The Broadcast Century

TheBroadcastCentury

The 20th Century was the century of broadcasting. It started with radio, then cinemas and finally TV. All one-way broadcast mediums. A read-only culture. They all have one restriction. They are based on a model of scarcity, i.e. program directors have to choose the program for you, since there are only finite number of channels and screens.

Television has not really changed very dramatically for many years. The only major upgrade was adding color until recently when TV got digital. Now TV is becoming a software platform distributed on the Internet. Youtube has become a TV channel and anybody can become a producer of content (including me, see below). We are now into read-write culture where program directors are not need, and being replaced by algorithms like Netflix recommendations.

In this lecture we look at how content viewing is changing and why the TV industry getting disrupted. We examing the long tail and how infinite shelf space of content has created new services.

Lecture L15 The Broadcast Century Part 1:

Lecture L15 The Broadcast Century Part 2: