-up wouldn’t be available via iTunes. According to Marketwatch, Apple will also drop other NBCU programming.

According to a statement from the company, NBC refused to renew its agreement with iTunes after Apple balked at paying fees that it said would more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode.

Apple said NBC’s demands would have raised the price of NBC shows to $4.99 an episode from the current $1.99 price tag.

“We would not agree to their dramatic price increase,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes, in a statement. “We hope they will change their minds.”

A spokesman for NBCU denied that they had asked for double the wholesale price, adding, “Our negotiations were centered on our request for flexibility in wholesale pricing, including the ability to package shows together in ways that could make our content even more attractive for consumers.”

Sorry, I don’t buy that. Nobody from Hollywood does ANYTHING that makes things “more attractive for consumers.” It’s all about money, and Apple — the folks who invented this source of revenue for everybody in the first place — is trying to help you and I by keeping prices low.

I find most interesting in this article from Marketwatch the comments of James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research.

“What they’re going to have to realize,” McQuivey said, “is that out of all the dozens of shows available out there, most people only want the four or five most popular shows. And if those aren’t there, those consumers are just going to walk away.”

This is conventional thinking, but it’s also the kind of stuff that got traditional media in trouble in the first place. Let me repeat what I said in my previous entry. Losing this content hurts NBCU much more than it will hurt Apple. Let’s watch and see what happens.

Here’s one that bears watching. NBC Universal has told Apple that it’s not going to renew its contract with them to provide programs via iTunes. According to the New York Times, NBCU wants to do things with its programs — such as bundling — in order to increase revenue. Apple’s model is one of simple, straightforward pricing, $1.99 per episode, $9.99 per movie. Rafat Ali at PaidContent summarizes:

NBC was in early on iTunes’ video offering, and now accounts for about 40 percent of downloads…The current two-year deal extends through December, so the 1,500 hours of NBCU programs will remain available on iTunes at least until then.

…This also comes as NBCU-Fox video joint venture Hulu is about to get off the ground, where NBC will be putting most of its shows for free streaming and distribution.

This could be just rhetoric in negotiations (after all, the NYT story is based on “a source close to the negotiations,” which is mediaspeak for someone who stands to benefit from releasing the information), but I think there’s an important element to note.

If NBCU’s content accounts for 40% of downloads, they are making the assumption that it is their content that drives those downloads. They no doubt use that number amongst themselves for high-fives and encouragement that content is still scalable via the Web. Why else even think of playing chicken with iTunes? The assumption is that “the people” so love our content that they’ll come where WE want them to come in order to get it. It’s the same logic that drove Viacom’s decision to sue rather than work with YouTube.

Apple, on the other hand, would argue that it is the presence of the content on iTunes that drives the downloads, that people download their products, because, as an aggregator, iTunes makes it easy for people to find them and download them.

So who is right? On this question rests much, and it’s the stickiest of all wickets for traditional media, because the business model of Media 1.0 doesn’t play well in an age of distributed media.

The gamble NBCU is making is that they can still make business decisions with their content that don’t include their customers. While I do believe that serious “Office” fans will go where they have to go to get their downloads, forcing everybody to do this is ultimately a fool’s folly, for most people will opt for the path of least resistance.

“Let’s see, Office isn’t here anymore, so what else do they have?” It is a critical mistake to assume that iTunes downloads will go down by 40% simply because NBCU decides not to play. Every other content creator that does business with iTunes is hoping NBC will go away, and this is the essential problem. NBCU may be able to increase its revenue, but eyeballs that go away are eyeballs that aren’t coming back.

If NBC were to leave, it would also hurt iTunes, because its ability to aggregate and present everybody’s content is its value proposition. So it’s not an easy matter for Apple either.

In the end, though — and as has been evidenced so many times in recent years — it is foolish to mess with empowered consumers. Who negotiates for them?

A lot of people ask me about how you do ads in feeds, and I think Facebook does it well. The bullhorn icon (nice metaphor) announces it’s an ad, and I’m free to skip it if I want. The creative challenge is to get my attention up front, which TBS does rather nicely here.

In the world of big-time unbundled, distributed media, the new middleman is the aggregator. Anybody who’s a regular reader here knows why that’s the case.

This is why today’s news about Universal Music Group’s decision not to renew a long-term contract with Apple’s iTunes is so important. As I wrote last week about the iPhone, Apple is making a play to position iTunes as THE aggregator of all professional content, a distribution point for everybody’s unbundled content. This includes both television and music.

Universal’s decision doesn’t mean they won’t keep distributing content there. Moving to a month-to-month position, however, opens the door for agreements with other distributor/aggregators — a world that is both fluid and evolving.

In the end, I think, you’ll see fewer and fewer exclusive deals, so that customer service and choice will be the proper end game for the makers of unbundled content.

iTunes is a fabulous application, and perhaps there’s a sense that it’s getting too big and too powerful. In the iPhone story, I wrote that Apple is predisposed to avoid direct downloads of music via cellphones, which is why you can’t do it (yet) with an iPhone. The market will decide whether that’s a smart position for Apple (it isn’t), a company that’s accustomed to providing people with what they want.

The ultimate winner in the aggregator game is going to be the one that allows media companies to monetize their own distributed content instead of trying to take that role for themselves. The aggregator will make money by providing ads either around the distributed content instead of the content itself or in the search process itself.

We’ll see who gets there first.

From Reuters comes word that Warner Music is putting its library of music videos online with advertising attached. This is textbook unbundling and a terribly smart move by the company. Now if we could just get TV stations to see the value of doing the same…

Shelly Palmer offers a powerful argument that the DRM lessening that we’re hearing about in the music industry won’t impact video in the same way, at least not in the short term. His reason centers around the difference between how music files and video files are used, the former having just one value chain and the latter offering many. There’s a lot of concern from the video business (from Hollywood to New York) that it will follow the music industry down the slippery slope of south-bound profits, and Shelly brilliantly suggests that this is not the case.

I like Shelly, and he’s generally spot-on with his analysis. This one is no exception, and I have just one little disagreement.

His reasoning includes the argument that video files are far bigger than audio files, and this is one of the reasons we (those of us in the video business) shouldn’t be concerned. That’s true, especially for full-length movie consumption. But in the world of clips and portions of clips, it isn’t the case. Besides, the illegal use of copyrighted videos lives in the world of FTP (file transfer protocol) and P2P networks, where size doesn’t matter nearly as much as emailing or other forms of sharing.

I’m one of those people who believes we need to pay attention to the music business, but not so much as a downer but as to what’s happening on its long tail. This is the new value chain of music consumption, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t be the same with video.

You have sent a clear message that you are taking on your customers by this new set of rules for online media coverage, and it’s a foolish and dangerous proposition. You’ll argue, of course, that this is about media companies profiting from that which belongs to you and not about your customers, but that’s not the case. You are limiting the choice of fans, and that’s a big problem for you.

Here’s why. The assumption you’re making is that if anybody wants access to your world, they must come through you. This is contrary to the cultural disruption that’s underway, and I think you’re underestimating it. If you really want an unbundled strategy, then make all plays available a la carte with an embeddable player. I mean, who gives a crap about whether somebody runs 45-seconds or 45-minutes of “your” content, as long as it comes from you and contains your marketing?

Moreover, a second assumption is that if media companies want access to your fans, they’ll also have to come through you. This is probably the bigger of the two assumptions, because you believe that limiting access to eyeballs has value. This is called scarcity economics, and it just doesn’t work online.

For one, your copyright, like everyone’s, is subject to the rules of fair use, and you will have to defend that some day and lose. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it has already been proven that your fans participate in fantasy leagues that are not of your making. Are you going to tell your fans that they can’t use “your” players, names and images in playing fantasy football?

I suppose you might.

The upfront is underway and this is announcement week. Nothing really surprising so far — a lot of stuff about multimedia advertising. But this caught my eye. It’s from a Media Daily News article on ABC’s delivery of “HD quality” video through its streaming player.

It represents another signal that ABC no longer views television as content sent in a linear pattern through a living-room screen. For advertisers, the initiative and new player will allow for geo-targeting of ads (emphasis mine). Creative can be localized and targeted to individual users.

If a television network can geo-target ads, they are actually competing in the local media space.

Ouch! That hurts.

I know this makes me sound like I have multiple personalities (because I emphasize Media 2.0), but when we present our Simulpath™ strategy to clients, we note that path one (brand extension) success is best achieved through an aggressive unbundling strategy. There’s a great article in today’s Wall St. Journal (free) that compares the CBS unbundling strategy to that of the other networks, each of which hopes to find success in constructing super video portals.

I wrote about this two years ago, and it continues to be a viable strategy. Jeff Jarvis calls this statement by Quincy Smith, head of CBS interactive, the “smartest media quote of the year:”

“We can’t expect consumers to come to us. It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.”

This is textbook unbundling thought, and I want to add my kudos to Jeff’s.