Have you ever been to a political rally, or maybe better said, an anti-rally, in which thousands of people are protesting but not about just one cause? Jon Stewart and Stephen
Colbert’s 2010 Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear was one like that, in which a quarter-million people railed against the corporate establishment/Fox News and Tea Party nutballs/birthers, etc.
all in one powerful, funny demonstration.
I was thinking about that this morning. Protests like that have “only” a percentage of environmentalists, only a
percentage of feminists, or civil rights and gay activists and anti-war activists who by themselves might not seem so significant at a similar rally.
But put them all together
and you’ve got a portrait of disruptive influencers.
I hate to ratchet down social protest for important change into a comparison of changing media forces, but, well,
it’s my job.
Today, Gigaom’s Janko Roettgers is reporting that Roku is pressuring some of its 1,800 online content providers
into signing deals that will give Roku a cut of profit from advertising, or some other revenue source.
He writes that many of the publishers he’s heard from aren’t
complaining about the idea of revenue sharing as much as they are how suddenly and bluntly Roku went that route. “Publishers also told me that they have had some very similar negotiations
with other device makers who are looking to cash in on the growth in online video as well,” Roettgers reports. “ ‘I don’t blame them,’ said one of these
publishers.”
With 10 million users in this country alone, Roku has some a nice share of the over the top market, which still seems to be hard to count because a lot of
consumers have OTT capability through their smart TVs, but either don’t know it or don’t care to know about it, which is not quite the same thing.
Like those
protesters, all of the devices add up into one great big disruption of the once relatively placid/flaccid content-viewing universe.
But also, Parks Associates also reports this week that 46% of all broadband households also have a game console
connected to the Internet and 28% use it as their primary connected device. And of those--and I do recognize the steps are going down with every qualitifier but still-- about 75% of them use their
gaming console to access non-gaming stuff.
Parks also says 55% of all broadband consumers subscribe to an OTT video service, so the movement away from conventional content
delivery has become significant enough that those OTT users represent a kind of consumer protest that is getting fast attention on Main Street.
pj@mediapost.com