The Medium Is, Well, You Tell Us

In a move that signals just how blurry the business of media is getting, a unit of AOL has been selected to handle advertising sales for a new joint venture of NBC Universal and News Corp. that will distribute television programming over the Internet. News that AOL's Advertising.com would handle display and video ad sales for the new, as-yet-unnamed joint online video venture, is just one of a series of recent developments and alliances that point to rapidly changing roles - and relationships - among the world's biggest media conglomerates.



In an equally telling announcement, the Sirius satellite radio network announced a deal to begin distributing children's TV networks like Time Warner's Cartoon Network, Walt Disney Co.'s Disney Channel, and Viacom's Nickelodeon as part of a new service dubbed "Backseat TV" (see related story in today's MDN). Talk about your backdoor moves into another medium.

In other news announced this week, two more major magazine publishers announced plans to scrap their traditional medium of print, in favor of the Web: Time Inc.'s Life and Meredith's Child magazines.

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Major newspapers, consumer magazines and even trade publications like MediaPost's are now offering video content online too., and digital out-of-home video networks are popping up on billboards, in stores, on elevators, gas station pumps and even in public rest rooms. In other words, radio, online, print and outdoor media are becoming television. Television is becoming online. And all media platforms are simultaneously blurring into each other. Welcome to the world of digital media, where content is "platform agnostic," consumers expect to get it anywhere and anytime, and business relationships morph among competitors and collaborators at broadband speed.

As rapid as these shifts seem, they are happening before even more fundamental changes begin to impact the media marketplace, including the next generation of mobile media devices capable of seamlessly delivering full-motion video and a variety of advanced interactive media content to the most ubiquitous and personal media device ever: the cell phone. Before personalized media controllers like SlingBox gain critical mass. And before a new generation of media "concierges" like Apple TV, Microsoft's Media Center and Vista, and the networked TiVo systems completely alter the way people manage their digits.

Given the rate of technological innovation, the shifts being witnessed now, are only the beginning of an even bigger transformation of a media marketplace in which most, if not all media content is available digitally. Consider this, executives familiar with the next generation of Sirius' satellite radio tuner technology tell MDN that the fourth generation of its microprocessor will be capable of interacting with cell phones, a move that would give the satellite radio receivers the same kind of interactive backchannel that satellite TV players like DirecTV and EchoStar have via hard line phones wired into the backs of their receivers.

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