ETECH Notes: Emerging Massive Media

By Cory Doctorow at 10:01 am Thursday, Mar 17

Here are my notes from Paula Le Dieu's Emerging Massive Media, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Paula is the outgoing head of the BBC's Creative Archive project, which will turn all the material in the BBC's archive into stuff that can be remixed and reused by Britons. She's now taken on the gig of running the International Creative Commons, though she will still be working on the Archive.

Audiences are acquiring media under their own terms, or more frighteningly for the incumbents, acquiring it from their own suppliers on the networks. Broadcasters broadcast to active, self-commissioning audiences, who decided on their own the what where when and how.

Prosumers are becoming the mass media -- but what about the massive media? How do they compete with their audiences for attention?

For many massive media orgs, the competition is viewed as heavily weighed in their favor. Every time Wikipedia trounces yet another massive media org (e.g. the NYT yesterday) it creates ripples of doubt in the massive orgs.

Last year Joi Ito gave a keynote at a TV con, to international TV execs: he said: "Re DRM: you will win. You will convince your audiences not to use your content." When Patrick Kennedy VP of Sony Digital Networks said, "Get your stuff out there any way you can, youngsters don't even know who you are anymore. Worry about the business model later." Massive media orgs aren't comfortable anymore.

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