In the new internet age, contextual content is king and no single platform wears a crown.
In a month where Facebook launched its TV app with Samsung as a launch partner, we have to ask what this means for TV and then every other channel. What if social media was just becoming the aggregation layer we accessed content through?
The concept of a “media channel” is about to explode. For decades we’ve had tight vertical channels named after the specific device we consumed it on, but we’re about to see all media become digital and we need to turn our thinking 90 degrees. We now have layers of content, not devices.
Media has stopped being about how things get to us, who made it and where it appears, it’s becoming an endless fight for eyeballs and which aggregator owns the eyeballs.
Twitter is now broadcasting live sports. Apple has a Radio station, YouTube has 2,000 Channels with over a million subscribers , Facebook has launched a TV app and is likely to become the largest TV channel ever known overnight. Change is everywhere. Things like the Amazon Echo are becoming a whole new media channel, while print publishers are heavily into SnapChat.
It begs the question: what’s happening to media channels?
In the same way that Airbnb is the largest accommodation provider with no properties, Alibaba is the largest retailer with no stores and Uber moves people around with no cars owned, we’re seeing a movement where ownership of the customer interface is most vital and where all media is becoming digital, and that means companies spreading across types of content rather than among discrete channels or technologies.
What we’re seeing in 2017 is a vast shift in how we think of media and channel. Advertising, and the content it subsidizes always split vertically, from newspapers to outdoor, television to movies and from traditional to digital.
Everything new from social to mobile we’ve added on as a new vertical silo. But when all devices do everything, where the line between radio and streaming, TV, and video bends and blurs, we need to think differently.
