Technical, economic and social developments, which are only inadequately described by IPTV, Web TV, Digital Special Interest Channels, and Web 2.0, are leading a fundamental structural change in the relationship between consumers/viewers and providers.
Until now, the value creation of television was geared towards offering content in order to gain the highest viewer attention percentage possible and to market a portion of this attention through advertising formats (e.g. TV commercials). As long as there were only a few TV stations available, this was a successful business model.
Today however, the viewer has the power to decide when and which media content he “consumes”. He/she can actively suppress advertising, zap or click to any media environment he prefers. At the same time, technology enables active navigation of media content, empowering the user even more:
- search,
- On-Demand streaming and download,
- and interactivity of content
These navigation tools offer viewers and consumers a completely new dimension of content relevance. The future belongs to
“Long Tail” specific, on-demand offerings, with context-relevant services and interactive ad formats that are targeted and relevant
These enhanced “program formats” are increasingly determined and - even outside the context of User Generated Content - “coproduced” by the users in increasingly differentiated clusters. This is the priciple that unifies the various new approaches from YouTube to Joost to sevenload.
