Terry Heaton reports:
Michael Rosenblum is launching a futuristic video news project with Verizon that ought to give the “trusted brand” crowd a shudder or three. He’s assembling news gathering units (what he terms “nodes”) in various cities that will make their content available via cellphone, web and cable, and he’s knee-deep in recruiting for the first node in Washington, D.C.
As the cable and phone industries move closer to creating a broadband duopoly in America, the idea that they may be going into the news business is both great and scary. Great, because they’ll have resources beyond most other competitors, and could do some excellent work. Rosenblum’s record is sterling for innovation, and he’ll be making waves for sure with this project.
Why scary? Because the phone and cable companies are demanding the right to determine what content travels on their systems, at what speed and in what order. If media consolidation has been worrisome before, it may get vastly more problematic. Do we want two companies pushing their own versions of news out ahead of everything else? It could happen.
The Big Media have been fairly quiet on network neutrality. Maybe this will spark some conversation.
on Sep 27th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Extry!Extry! Video Leaping Off The Page: Newspaper Sites Gettin’ Viddy With It…
And why shouldn't we want video on newspaper Web sites?
Newsroom convergences — like the one taking place at the U.K.'s Telegraph company, a related newspaper-biz drama of which Roy Greenslade anaylzes here (Sept. 25), and discusses along…