• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, July 7, 2010

Oil, oil everywhere, but what the hell does it mean to the media world? It represents the future, claims In-Stat in a research brief. The video feed from BP of its relentlessly gushing hole in the earth "is now the longest continuous running underwater online video feed in the history of the Internet." I have no idea how that record was determined, but I think the "underwater online video feed" qualifier gives them some cushion there.

We've mentioned here in the past that the BP's Gusher-TV is certainly the video of the year online. It may come closest to being a mass media event that we see in our lifetime in these increasingly fragmented media times. It also has a certain dark poetry to it that communicates our helplessness in a stark way.

Well, that is what I argued last month, at least. And so I was interested in In-Stat's argument, which is quite different. They think the meaning of the BP video lies in the endless ways in which it is being used, personalized and connected to. The video and the story itself has fragmented into countless special report pages on the major media sites and on blogs, and even throughout the BP video. The story has infinite angles and people never seem to tire of commenting on it and raising a host of new concerns. In other words, the story of the spill, embodied by the proliferation of the relentless video itself, is spreading in as many unpredictable directions as the Gulf oil slick itself.

"It's created an ad hoc universe of connected links, counter-links, and embedded links that present an excellent model of how media in the future is going to operate," says In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold in the brief.

The BP video is a kind of catalyst or a launch pad for news consumers and news publishers taking the story as their own. Experiencing the news has now become more a matter of assembling and participating in a web of interconnections across blogs, media sites, social networks, personal emails, TV and radio. We are already seeing apps and personalized feeds being used to customize our access to news. In-Stat analysts argue that eventually the straightforward electronic programming guides will be replaced by Content and Service Discovery Guides. "Recommendation engines from companies like ROVI or The Filter will automatically try to match interesting content and up-sell services to any piece of content that consumers find of interest," In-Stat says.

In other words, the BPO leak foreshadows the future in more ways than one. Get used to relentless gushers (of content) you will have to pay for.