Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
The news that four of the world's most powerful media players are contemplating banding together to create a video website to compete with YouTube, a website developed with relative small change just 18 months ago, is the ultimate irony.
The fact that three former PayPal employees could
build one of the world's most successful websites from a tiny office
and grow it with an initial investment of just $3.5 million shows how
the internet has smashed the barriers of entry to the media. It also
shows that money can no longer buy everything.
Yes, Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube but the site was created for
a tiny fraction of that and still managed to attract tens of millions
of visitors each month. What's more YouTube still has less than 100
employees.
YouTube's success has obviously made the traditional media players,
such as Fox, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal green with envy. According
to a Wall Street Journal report, those four media juggernauts want to
create a site to rival YouTube. It takes the combined efforts of four
multi-billion dollar media companies to figure out how to build
something to rival the effort of a small Silicon Valley startup?
What the WSJ story illustrates is that the days when old media
conglomerates commanded the mindshare of the public because of their
deep pockets are coming to an end. The Internet has been the great
leveller and enabled innovators with limited resources to bring their
great ideas into reality.
Rather than try to develop a rival YouTube, old media players would do
well to follow the example of fellow old media stalwart News Corp,
which spent some of the fortune it has amassed over the years to buy
new media success story MySpace.
The fact is that the new media is a different ball game which most old
media players aren't equipped to play. The best they can do is to try
to buy their way in.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
