The Weekly Cover returns for 2024, as we attempt to decipher the current riddle that is the on-going evolution of the media industry. And a great place to start, to put it simply, would be…
Where are we?
It’s no secret that the global media industry finds itself in a period of transition, and downturn. In December, Vox and Conde Nast became the latest high profile publishers to announce significant layoffs, and when we look back at the cuts made across the media tech industry at large in 2023, it’s clear that the second dotcom bubble has now burst.
At the end of the year also, a turning point came in the ‘Will they, won’t they’ relationship saga between traditional media and artificial intelligence, as The New York Times announced it was suing Microsoft and Open AI for ‘billions’.
Wherever that microcosm goes, it’s clear that from a macro pov that AI is now coming down the track fast, and will ask a bunch of important questions about the functions not only of media and politics in society today, but that society at large. It’s a set of questions, for media in particular, that have already been alluded to by the advent of social and increase in fake news over the past decade, and will now be asked with even greater fervour with the rise of sentient search.
For inPress Online’s part, we have refocussed our strategy on building transparent and trustworthy communications from the inside out, by way of a new ‘Atlantean approach’. With sites like LinkedIn increasingly appearing to downgrade posts linking back to your own pages, it’s more important than ever to deliver messaging in a joined-up way, wherever it maybe found.
Pragmacies
Some of the pragmacies relating to the level of change taking place in the media industry today are explored by Senior Yahoo Finance Reporter, Alexandra Garfinkle, in a recent article titled ‘How Meta, TikTok, and the social media industry are changing to survive’:
‘Social media is on the cusp of visceral change,’ she writes, ‘and its biggest players will have to adapt or be left behind. Regulation looms in the European Union, while long-simmering concerns about privacy and safety are gaining visibility in the US. Elon Musk’s chaotic acquisition of Twitter, now X, has thrust the sector even further into the spotlight.’
Streaming
Another excellent media tech writer who was in reflective mood over the festive period is The Guardian’s Mark Sweney, who provides a topline look at the changing fortunes of the streaming sector:
‘It’s official: this year [2023] has marked the end of the era of the winner-takes-all battle for global streaming supremacy. After a dire 2022, when investors turned on the profligate spending and seemingly endlessly loss-making strategies employed by the global giants as a result of the abrupt and dramatic post-pandemic slowdown in subscriber growth, this year has been about building streaming model 2.0.’
When we look, as we did at the beginning of this week’s cover, at the current level of fragmentation within the media industry at large, streaming provides a tangible consumer-side example. Where Netflix once emerged as a welcome addition to traditional content channels, the subsequent streaming wars that ensued have really served only to divide – rather than help consumers conquer – their streaming schedules.
E.g. the new South Parks are accessible via Prime Video, but in order to do that I have do subscribe to Paramount+ do I? In fact, can Prime Video even be considered a streaming package anyway, since half the stuff you see on there is pay-to-play? It’s this sort of fragmentation that the industry needs to tackle right across the board, especially within the context of the curator mastery of AI.
Research Tracker
To help media professionals get back to their homesquare, inPress Online will also be launching the Global Media Research Tracker later this month, following in the footsteps of our successful events incarnation. What we aim to do is bring together fundamental data and analysis from different components of the global media tech industry… How big is the streaming sector? What’s the latest on social regulation? What trends are we seeing in print vs digital? Etc.
It’s our hope that by bringing these fragmented pieces of the pie back together under one roof, we can begin again to understand the key ingredients that go into forging a successful industry, and ultimately help that pie to grow again… Even if you watch no other, watch this space!