This week we continue our summary of Pollack Media Group’s yearly comprehensive look at media trends, The New Media Landscape: 2007. Over the next few weeks, we will publish a summary of the various sections of the report. If you are interested in a full copy of the report, you can request one by e-mailing hq@pollackmedia.com.

Consumer Generated Content

The trend of remixing content, rather than creating it on its own, will continue to dominate CGM in 2007, but the independent artist will become more and more of a factor as the year goes by. Perhaps the biggest question of 2007 will be whether a true star will develop outside of traditional media channels.

Last week we released our yearly comprehensive look at media trends, The New Media Landscape: 2007. Over the next few weeks, we will publish a summary of the various sections of the report. If you are interested in a full copy of the report, you can request one by e-mailing hq@pollackmedia.com.

Introduction

In last year’s annual New Media Landscape report we discussed that the pace and nature of technological change demanded that formerly discrete industries like print, radio, television, and movies embrace a much more content-specific and distribution-neutral model. We also outlined specific trends that would impact practically all of media.

Last week, I made my annual trek to Las Vegas & joined the 140,000 other attendees from 130 countries at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, to spend some time trying to find the most interesting highlights among the 2,700 exhibitors on display. The CES celebrated its 40th anniversary this year by reminding visitors that the first CES had only 110 exhibitors in 1967, the year that the show began, so it was quite amazing to reflect on how far technology has advanced both in popularity & complexity over that time period.

Some of the tech hype last week was stolen from this year’s CES by Apple’s announcement of the iPhone at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. However, there was definitely some cool new hardware on display at the CES, ranging from the biggest (Sharp’s huge 108” LCD 1080p HD flat panel, which will be available in the 3rd quarter of this year for around $100,000) to the smallest (Sony’s unbelievably bright & clear 27” HD flat panel using Organic Light Emitting Diodes that was a mere 4/10’s of an inch thick, which was just a working demo with no plans for commercial release at this time; up until now OLED’s could only be used in tiny screens, like those on mobile phones).

The Apple iPhone was an announcement shrouded so much in secrecy that senior Apple executives weren’t even aware of more than rumors of its development until Stephen Jobs’ keynote at Macworld. It was also a concept with such high expectations that the board of directors of mobile partner Cingular signed off on the deal without even seeing a prototype. News of the announcement sent Apple’s stock up 7% and had the tech world in a frenzy. The initial feedback has been nothing short of glowing. A closer look at the iPhone presents the user with an odd scenario in today’s hype-driven world: The iPhone is even more revolutionary and worthy of hype than we’ve seen.

Its name sounds like a USC film school assignment, but don’t be fooled—The Venice Project is a new media company you will be hearing a lot about in the near future. Created by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the founders of file-sharing network Kazaa (sold to Sharman Networks) and Internet telephony company Skype (which was sold to Ebay for $2.6 billion), The Venice Project aims to offer a complete solution to television over the Internet, improving on the piecemeal pirated offerings of YouTube and the scant content of the networks themselves.

**Full unedited speech delivered by Pierre Bellanger at the Forrester Consumer Marketing Forum in London on November 19th, 2006.**

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Ladies and gentlemen,

I am here today to talk to you about a real-life scenario – how a traditional analogue media form such as radio can convert successfully to digital and the consequences of this for radio itself, its audience and its advertisers.

First of all, I would like to tell you a bit about our background. Skyrock, the radio station I founded, is the most popular youth radio station in France for the 26th consecutive year. As the most popular station in the 13-24 age bracket, Skyrock has around four million listeners a day.

Skyrock first started during the “radios libres” movement in France, which in the late 1970s fought against the state-run radio and television monopoly, resulting in its downfall in 1981. On the run and pursued by the police, our driving force was this desire for freedom of expression. This is what makes up Skyrock’s DNA – freedom of expression and allowing listeners to air their views.

When we started looking at the Internet for radio in the late 1990s, we did the same as everyone else. We put our broadcasts online, added the programme schedule, presenters’ photos and downloadable screensavers. We have seldom done anything as boring as this.

Over the past year Google has made a concerted effort to extend the overwhelming success of its Adwords online advertising program to traditional media. Their highest profile test was with print magazines, although they have made moves into both television and radio (video integration for television and the acquisition of dMarc for radio). As we outlined earlier in this publication, the magazine test for print advertising received a very poor reception. Still, word came out this week that Google has moved into a more comprehensive print test and will integrate its Adwords program into the print editions of 50 major newspapers.

Clients of Pollack Media Group have been able to witness how the trends we outlined in our New Media Landscape report (published in January) have dominated media throughout the year. Perhaps the trend that has had the greatest impact in 2006 is providing content on-demand. From the explosion in podcasting (and the iPod evolving into the on-demand multimedia device) to YouTube acting as the de facto source for on-demand network television viewing, facilitating the consumption of media on the consumers’ own terms has been the story of 2006.

It’s been over 2 years when I first wrote about high-definition televisions offering 1080p, with 1080 horizontal scanning lines using progressive scanning, which is the most technologically advanced HDTV format approved by the FCC. And I’ve just taken delivery of one of Sony’s second-generation SXRD sets. Its latest generation of signal processing circuitry creates an amazingly lifelike picture from every pixel of both existing HD broadcast formats (1080i interlaced and 720p progressive). Moreover, these new sets are capable of displaying a true 1080p picture from the HDMI inputs. The 1080p format demands so much bandwidth that it’s not economically feasible now for cable, satellite or even terrestrial broadcasters, but the new Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD players can reproduce a full 1080p image from the few discs that are currently available.

It didn’t take long before the press started to view Google’s purchase of YouTube as a negative for the site. Both The Dallas Morning News and the San Francisco chronicle ran stories this week about whether YouTube would still be considered cool now that it has been purchased by Google. Online commentators are also looking ahead at the sites that may take over the YouTube video crown.