• by Brian Glicklich , September 19, 2011

The future of media will be defined by a newly unfettered audience access to content, unlike its past, which was defined by control of distribution. This is a paradigmatic change with profound implications for publishers, distributors, creators, and advertisers, as well as everyone who uses media to inform or entertain themselves.

In a distributor model, there has historically been a scarce resource in the form of consumer bandwidth, usually over the air or by cable/satellite. As a result, the key metric was aggregation power, or the ability to develop a commercially viable audience for the primary model available for monetization...advertising and syndication sales.

In the new disintermediated model, audience has unlimited access to content via IP now easily available at the television, and as leading edge content developers add or transition to IP delivered programming, segments of all sizes can be monetized via variable blends of advertising, syndication, and user underwriting. The net effect is the creation of a new content ecosystem that is larger, custom tailored to audience, and ultimately higher value, since audience will create their own programming bundles.

For content creators, the opportunity is living in a world where ever smaller slices of audience can be addressed profitably, even more so than the legacy model. The challenge is finding the content and marketing equation that works as both a business and a creative enterprise.