• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 16, 2009

That's a catchphrase coined by Nielsen chief Susan Whiting to help refocus her company around the notion that the business of television isn't just television, anymore. It has become video content in all the forms that it can manifest, and all the places, times, and consumer and business experiences and expectations that are reshaping our industry's most dynamic storytelling and product-selling medium.

Or as Werner Wolf, the local New York sports commentator used to say on WCBS, "It's time to go to the video." Maybe he still does. I don't know, because I don't watch much "television" anymore. Increasingly, I'm going to the video instead.

So what's the real difference? Fundamentally, everything. For one thing, television is a powerful cultural reference point (it's still that), while video is a content format. Television shapes the way we think. Video is shaping the way we think of television.

Like Susan Whiting, Steve Fredericks also got it right. A couple of years ago, Fredericks, the former head of media tracking firm TNS Media Intelligence published a book, which had a cornball name ("StrAdvertising"), but a powerful insight. In it, Fredericks said we were shifting from a society (and an industry) of media platforms (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, etc.) to one of media formats (text, audio, video, etc.). The driver, he said, was digital media, which effectively untethers content from its platform, and makes it maleable for the user to consume where, when, and most importantly, how they want.

The Kindle is a good example. Some people think it is simply digitized "print." It's not. Not anymore than an iPod is digitized audio. An iPod can also show video, make phone calls, browse the Web, of transform itself into any widget anyone can imagine and program. The same is true of a Kindle, which can transcribe the printed word into the audio kind, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it reproduce the video kind soon. All that's true of any digital media device, whose only limitations are the quality of their audio, video, or other output, and the expectations of their users.

So if you ask me, the TV set isn't a TV set anymore either. It's just an audio/video digital media output device. Society just hasn't caught up with that fact yet. Nielsen's Whiting certainly has. On Monday, just days after the U.S. TV industry converted from analog to digital broadcasting, Nielsen announced a new deal with digital "watermarking" developer Digimarc to create new businesses that will help manage both the content and commerce of video -- on the tube, over the Web, and on the mobile hand-held device. And somewhere, I imagine, the late Arthur C. Nielsen is looking down on Whiting and smiling.

So I will tell you honestly that I have no idea where this video thing is going. But I can tell you with great confidence that it surely will be going. And that whatever we do, we'd better make sure we follow it.