• by Tom Hespos , March 2, 2004

By now, we're all familiar with the concept of timeshifting. We usually use this term to describe the behavior of PVR users when they digitally record programs with the aim of viewing them when it's most convenient for them. At times, I feel as if we concentrate so much on Tivo's commercial-skipping capabilities that we don't look as closely as we should at its ability to take commercial programming out of its time element (time slot) and into one that's more convenient for the viewer (Sunday night, after the kids have gone to bed).

Timeshifting has its own set of repercussions for the media business. For one, how do we measure the viewership of a piece of broadcast content if a significant percentage of households are recording it and saving it for some undetermined future date? Here's another... will the impact of a program's time slot diminish over time as PVR penetration increases? These are all things we should be thinking about. In thinking this through, we have to teach our brains to uncouple the concepts of content and time, as they relate to the success or failure of commercial programming and the advertising that accompanies it.

A similar concept, which I'll call "Placeshifting" is getting ready to emerge in interactive communications. Similarly, we'll need to train our brains to deal with the notion of communications without destinations. That is, content is becoming less of a destination-specific concept. These days, I can publish an idea online using my own personal website and that idea can, with the help of some simple technology, take on a life of its own across multiple destinations.

One of the technologies enabling placeshifting is RSS, which I've discussed in prior columns. Syndication with RSS is simple to set up. More and more content management systems are beginning to incorporate this standard, particularly the content management systems that run blogs. Recently, Yahoo integrated RSS feeds into its My Yahoo product, so that users can customize their own pages with news from sites they like that syndicate with RSS. Thus, I can customize my own page on My Yahoo that pulls in news feeds from various marketing news sites that strike my fancy. All of those content elements are aggregated on one page for me, which can serve as my jumping-off point for my daily surf through the trades.

On this My Yahoo page, I see headlines and short article summaries. Only after I read the headline and summary and am still interested in reading the details of the story do I actually click on a link to be taken to the original destination site that originated the content.

My Yahoo is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the only application that can aggregate RSS feeds. There are such things as standalone RSS readers. There are other aggregators as well, such as the Feedster search engine. Heck, even Microsoft is planning to include an RSS reader in Outlook.

Another technology that contributes to placeshifting is Trackback. Trackback is a concept fairly well-known to bloggers, and it involves informing the original poster of an idea that another content site has posted its own take on the idea. In this way, ideas can exist across multiple destination sites. For instance, if I decide to publish "A buyer's guide to red rubber balls" on my weblog at Hespos.com, and fellow blogger Rick Bruner sees my post and decides to add a few details I might have left out on his blog, Rick can use Trackback to ping my site to let me know that he has expanded on my original post. This appears as a link on my blog to Rick's.

One question you might have after reading about RSS and Trackback is, "Who gets the ad revenue?"

That's precisely why web publishers need to alter their strategies for monetizing their content a bit. This is no longer a game of driving traffic to web destinations. This is a game of getting the right content to the right people through a number of interactive channels and figuring out a way to monetize those channels.

Sure, we could add advertising to RSS feeds, and hope that enough users click through on article summaries often enough to pay for the content. But that would be ignoring the fact that placeshifting bodes well for the subscription model. What about charging for access to the feeds themselves? Furthermore, what about discounting access to feeds for aggregators and empowering them to sell subscriptions to your feed through their own aggregation tools? For instance, if access to the Advertising Age feed normally costs $19.95 a month, (I'm making this up) why not offer Yahoo the right to buy feeds for $14.95 a month and mark them up to $19.95? Then, Yahoo could take all the advertising-related feeds and offer them as a discounted package to the end consumer. Pay one price and get automatic news headlines from all the major advertising content providers...

Many new content models could emerge from the concept of placeshifting and the technologies that support it. To position ourselves to take advantage of these emerging models, we need to train our brains to think of content as something that is not specific to a particular online destination.