• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, November 22, 2005

As this column went to bed, the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences announced plans for a new Emmy award recognizing original programming presented on non-traditional viewing platforms, including "computers, mobile phones, PDAs, and similar devices."

Earlier in the day, at the Traffic Audit Bureau's Out-of-Home Advertising Forum, Starcom's Jack Sullivan and John Marson of Kraft Foods described how electronic billboards equipped with Bluetooth technology were transforming billboards into the next digital, interactive medium, one capable of running TV-like commercials. Also that day, Hasbro announced deals with Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon to download cartoons to a new hand-held toy for kids to enjoy on-demand.

These developments capped off a flurry of deals in the preceding weeks, including Disney/ABC's pioneering iPod video download deal, AOL's launch of in2tv, which will make the Warner Bros. TV library available on-demand, and an array of broadband and video-on-demand plans by the major broadcast networks.

Something's going on here. And it may be what Publicis' Rishad Tobaccowala meant when he predicted a year or so ago that "TV is becoming the Internet." Either that, or the "Internet is becoming TV." From where I stand, it now looks more like, "Everything is becoming everything." Analog media like outdoor, magazines, and newspapers are becoming digital and interactive. Radio is now capable of broadcasting something that looks like television. And as the prescient Tobaccowala noted, people are now using the Internet to access TV.

But given the migratory nature of digital media, the real point may be that anything can become anything the user wants -- media rights holders authorize it. Actually, as a new generation of media consumers has begun to realize: anything can be anything they want, whether or not media rights holders authorize it. A massive gray market of media usage is emerging that is not tracked by Madison Avenue and rarely recognized in its media strategies. As Rob Kendt notes in this month's cover story, there are new shades of gray in the consumption of media that are shifting control over content, context, and conduit from owners to consumers.

The rapid rise of peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent enable any person with a hard drive and high-speed modem to access virtually any program they want on-demand, and generally without advertising or the permission of content owners. It's an amazing loophole in the media marketplace that somehow has failed to make the kind of headlines Napster did in the peer-to-peer music-sharing world. But it is one that is having a profound effect on the way many people use media. By some standards, BitTorrent already is the most popular online destination, and usage is growing fast. Popular primetime series that were receiving downloads of tens of thousands a year or so ago, are now being downloaded in the hundreds of thousands

Given such behavior, it's easy to understand why the networks are seeing the light and finally embracing authorized, commercial models for giving consumers what they always wanted: on-demand access. Some people have criticized Walt Disney Co. chief Bob Iger for opening up the floodgates in partnering with Apple. I say Iger was simply the first to recognize the inevitable, and something it took the music industry years of turmoil to discover: You're better off developing a legitimate model for giving consumers what they want than waging legal battles against them.

These are incredible times for the media business, and we'll likely look back and marvel at the transformations that occurred in the second half of the first decade of the 21st century. It's also an especially frightening time for the advertising world, which must develop entirely new models for ensuring messages get in front of consumers.