Is Media Convergence Really Happening?

This video from AlwaysOn discusses disruptive change in media and looks at where media business models may be going. The kind of convergence they are talking about is the increasing media and marketing integration between traditional and online media. Or you could simply describe it as “survival”—see the newspaper headline in Friday’s post!
View the video here.

The venture capitalists at the AlwaysOn network survey media industry leaders and what they found is not hugely new but backs up the contention that new media is on the move. It doesn’t illustrate the fact that old media is behind much of the growth in new media, but it (necessarily) is. News of venture funding for Glam and British network Adicon makes the connection.

With that in mind respondents to this survey forecast that the move to new media would continue unabated. They believe that neither advertisers nor their traditional agencies have a good grasp on how to take advantage of changes like social networking or how to get a satisfactory ROI on their expenditures in new media. Other posts on this site discuss the need for better mobile standards, but nonetheless respondents see the mobile web assuming greater prominence in the near future. See all the survey results here.

Convergence is one description of what is going on. It’s not hardware convergence—everything available on a single device. The variety of content has probably outgrown that type of convergence. But media are coming closer to a seamless ecosystem in which users can get the content of their choice on the device of their choice at the location of their choice. Is that the ultimate goal or a milestone on the way to an even more disruptive innovation?
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