Barry Diller at SXSW: The evolution of media
- Mon, March 14 2011
- Filed under: Social networking and web 2.0
I’m at SXSW Interactive, at a session with Barry Diller on the future of all things media. He has been a visionary on technology since as he put it, in 1992-3, he saw QVC and was fascinated by a screen being used to do something other than to tell a story.
He spoke about new and old media. Here were key insights he shared:
The control that is passing to consumers
What seemed to excite him most was the control that is passing to consumers in creation of content. As he put it: “The Internet is a miracle-you push a button and publish to the world. There is nothing between you and all consumers, except perhaps in China and Libya.” He said that Internet television will advance this still further— We will move from utter cable company control to anyone with ideas and backing gaining access to a television audience.
The pace of information sharing
He spoke about his own investments in new media - and old: “We started the Daily Beast because there was no place yet with a journalistic process with the rhythm of the Internet. It was differentiated from anything out there… Along comes Newsweek, a weekly news magazine, an antique concept. We’re trying to fuse the Daily Beast into Newsweek… It’s an experiment - it’s better than it was, but we’ll have to see what happens.”
The nature of information sharing
Information will be open, and content will need to work in all forms and distribution systems. Closed systems will fail. People in the entertainment business, he said, want to keep the old systems in place. “TV everywhere is still owned by concentrated giants. They are happy to have people watch it anywhere if they pay under the same system - to the cable company and then the entertainment business.” He said these interests are against net neutrality, because it threatens their closed system and sources of revenue.
Net neutrality
“We should be screaming for an ambiguous law that no one will step between the publisher and consumer. With the Internet, no one should be on that highway choking it. We’ve got it, and it’s a miracle…” He said the policy of the US has to be a competitive broadband.