New Business Models for Free to Air Television

The problem with writing about the future of television is that most people one approaches for comment have overwhelming vested interests, and this is reflected in the “he says, she says” nature of most mainstream media writing on the topic.

Freeview types want to talk up the future of Free to Air as against Pay. Foxtel types do the reverse. Public broadcasters want to tout their advantages over anyone forced to depend on the advertising dollar. Thus they talk about areas of “market failure” to back their claims on the taxpayer dollar.

All are defending their own particular business/funding models against the competition and the likelihood that technological change, including internet protocol television, will knock the whole current debate into a cocked hat and force everyone to reconsider their raison d’etre.

So it was with joy in my heart (I’m weird that way) that I happened across this piece by Stephen Byrne of Diffusion, a company that advises on the value of brands.

After speaking frankly about the erosion in viewer numbers, Byrne suggests four new business models that might emerge:

Social Networking

Longtail

Contextual Programming, and

Branded Content

Read the piece for expansion on the points.

This fits snugly with some of the things I said about new business models in my 2007 book The Content Makers, although I have often thought since the book was published that I should have said a lot more about Social Networking, which is clearly going to become one of the biggest determinants of what we choose to consume in media.

I have written more, since the book, about this here. And when I wrote that, I didn’t even know about Twitter.

Things move so fast.

UPDATE: Trevor Young has interesting things to say on social networking from a PR point of view.