The Perfect Storm: 2006 Media & Entertainment Year in Review
Third, the networks can use information gathered about viewers to do their own demographic and viewership profiles, rather than relying solely on more expensive and less accurate offline rating profiles.
Fourth, casual consumers are responding positively to the availability of content, in a way that appears to be converting casual viewers into avid viewers. Perhaps this is due to time- and place-shifting that allows a viewer to eavesdrop on a series that an office colleague raves about, or perhaps it’s just that the networks are putting their best foot forward by only making their best series available on the web. Either way, the trend continues to grow.
The advent of Microsoft’s Zune, which is geared toward video and movie playback and adds the ability to share content wirelessly with other Zune users, was further validation that Apple’s iPod Video and iTunes online store were on the right path. Microsoft has gone so far as to provide royalties up front to one of the media conglomerates—Universal—in a nod to the power of digital media distribution and its potential negative impact on the traditional media distribution model.
In conclusion, 2006 has been a watershed in terms of the web’s growth as a consistent video delivery medium. From consumer-generated content to big media’s tentative but determined embrace of the web as a delivery medium, streaming media is here to stay. And while U.S. broadband deployment continues to lag behind many other first-world countries, the continued technical advancements and the consumer’s insatiable appetite for creating and consuming content combined in 2006 to show a glimpse of the path forward for streaming and rich media.
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