It seems everyone these days is talking about new Media. So what is it ? Well there is a definition on wikipedia : New Media . New media has especially been made prevalent after the spread of Web 2.0. Traditionally people had their main recreation source as the TV. So whatever time they had, was spent in watching TV; but online video is changing the rules. A quote from BBC : "Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.". This means that people are looking at things other than the TV too. This fact poses a big dilemma for the major media corporations because their viewership is not only going down but the time an average user can be bombarded with ads is going down too. Thats why Google stock is up because of Google being the leader in the online ad space especially on a site like youtube which has a high viewership and is owned by Google itself. Consequently, a major strategy shift is needed for the old media (TV, newspaper etc) corporations to compete with this new found love of the users.
New media will be a disruptive force when all that the users want, on the TV, can be seen through the web. Microsoft has taken some positive steps in this direction by launching Silverlight which supports HD Video as compared to a Adobe's flash standard. This has some powerful implications. Imagine your TV (lets say connected to a media center PC) can show videos on demand from various sites like CNBC, Fox, Discovery etc. The convenience of a web like searching and taxonomy combined with a TV like quality can be a disruptive solution.
Then there are the extreme applications of new media apps like plugging directly into the 3d virtual worlds. Imagine your boring social network browsing to be an interactive 3d browsing where you can visit friends' houses , call ad-hoc parties, chat with them in real time and more. So if I feel like I want to see my high school buddy, I can visit his virtual world house and if he is available, call a small ad-hoc reunion by messaging other high school friends who are on the instant messenger. Then maybe record the party and send it as an online video to other friends ( as a video podcast to people subscribing highschool XYZ parties) so they attend the party next time. The RIA (Rich Internet apps) platforms like silverlight and flash can enable us to do these things. With the availability of gaming engines like Xbox and PS3 in every home we can easily make 3d virtual interaction a possibility and fun experience. Imagine being able to navigate second life through an Xbox360 like an MMORPG.
So in short new media enables much more interactivity than the old media. But that does not mean old media is obsolete. The professional production quality techniques of the old media can be applied to new media increasingly for enhancing the quality and overall experience. People would still want to read a news paper made up of fresh content tailored to their tastes.
New media taps into the creative of the masses , because of which, its more interesting than the old media tailored by an elite few. Also new media allows personalization which feeds people only the information that is most interesting to them. After all TiVo showed us how good personalization can work. Buckle-up for your morning newspaper which contains a mixed subset of wall street journal, new york times and the local newspaper but only containing stuff that you like. Or your personal magazine with snippets from fortune, popular mechanics and wired. Now that is on-demand.....
