The Next Internet Is TV
The internet is transforming from majority text to majority audio / pictures / video - real reality TV, Information dense newscasts, interactive video chains, all are the next wave.
There are a few things in the way of that however. We really do need an audio video search engine - one that catalogs who, what, when, where and the entire text transcript of the content along with audio and visual keywords. (music, dance, news, landscape, )
We really do need to improve the meta data and content cataloging methods - a dewey decimal system for the non text internet of some sort so that we are not lost in piles of garbage in the future and so that we don’t lose so much of the rich content created so far.
Here is a question worth asking of any large media company, as well as an answer:
Disney has given Fusion a lot of money to launch. What does the company see as a successful return on that investment? Traffic goals? TV audience? Influence?
I think it’s all of the above. Part of our overall mission is to be a lab for experimentation and innovation for our parent company. Univision and ABC want Fusion’s help in figuring out how to reach this incredibly dynamic, diverse, and digitally connected audience, so we’ll be investing heavily in audience development and technology and transferring knowledge to the parent company about what we learn.
This might sound a little deflating to Fusion’s newly launched site, which surely doesn’t think of itself as a market-research arm for an entertainment conglomerate, but it’s not, really. This is a journalist and manager speaking the language of her business, acknowledging Fusion’s particular relationship with the capital that keeps it running. If anything it should be read as comforting. It suggests a mothership that is more interested in observing than meddling, at least for the time being. (The startup’s equivalent answer: “Sale or IPO, idiot! And in the meantime…”)
Fusion is fun to think about because it exists very slightly outside the weird new Zones of Content. It isn’t an established print publication trying to revamp itself under the same name for the fifth time in fifteen years, nor is it a VC-funded company that people started paying attention to a few years ago and that’s speeding toward some sort of liquidity event. What does it want? To build “a new kind of newsroom to greet the changing demographics of America” that is also “a little bit outside of the media bubble.” When does it want it? As soon as possible, but, whatever.