The internet is a dangerous place

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The internet is a dangerous place. My advice is, if you have anything to hide, never take a ride on the digital superhighway. The internet knows your name, it knows where you live and importantly it knows what you spend your money on. What did you expect?

The internet is not a free ride, all that great free content comes at a price, and the currency is information.

 

I’ll say it again, the internet is dangerous place. Don’t ever go on it.

 

At a time when television is looking deep into its soul and its very integrity is under scrutiny the internet is not a place for those who run free with the regulations to hide.

 

Television has been caught telling lies and there’s a bit of bridge building to be done in the credibility stakes. Hang on though isn’t it the internet that’s full of identity thieves, phishers and credit card scam artists? Let’s get this in perspective. Television is going through a number of crises of confidence, which boil down not just to a breakdown in trust but to a breakdown in the funding models which underpin it. And you might say that technology or for that matter digital media is the cause of all of or most of those woes.

 

Namely “fragmentation of the audience” – everybody is on the internet or mobile phone or XBOX, and “ad avoidance” – everybody is on the internet or etc.

 

Some of the suspicion about television brought about by the recent “phone scandals” have not been bad people doing bad things, it’s too simple an accusation, that plays to a too readily to jury too eager to convict. The rush to phone revenue and the subsequent dependence upon it, is linked to the structural problems with traditional advertising revenue brought about by the fact that everyone is on the internet!

 

There is a case for suggesting that the convergence of television with the computer brought about by IPTV whether that’s application (Joost) or browser (html) based or in the case of the Vista MediaCentre platform might help restore some of the trust.

 

If part of the inherent danger of the internet is its intrusive nature, part of its allure is the blatant transparency that it provides.

 

The Microsoft Channel 9 forum which is based on the United Airlines inflight audio service “Channel 9” which allows passengers to listen in to the flightdeck, is a great example of the transparency that the internet allows.

 

It’s a forum where Microsoft employees and developers discuss stuff with Microsoft users! (You know all this.)

 

But the logic behind such a bold and open move of naked collaboration flies in the face of corporate confidentiality and it goes like this “there’s no point trying to hide what we’re doing because everyone can see” – which probably leads to “look if you’re going to do bad things on the internet you’re going to get found out, so why not do good things instead.”

 

It is the intrusive nature of the internet that provides the transparency that TV needs to help demonstrate it actually has nothing to hide, it is this Channel 9 principle that admits there is no point in hiding.

 

The big question is whether TV and by this I mean the broadcaster and production community is going to take opportunity of the internet seriously. We are at a bit of crossroads. TV needs to embrace the potential of personalised digital distribution which allows for the deeper more meaningful engagement we hear about. But first it has to get its head around the content and not just use digital distribution as a substitute for linear TV.

 

There’s a real opportunity here.

 

But as I might have mentioned the one thing the internet does well is know who’s watching, how long they watched for, what they were watching before and where and when they went to after.

 

There’s some real value in that level of transparency.