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I was reading an article on iMedia Connections about the impending switch from Digital to Analogue (Australian spelling intended!) TV today and it sent me navel gazing. Such a geek thing to do!

So many old media concepts have been smashed in the last few years, a relatively short period of time in the scheme of things. Think about the decline of the music CD. I’m old enough to remember records, and I was an avid fan of the digital cassette tape. Remember them? Well, now the CD is dead too.

Instead of thinking about music in terms of CDs and albums, we can buy tracks online. It’s a seismic shift and it caught the "old school" music industry well and truly unprepared. Their entire business model was blown away and that meant that jobs, profits and people took a shellacking!

Now, it’s time for "prime time" to die!

You see with digital media, people choose what they want to watch (more like be involved with) and when they want to watch it. The death of prime time is already happening for two reasons:

• Personal Digital Recorders (PDRs) - Allowing you to time shift programs
• More significantly, the shift to Internet.

When Analogue TV switches off and Digital TV takes over, the pace of change will accelerate for TV oriented companies. That’s because digital makes on-demand programming possible, and that in turn kills the idea of TV ad placement.

As we all know, the problem that Media companies and TV stations face is that people don’t want to watch ads.

On the other hand old school marketers love ads. Think about those agencies that make the ads for the multi-million dollar ad spots around the NFL Superbowl in the US. Think of the TV rights and dollars that go along with those spots that are under threat as people consume more online.

Consumers have also demonstrated that they don’t want to set their schedules around the TV. In Australia, Neilsen Media reported that Australian now spend more time online than watching TV.

In Australia we’ve already seen old stalwarts like Kerry Packers Channel 9 falling apart at the seams. They’re struggling to deal with the fact that consumers stopped watching the 6:00 news. Their entire business was built around it in fact, but now they are reeling.

Channel 9 recently surprised us by cancelling it’s late night news program. The market has left. They can now get the news online, and they are increasingly waking up to the fact that the "newstainment" being shoved down their throats in not real.

Channel 7 isn’t as far ahead as it would like to think it is in adapting to the change either. It was heavily criticised for it’s pathetic single channel online coverage of the Olympic games. It showed that they still think like an old media company. And then there’s the castrated Tivo PDR that they launched in July. Channel 7 disabled the Ad skipping feature of the Tivo to force you to watch ads. Dumb old school thinking that the market will punish.

What is certain is that the old media business will soon have a new look. It could be the look of a ghost town. Look out for the tumbleweed.

Even if the change is not so drastic, the impact will be significant. What will this mean for commercial and political systems that rely on it so much?

Strangely, at the root of it are all the geeks who made the Internet work. You probably wouldn’t want to release these geeks to the light of day, but without them and their technology none of this could have happened.

And the credits roll something like this:

• TCP/IP
• HTTP
• Web Browsers
• Netscape
• Internet Explorer
• 56k Modems & Dial Up Internet
• MP3
• Quicktime, Real Media, Windows Media
• Napster
• Alta-Vista
• Peer to Peer file sharing
• Broadband / ADSL
• Google search
• Video streaming
• Firefox
• Flash
• DivX
• Bit torrent
• You tube

Got anything to add?

25° in Melbourne yesterday became 10° today. Just great!

If you’re getting a “connection to the server was interrupted” message from Outlook 2007 while trying to connect via POP3, the following may be a solution for you…

In exchange, on the POP3 connector, turn of NTLM authentication. It seems to stuff up with Outlook 2007. Something to do with Outlook trying to use the AUTH command.

I randomly came across the following video showing a Texas train carrying truck trailers (pantech, sem-trailers). I wondered why we don’t use a system like this in Australia.

Perhaps it’s due to height restrictions.

Seems like a good way to reduce heavy road traffic, increase fuel efficiency and reduce environmental impact. With such a vast land and just a few major centers, this would make a lot of sense.

I think that rail is way under utilised in Australia.

From the pre-launch hype to the post release headaches, I’ve been pondering this question, “What is an Apple iPhone 3G really good for?”

There’s been lot’s of suggestion, but precious few with any substance. A colleague of mine, Jim Stewart of stewartmedia.biz told us in a video blog that his iPhone is an important business tool because it has Facebook on it…???

Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook just as much as the next be-my-freind-to-build-my-hungry-ego guy… but is that really all there is?

Ok, so it’s a phone… that looks cool… that you can browse the web on… riiiight. *yawn*

Oh, and you can email on it. However, MobileMe, the supposed replacement of BlackBerrys and Exchange doesn’t actually work.

IT wire’s top ten productivity tips for iPhone consisted of things like how to turn the caps lock key on, and how to kill crashed programs… Hang on a minute…! What? An Apple iCrash? I was told that such a thing did not exist!

So sure it’s got a nice sexy casing and a large screen that drains your batteries faster than you can charge them.  But, now cracks have started to appear in shiny white iPhone casings.

And of course, you can’t change that battery, so the whole phone is throw-away tech.

Now I admit that this thing is so alluring that I am tempted to buy one, but that rational side of me is screaming out:

“Please, please, please tell me that there is something useful about this thing?”

I beg of you Apple, please stop marketing your electronic gadgets to me!

Apple iPhone 3G smells stinks to me like the American consumer culture at its peak. As their unsustainable consumer economy crumbles down around them, at least they can take comfort in their cracked but shiny white iPhones.

Instruction to believers:

Apple drones, you have been told what to do by the great fruit shaped corporation in the sky. The iCreator wishes you to proceed to an Apple Worship Altar Store to buy your iPhone 2.0 now. Forget that you ever owned an iPhone 1.0 and please be sure to stow it safely in your desk draw, never to be seen again!

Check out the www.stuffthathappens.com blog…

Some good advice for perfectionists from Derek Gehl of marketingtips.com. If you are a perfectionist, these tips will resonate strongly with you. As a perfectionist, I have a tendency to get distracted by irrelevant details and that ultimately leads to failure. So this article really resonated with me.

In summary, his tips are:

Strategy #1: Be realistic about what you can achieve

Strategy #2: Set strict time limits for each of your projects

Strategy #3: Think of failure as a learning experience

Strategy #4: Celebrate your successes

Strategy #5: Don’t be afraid to admit you need help

Well worth a read here: http://www.marketingtips.com/freenewsletter/index.php?article=205

I particualry liked the tip on celebrating success. Perfectionism often only allows us to see the faults. So, after reading these tips, we’ll keep pressing on with the imperfect and appreciating it for what it is.

The trouble with email is that it comes in all day everyday. It’s like an addiction, it’s always with you. I woke this morning to 72 messages in my inbox. I’ll get more than that in my inbox again today.

I’ve done some analysis, and it turns out that each day I delete about 100 emails. I’ve reduced that substantially by removing myself from email lists and by taking the time to be more effective with email.

I’ve been thinking about the fact that these email messages come in one at a time and all through the day. Every single on of them initiates the outlook "you’ve got mail" ding, followed by the toast (that’s what the call the pop-up thingy that shows you what the email is) and the new mail icon in the system tray.

All that adds up to a 100+ distractions a day!

How am I supposed to get any work done? I’m duped into reactive email management every time I hear the ding, see the toast and notice the icon. I can’t resist the temptation to head for the inbox.

As much as I love toast… I’ve decided to turn it all off! I’ve known that email is a time management killer for a long time, and I’ve finally taken action.

Menu: Outlook 2003 > Tools > Options > Preferences Tab > Click Email Options

What will I do without my toast fix? I’m getting a bit nervy. Maybe someone can develop a patch .

It has only been legal to record TV in Australia since late 2006. Of course, for nearly 30 years most of us have had video recorders, then DVD and hard disk recorders that don’t really have any other purpose but to record TV shows.

Video recorders have been freely available to buy the whole time, despite the fact that it was technically illegal to record TV with them (which is what we all did). So in 2006 the law changed to allow “time-shifting”.

What that means is that:

• You can record a program to watch later by yourself or with members of your household
• You can also record the program from the internet, but only if it’s a live broadcast (simultaneous with the TV airing).

That’s it. That’s all you can do legally.

A commenter on an article about Internet TV over on IT wire - which quoted a Cisco study that shows that 59% of Australians watch TV on the Internet now - asked the question, “Is it illegal to download shows that have already aired in Aus?”.

The author of the article Alex Zaharov-Reutt pointed to the thin pickings of legal, downloadable TV content in Australia. Most popular shows are not downloadable, and few of the downloads that are available are even full episodes. So the commenter reasoned, if the show has been aired on free TV, surely I can download it legally?

What you still can’t do legally:

• Record a program and watch it at the same time
• Record a program to watch again and again
• Download a program from the internet after it has aired on free TV

Check out the Australian Copyright Council’s information sheet about recording TV here:

It seems that we have been spoiled by free to air TV for too long. Now that Australians are leaving the TV and spending more time on the internet, we seem to expect that everything is free over there too!

What we forget is that free to air TV is supported by advertising. It’s easy to forget that advertisers pay high prices for TV ads and some of that money buys the copyright to actually broadcast the TV show.

But this model doesn’t work on the internet. The reason it doesn’t work lies in the following comparison:

It’s just painful. I can’t bear the thought of paying to watch a TV show. Connecting the thrill of watching The IT Crowd or Desperate Housewives with a dollar departing from my wallet just destroys any pleasure that’s in it for me. Especially when it has been free to watch TV ever since the box was invented.

But the reality is, if we want people to spend their lives creating great TV shows, then someone has to pay them to do it… And if we want content on demand, on the ‘net and downloadable at any time, then we’re going to have to pay for the privilege.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s time to stop watching TV and go for a walk outside instead.

I’m using the Wordbook plug-in to publish this blog to my Facebook mini-feed. It is  pretty simple to install the plug-in. Just download it and upload it to your plug-ins directory. It walks you through setting up the WordPress key and adding the application to your Facebook page.

Easy!