• by November 22, 2005

REMEMBER COLUMBIA BROADCASTING SYSTEM? NAH, WE DIDN'T THINK YOU WOULD -- Two e-mails sent in the past week send markedly different messages about the future of television. We only received one of them, while the other is lost forever. The one we got was actually a bit of spam offering a nifty new case for carrying a video iPod. It told us that Apple's new portable TV device has gained enough traction to spawn a third-party accessories market. The e-mail we didn't get was one sent by the communications department at CBS inviting us to a press briefing to hear how the networks were dealing with Nielsen's new DVR ratings. We knew about the press conference, so we called CBS asking about our invite. That's when we found out that the e-mail was lost because CBS had sent it to us at Prodigy.com, an online service that's been out of business for nearly a decade. That last point is more than just a dig at the antiquated nature of network press lists. It says something about the culture of some big media organizations. CBS of all media outfits should've known that Prodigy.com was defunct, because CBS, along with IBM and Sears was one of the original partners that created Prodigy back in the 1980s.

Okay, so it may not seem like a big deal that CBS' press department doesn't have a great depth of institutional memory. And why should they. Since then, CBS has been owned by Larry Tisch, Westinghouse, and Viacom, and is soon to be owned wholly by the public at large. Clearly, other matters have preoccupied the CBS press team. But the anecdote is more than just symbolic.

Once upon a time, CBS was among the leaders in new media technologies. Those were the days when terrestrial TV and radio signals constituted new media technologies. Ever since then, the network has stumbled into a series of half-hearted commitments to embrace new platforms that might transform it into a new media company. Most, if not all, have failed. Prodigy aside, CBS was among the earliest adopters of a suite of early, pre-online interactive media technologies, including audiotext and videotext, and was even the first among the major broadcast networks to launch a major cable network. As good as CBS Cable was, it also failed. As did CBS' attempts to leverage the launch of another cable network when the FCC authorized broadcasters to renegotiate their broadcast signal retransmission deals with cable operators. In fact, CBS only got into the cable business when it was acquired by Westinghouse, which owned The Nashville Network (now Spike) and Country Music Television, both of which are being spun off along with the rest of MTV Networks into a new sans-CBS Viacom.

Sure, we've see a flurry of press releases from CBS about podcasts, blogs, video downloads, but most of these are just that, press releases, or at the most, promotional strategies for getting new, or elusive digital media consumers to sample CBS' shows. From where we sit, CBS is reacting to, not leading, the next wave in the digital media revolution.

The problem is things are beginning to revolve a lot more quickly.

Just look at the news in the past several days.
* TiVo is enabling its TiVoToGo service to transfer TV recordings onto portable video devices such as Apple's video iPod.
* Cisco Systems, the major provider of routing technologies on the Web and in the home, is acquiring Scientific-Atlanta, the major provider of digital TV set-top systems for the cable and satellite TV industry.
* Outdoor giant Clear Channel has teamed up with Yahoo! to create a national digital out-of-home TV network in shopping malls nationwide.

And it's just Monday.

But the deal that really got our minds revolving really quickly was Walt Disney Co.'s content deal for the video iPod. It was significant because it said a major broadcaster gets it. It's not simply going to react to another change in media content distribution. It's going to lead it. The move was also striking because the decision came under newly installed Disney chief Bob Iger, a dyed-in-the-wool broadcaster who apparently has seen the digital light.

Others have, too. Rupert Murdoch's decision to acquire online social network MySpace.com is well timed, and makes up for past sins, like News Corp.'s ill-fated first attempt online: its acquisition of Delphi Internet Services in the early 1990s.

The new, soon-to-be-spun-off CBS, meanwhile,apparently still thinks a lot like the old CBS. The new company, which will also be comprised of Infinity Broadcasting--coincidentally the more old-fashioned and reactionary of the two major radio broadcasters--still sees itself as a broadcast company at the center of a media universe. That's clear from a presentation given a couple of weeks ago by a top CBS executive in Hollywood. The title of the presentation: "Welcome To The Era of Digital Television... ... From Linear Viewing... ...To Non-linear Viewing." In CBS' new nonlinear flowchart, the CBS television network is still the hub of a media content system that is fed by a television studio and has other distribution channels floating around it: TV stations, syndication, cable networks, international distribution, Internet and video-on-demand, DVDs and merchandising.