Media Publishing

Introduction

The Frankfurt Book Fair enjoyed a record number of exhibitors, and the distribution of free newspapers surged. TV broadcasters experimented with ways of engaging their audience via the Internet; mobile TV grew; magazine publishers promoted digital editions; and the popularity of e-books appeared to be on the rise.

Television

Industry Trends.

In 2006 the television industry found itself in the uncomfortable position of being redefined by an array of new media technologies and the habits they created in consumers. It was a distressingly familiar situation. Only a few years earlier, the major American television broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox—had had to make room for a vast new assortment of cable news, entertainment, and sports channels. Then a new generation of digital video recorders (DVRs) threatened to move viewers beyond the grasp of competitive scheduling and—more important—the advertisers who kept the industry afloat. The attack on the primacy of TV had been taken up by the seemingly limitless Internet, particularly the ever-more-sophisticated computers and handheld devices that made downloading, trading, and watching entire TV shows as easy as pointing and clicking.
Although the new video technologies threatened the TV industry's traditional ways, they also opened unforeseen horizons for creativity and commerce. By the end of the 2005–06 TV season, most of the networks were allowing Internet surfers to view recently aired episodes of their most popular shows on the networks' own Web sites, often for free. Other episodes were offered for sale (usually for no more than $2 an episode), either on the broadcast network's Web site or via Apple Computer's online iTunes store. After the end of the season, producers of NBC's sitcom The Office and ABC's hit adventure/mystery program Lost launched a small network of Web sites that wove show clips, unaired video, and freshly written material into Internet-only presentations that served both to keep fan enthusiasm high during the off-season and as a platform for selling DVDs and other show merchandise.
Most network TV executives had come to accept that their industry had to change—and change quickly—in order to keep its place as the preeminent medium for news and entertainment. To ignore the upstart media would mean commercial death. If TV companies turned the new technology to their favour, however, they might not only survive but enter a new era of prosperity.
The changes were coming slowly and often against the networks' instincts. When a viewer uploaded Lazy Sunday, a rap video parody from NBC's Saturday Night Live to the YouTube free video-clip Web site, NBC's outrage at the copyright infringement was eased only after its executives realized that the appearance of the video online had given the fading comedy show a new burst of attention. Within months the network struck a deal to add more NBC clips to YouTube's free online library. When the pilot for Nobody's Watching—a sitcom that first had been commissioned by NBC and then was rejected by the WB network—leaked onto YouTube and began racking up impressive numbers of viewers, NBC again capitalized on the phenomenon by snapping up the rights to the program. Still unsure whether the show could cross over to a mainstream audience, the network created its own Nobody's Watching Web site, set its cast and crew to work making more Internet-only episodes, and thereby transformed the new medium into a low-cost tryout vehicle.
Other industry changes only made TV production more expensive or threatened to dry up traditional revenue streams. Sales at the annual TV upfront advertising sales derby in May deflated by 2% from the previous year, in part because of Madison Avenue's fear that DVR- and Internet-equipped viewers would no longer sit still long enough to watch their commercials. Broadcasters experimented with new forms of promotion; ads were turned into elaborate multipart capsule dramas (called content wraps) that played between the real shows, or companies were charged to place their products into the shows themselves. Meanwhile, production costs for new programs skyrocketed to new heights, while the traditional back-end revenue streams—network repeats, sales on VHS or DVD, and worldwide syndication—no longer seemed quite as guaranteed as they once had.