Results tagged “abc” from Trends in the Living Networks

ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) TV had a very nice segment on Twitter yesterday, as below.

As befits the august institution, the segment was more thoughtful than some other recent media coverage.

It begins with how politicians are using Twitter, including Barack Obama, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull, and South Australian state premier Mike Rann, who announced his new cabinet on Twitter, and talks about how he embraces it as a way of communicating with his electorate.

The segment then looks at how Twitter is becoming a media channel, including providing breaking coverage of events such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks and Australian bushfires, and quotes me saying that many news events are covered first and sometimes better on Twitter than on mainstream media.

On the segment ABC Managing Director Mark Scott says that most Twitter sources cannot be trusted, so people will look to credible sources such as the ABC, possibly delivered over the ABC's own Twitter channel.

This approach just takes us back to the traditional view that news is only news once a journalist has reported it. In part of my interview that wasn't used in the segment I noted that people are increasingly looking for primary sources for news. They are not interested in waiting until the broadcast journalists get to the scene, and they feel capable of assessing the validity of these unauthorized sources themselves.

The segment wraps up mentioning Twitter's search for a business model.

Today’s ABC Media Report featured a special report on peer-to-peer file sharing and its impact on media. The program provided an overview of the history of peer-to-peer content sharing, starting from Napster and its legal travails, moving on to Kazaa, BitTorrent, online video distribution and the situation today, and how it is impacting the music, video and media industries. The report can be downloaded as a podcast (note that the peer-to-peer piece is only on the download, not the stream).

In between various industry lobbyists, lawyers and musicians, I was interviewed as a “futurist,” describing how video content is increasingly being distributed over the Internet and digital channels, and how content providers now have a choice on whether they distribute through traditional broadcast and cable television, or directly to their audience.

I was also quoted on some of the ideas that were contained in the Future of Media Report 2008, on how the media and entertainment industry is likely to quadruple in size over the next 20-25 years, and on the continuing drive to fragmentation that is challenging the industry. I continue to believe that there are major opportunities for those content providers that position themselves effectively in the current extraordinary transformation in content distribution.