Opinion: Yahoo content guru says that audiences embrace Internet-based media for its immediacy and integration.The tale is widely told, probably with dramatic license, that tycoon David Sarnoff of RCA and NBC made his first proposal in 1915 for radio broadcasts of music and news. His associates, the story goes, pooh-poohed the idea as "messages to nobody in particular" and demanded to know who would ever pay to send them.
Often invoked to illustrate myopic thinking, that (possibly apocryphal) challenge looks more farsighted as content providers shift their focus from radio and TV to IP-network media. Those who pay to send the unaddressed messages of mass-market advertising can now know much more about who's receiving them—and have much more power to decide who they'll pay to reach.
We're at a watershed moment in the creation of a mainstream audience for Internet streaming content, according to Scott Moore, vice president of Content Operations for Yahoo. I spoke with Moore as Yahoo was getting ready to light the fires on its coverage of the space shuttle launch originally scheduled for July 13. With an exclusive deal on the upstream side to serve NASA's official video feed and downstream arrangements for 50G bps of bandwidth, Yahoo was aiming for appreciation from the strong Internet demographic of spaceflight enthusiasts. "We're not making money from this," said Moore, but Yahoo obviously hoped to gain good associations for its brand.
As we spoke, I thought of the hallways of my elementary school, filled with students and teachers watching low-data-density broadcasts from the launch pads of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. The memory made for quite a contrast with the multiple images and multiple channels of collateral data available to a desk worker with a broadband connection while waiting on July 13 (and, as of this writing, still waiting) for Discovery to fly.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Future Is Bright for IP-Network Media
