Convergence Soup
Saul Hansell has a great article about convergence in The New York Times.
[tease]
“Convergence is possible now, and you are seeing the earliest breaks on the beach,” said John C. Malone, the chairman of Liberty Media, who has been trying to profit from convergence for the last two decades. Now that it’s here, he predicts there will trouble for many established companies.
“The ‘anything, anytime, anywhere’ paradigm is really going to shift the world of media,” he said. “There will be a tough, grinding transition for an awful lot of businesses.”
[tease] (emphasis added)
But what really broke down the barriers in the last few years was the spread of high-speed Internet connections and the development of efficient ways to deliver high-quality video signals.
“There is this primordial soup brewing of more bandwidth, more storage, more devices and more people creating content which is inherently digital,” said Ted Leonsis, the vice chairman of America Online. “The lightning that struck is that the people have rapidly adopted all this even faster than we in the industry conceived, and bypassed the traditional media.”