The BBC Logo, 1936 - 1939
Bye-bye BBC
The BBC is dissolving their television and radio divisions. It sounds like the shake up is prompted more because of internal politics and, quite possibly, graft than a re-jiggering based on the changing landscape of media. Regardless, this is interesting to think that a major media outlet may actually be restructuring to take into account how people are now consuming media.
How I Consume Media
I have never had access to cable or satellite television in the home. Furthermore, for the last quarter century terrestrial television has not been in the house either. All of the limited visual media our household consumes has been coming through our internet connection. Netflix and iTunes store downloads are our two main, and nearly only, methods of viewing video content.
The Rise of the Hammer
Simultaneously knocking down the old and building the new, video over the internet is to old media as the telegraph was to the carrier pigeon. Some interesting stats on YouTube alone, emphasis mine:
YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.
YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18–34 and 18–49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
The Writing on the Wall
Large entities are slow to change,[1] users are slow to change.[2] But the demographic most open to change, the youngest, is the only demographic one really needs to go after if you’re in it for the long haul. Trying to stay ahead of the curve is a far more enviable position than staving off irrelevance.
In my household we haven’t missed television at all in its more traditional form. Anecdotally the majority of video content that kids today, the next generation, enjoy comes through YouTube.[3]
Hopefully the shake up at the BBC is a success and paves the way for other media outlets to follow suit. No one wants to be the first to bet the farm. The means by which the media organizations of today can stay relevant are the very means by which they have seen their prominence diminish.[4]
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It took Apple, whose juggernaut iTunes inaugurated successful internet distributed music, years to shift to a streaming subscription plan with their huge Beats music acquisition to later come out with Apple Music. ↩
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I still buy music through iTunes and don’t use or subscribe to any music streaming service. ↩
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About a year ago Google released the YouTube Kids app. They saw the writing on the wall too. ↩
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Bye-bye newspapers. ↩