(The Comcast and NBC Sports folks gave me tremendous access, something I’ll be writing about in a bit.)

Video technology continues to march inevitably forward to more cord-cutting and more a la carte viewing…with the latest disruptor being AEREO.

Want to watch any broadcast channel from your iPad? Or record any broadcast program and play it back whenever you want, wherever your are? (Think TiVo meets SlingBox)…well, that’s basically AEREO (formerly called “Bamboom”), a new video service that recently launched in New York City.

VenturBeat.com

Just a terrific graphic from VentureBeat.com’s MediaBeat on the evolution of TV Technology/Entertainment, that’s further pushing content to both ends of the Curve.

Oh, and I’m not just talking about people in the media business. I’m talking about practically everyone except for tenured professors.

We’re living in the “Age of Disruption” — a time when technology has flattened the world, making it easier for new companies to be born, but more difficult for traditional companies to do anything but cut costs and cut jobs. In the Age of Disruption, change has become the only constant: business models are being torn up daily, and the skill-sets required of both workers and managers are in a constant state of redefinition.

I’m not a historian (and I don’t play one on TV) but I can’t recall reading about another period in history where everyone no matter their occupation, their education or their social status, seemed so uncertain and disconcerted about their job future…a time when everyone deep down was worried that they were, at most, a couple of years away from becoming obsolete.

Curious to know your thoughts. Feel free to comment here or toss me an email.

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Lisa de Moraes

That said, yesterday she wrote a column, “Conan tells Fortune: NBC like an ‘Indiana Jones’ Nazi” about some of the stuff that Conan O’Brien had said to me, and I quoted in my recent Fortune Magazine piece, “Conan 2.0: How a late-night Luddite accidentally fought his way back into bedrooms (and computers, smartphones, and tablets) across America.” Her piece appears to be based solely on the Fortune PR release and not the full article, as her conclusions seem off-base and out of context.

Among other things, she insinuates that the powers that be at Time Inc. (Fortune’s parent company) published the piece to give Conan’s show (which airs on TBS, which is owned by Time Inc.) some badly needed publicity, and that Conan himself is consumed by bitterness towards NBC. Well, neither of those things strikes me as true, and I’ve just written as much in the “comments” section of the Washington Post page where her column lives.

Here in full is my “comment” back to Lisa:

Lisa —

I’m the author of the Fortune story…

I have the greatest respect for you—honest—in fact, you just may be my favorite newspaper read and have been for years (and you can ask our mutual friend Tony K. about that), but I think your take on the Conan article is way off the mark, and seems to have come from reading the press release (which I’ve actually not seen, myself), rather than from reading the article. First off, and most importantly:

Time Inc. had nothing to do with commissioning this article. I pitched Fortune—and I’m not a Time Inc. employee, nor have I ever been. (In full disclosure, I have done other freelance work for Time Inc. properties but not for close to a decade; oh, and I sold them a photo about five years ago. But I think that’s it.)

In short, I had no interest in writing this piece to promote Conan on behalf of Time Inc., and they didn’t publish it for that reason.

My only motivation for writing the piece—outside of getting paid—was that, as a digital strategist who for many years was a television journalist and producer, I find it fascinating that “traditional media” people still don’t understand the social media phenomenon…and I found Conan’s story particularly fascinating—and fun to tell—because of how he accidentally was thrown into the digital world, and how he and his team have now made a major investment in it.

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* As for Conan’s bitterness:

Nobody on the show—from Conan to his writers, to his bookers, to his stage manager or the rest of the crew—pissed one drop of bitterness on NBC the entire time I was with them. And I had full access to everybody. (And since I’ve worked as a producer at NBC at various times since 1989, I’ve casually known a bunch of the Conan folks, from the producers to the crew, for a long time. So, trust me, they’d have no problem pissing to me, and none of them did, not even off the record.)
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* As for Nazi bitterness:

Yeah, Conan made the Harrison Ford fighting the Nazi allusion, but it was far more about feeling like he was thrown through a windshield than it was about a Nazi doing it. That said, my guess is that Conan won’t be buying Jeff Zucker a Valentines day card on Monday—still, I don’t think Conan has dreams in which Jeff’s wearing a little box mustache, like the one Michael Jordan’s sporting these days. (What’s up with that, anyway?)
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* As for Conan comparing himself to the Beatles and Elvis:

It happened while we were talking about the process of performers needing to evolve as technology evolves, and how they need to find their own voice —Conan was comparing the process more than the players. That said, no one gets to host their own late night show without having some ego.
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While we may have differences of opinion about how to interpret the Conan quotes, I think most of the above is clear to anyone who has read the full article—whether or not they like Conan the person or the show. (The full article is at http://bit.ly/CONAN-Fortune )

— Douglas Warshaw

And then sit back and watch the networks try to deal with this new media equation:

CP + DT (O-DVFA) = NFN

Spelled out, thats:

Couch Potatoes +  Disruptive Technology (On-Demand Video From Anywhere) = Nightmare for Networks

The result will be classic Curve:  Lots more watching of High-End and Low-End content, with the middle dropping out even further. (Big time).

Second prediction:

The “lean-forward” experience of laptop viewing will become a “lean-back” experience of group selecting and sharing—in the same room—in real-time. Yup, I’m not talking about an over the web, social-network sharing with friends, TV viewing experience—which will be cool, and huge—I’m saying get ready for the return of the wonderful experience of watching something other than the Super Bowl with a group of friends in your living room.

It won’t be appointment TV (aka Ed Sullivan), it will be, “Hey, I gotta show you something!”—spontaneous and serendipitous TV watching.  (SSTV?) And the over-40′s will be doing it, too.

(Okay, why am I showing you something shot from a hand-held camera?  Well, unfortunately Google’s own video from their developer’s event doesn’t show their product at work. Why?  Well, because Google is trying hard not to piss off the TV networks in the hopes of getting them to work with them, Google doesn’t want to post the full demo that includes clips of the network and cable TV shows.  Ah, those of those pesky licensing and copyright issues. Insane, right).

And speaking of those pesky copyright issues and Ed Sullivan, let’s see how long this stays up:
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My answer was that five years is a long way off, and way too distant a horizon to be thinking about media. (But it’s still a hellova a measuring stick to use when trying to figure out Soviet farm production goals.)  And, anyway, when thinking about where things are going, rather than trying to plot specific points along the digital highway, I tend to limit myself to just trying to figure out the right direction, to try to see what’s going on and hazard a guess as to where the media world might be heading.  And to that end, I have a compass, which as opposed to the normal one needle with four points, has only three points:  1. First-person Communication; 2. TheCurve; 3. Open-Source Media. Let’s look at them one at a time.

1.  THE ERA OF FIRST-PERSON COMMUNICATION:
We’re living in it.  And have been for about two years.  It’s a world where everyone can publish and everyone can distribute. And this, of course, is what is crushing what used to be called traditional media.

In the Era of First-Person communication, celebrities, athletes, politicians and anyone else who can make themselves part of the news now can communicate directly to their audiences, without having to go through the traditional media. They can do it through blogs, if they have the time, and the writing or video ability; they can do it through micro-blogging applications like Twitter and Facebook; and they can do it through real-time social networking applications, like Foursquare.

2.  TheCurve:
As I’ve written about throughout this blog Technology moves things to the extremes — and that’s going on right now in the media/content world at a continually accelerating pace. This means content consumers will be continue to seek the most high-end content, stop randomly grazing and be more selective about their consumption of medium quality content (the stuff created for the lowest common denominator), while far more of their time will be spent consuming the lower-end First-Person Communication directly from the news makers. (Like Shaq’s tweets.)

3.  THE OPEN-SOURCE WORLD = OPEN-SOURCE CONTENT = VOYEUR MEDIA

The open source paradigm’s migration from the tech world to the content world has had enormous effects, especially in journalism and the world of short-form video.

Again, because everybody can now publish and distribute their own content, and because the tools for gathering and producing content are now so inexpensive and readily available — our smart phones, our iPhone’s, digital cameras that shoot video with stills, etc. — we now live in a news world of infinite eyeballs.  And as we’ve seen with the Tiger Woods and Ben Roethlisberger stories, this has made millions of us participants in voyeur journalism, which naturally flows directly into celebrity and gossip journalism.

The immediate battleground for this trend in media is the sports world — and not just because of Tiger. It’s because the sports world has been a remarkably closed ecosystem, controlled by the leagues and rights holders, that’s inhabited by players and a sports media that, for the most part, all have their interests aligned with each other. Ah, but now onto the field has come a group made up of Everybody Else (as in “Here Comes Everybody,” to use Clay Shirky’s book title).  And the interests of Everybody Else are not aligned with the rights holders and players, the way traditional media’s interest are.  Now Everybody Else is acting solely in their own self-interest, which for the most part is their interest in getting noticed and gaining status. The result is that now Everybody Else is looking to capture video and still images to blog and micro blog about their favorite and least favorite athletes. And the result of that has been the tabloid-ization of sports coverage, led by TMZ and Deadspin.

TMZ’s, Deadspin’s and other non-rights holding independent media are unaligned with the rights holders and players — because they don’t care about the biggest thing that’s kept the traditional media in sports, and in politics, in check: Access.  They don’t want to sit in the press box. They want to enjoy what’s happening between the lines, and they want to write about what’s happening outside the lines: They want to be in the bars, restaurants and police stations.  And they want to be monitoring the athlete’s own First-Person Communication, and creating their own content from there. And that’s what makes them so interesting.

Because these outlets don’t care about access, the leagues, athletes and other movers and shakers of the sports world have no control over them.  They can’t kick them out of the press box, because they’re not in the press box. They can’t stop talking to them, because they’ve never talked to them.

(“The Daily Show” enjoys the same enormous advantage over the network and cable news divisions — not because of the web but because of… their green-screen. Their green-screen is The Daily Show’s middle finger to the politicians of the world. It’s what says, “We don’t need no stinkin’ press credentials that you could take away from us if you got angry with anything we say, which would make us toe the line. We don’t need to  get your permission for an interview, or for a camera location… so screw off. You’ve got nothing you can take away from us to force us to play your game by your rules.”)

And that’s the same thing that makes Deadspin so popular.

Whether or not the traditional news outlets want to go down the tabloid path is immaterial, because they have no choice, and they’re already well on their way. But how far down the path will they go?  It’s quite a conundrum for them: If they don’t move in this direction they will lose more and more of their audience to those media outlets catering to user generated gotcha content. But if they do follow this path it will put them in conflict with the leagues and rights holders with whom they are partners.

This is going to get really interesting.

And, once again, this is where First-Person Communication comes back into play, as moving forward, the unwilling subjects of everybody’s eyes and video cameras will have no choice but to engage their audiences in direct communication through their own blogs and micro-blogs, and like political candidates with their war room, they’ll have to constantly be prepared to explain (and often apologize for) their behavior.

(On the other hand, as we all begin to live our lives more publicly, the standards for behavior will no doubt change — “defining deviancy down,” in the words of Patrick Moynihan, who probably didn’t realize that he was describing the 21st century media world — and so perhaps there will be less apologizing than we might expect.)

So, my compass continues to point to an expanding and ultimately infinite number of sources for content, with consumers continuing to value most those media outlets that don’t just bring them content — most of which they can get a thousand other places — but bring them the tools and applications that work best for the consumers of content in ways that make it easy for them to find and filter what they want, aggregated content the way they want, personalize it the way they want, and share it the way they want.  (As I’ve written before on TheCurve: http://tinyurl.com/Open-Source-Journalism

But wait!  What about the iPad?

What about Steve Jobs controlling content providers access to consumers by not letting anyone put an app. on the iPad?

And what about Comcast choking off the pipes?

And what about Rupert’s walled gardens?

What about the forces of control?

Well, that’s why my compass right now says media is quickly moving into the intersection of greed and anarchy — and that’s where a really big and scary battle is about to be fought.  And in that battle, I’m betting on anarchy to, if not win, then continue to do some real damage.

Why?  Two reasons: (1) Because I think an infinite number of little guys who can network with each other can continue to make the big guys bleed — they’re a guerilla army, and the topography of the digital battlefield favors them (you’ve seen The Matrix, right?) — and (2) Because the infinite number of little guys have one really big guy on their side (at least for now) and that’s Google. Google likes and understands the open-source media model, and Google likes and understands that it’s no longer really about the content — except in very rare events — and that it’s about the tools and applications.  (Oh, ESPN’s content and digital guys realize this too, which is why, unless someone there really screws up, ESPN will remain ESPN.)

Anyway… that’s where my five year compass points.  At least for the next two to three years.

Okay, okay, it’s not actually about TheCurve — but Surowiecki’s article describes exactly the same phenomenon — about how, when it comes to consumer products:

While the high and low ends are thriving, the middle of the market is in trouble.

Now, while I originally started writing about TheCurve focusing on evolution of the consumption of television content (see graphics below), I later began posting about other areas that adhere to TheCurve, along with Adam Park’s observations about TheCurve and consumer electronics. And although Surowiecki never graphically drawers TheCurve, in this week’s New Yorker he does write about how the consumption of consumer electronics has shifted from “the amorphous blob of consumers who make up the middle of the market to the high and low ends.”

For Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success in recent years, “build it and they will pay” is business as usual. But it’s not a universal business truth. On the contrary, companies like Ikea, H&M, and the makers of the Flip video camera are flourishing not by selling products or services that are “far better” than anyone else’s but by selling things that aren’t bad and cost a lot less. . . unlike Apple, the companies aren’t trying to build the best mousetrap out there. Instead, they’re engaged in what Wired recently christened the “good-enough revolution.” For them, the key to success isn’t excellence. It’s well-priced adequacy.

These two strategies may look completely different, but they have one crucial thing in common: they don’t target the amorphous blob of consumers who make up the middle of the market. Paradoxically, ignoring these people has turned out to be a great way of getting lots of customers, because, in many businesses, high-and low-end producers are taking more and more of the market. In fashion, both H. & M. and Hermès have prospered during the recession. In the auto industry, luxury-car sales, though initially hurt by the downturn, are reemerging as one of the most profitable segments of the market, even as small cars like the Ford Focus are luring consumers into showrooms. And, in the computer business, the Taiwanese company Acer has become a dominant player by making cheap, reasonably good laptops—the reverse of Apple’s premium-price approach.

While the high and low ends are thriving, the middle of the market is in trouble.

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A SIMPLE PHRASE

I’ve come to the conclusion that all of this can be summed up in a single sentence:

Technology moves things to the extremes.

That’s what we’ve come to see everywhere — not just in content and consumer products, but also in politics, sports and even interpersonal relations. (Something I’ll write about in a bit.)

And that in a nutshell is the lesson of TheCurve:

Technology moves things to the extremes.  The middle drops out and both ends of the curve move up:

Indeed, that’s what happens whenever disruptive influences enter an ecosystem.

As posted back in May of 2008, it turns out that TheWarshawCurve actually follows what evolutionary biologists call a “Disruptive Curve,” as you can see below, along with the two other evolutionary curves: the “Stabilizing” and “Directional” curves (again, click on the images to enlarge them):

(Click to Enlarge)

If you think about it for just a second, it makes a great deal of sense that this same disruptive evolutionary curve should be found in patterns of consumer consumption:

New media and communication technologies — “disruptive technologies,” as they are commonly called — are entering the marketplace today at a frenetic rate, specifically with regard to the storing and sharing of content.  Devices and platforms such as TiVo, generic DVR’s, iPods, iPads, YouTube, Pandora, Netflix and on and on and on — basically all the stuff that’s making life hell for the television networks and film studios, who once upon a time, not too long ago, lived in a world where consumers had to eat whatever they served — and most of it was mediocre content. (After all, as Ernie Kovacs so eloquently put it, “You know TV is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done.”)

The result of all of the time shifting, sharing and storage, of course, is that people are no longer eating the middle of the curve and instead are saving up the high-quality stuff to eat later and noshing on the low-quality stuff (mostly thanks to YouTube) whenever they want to see a cat flush the toilet, a bull dog ride a skate board, a skate boarder crash or an infinite number of other things to entertain themselves for a moment, at that moment.

ONE OTHER THING THE CURVE TELLS YOU: BRANDS MATTER LESS AND LESS.

Finally, as Surowiecki also notes — under these new conditions, as we’ve written before:

The result is that brands matter less: a recent Nielsen survey found that more than sixty per cent of consumers think that stores’ generic products are equal in quality to brand-name ones. In effect, the more information people have, the tighter the relationship between quality and price: if you can deliver a product or service that is qualitatively better, you can charge top dollar. But if you can’t deliver the quality you can’t get the price. (Even Apple, after all, couldn’t make Apple TV a hit.)

It’s a point that I’ve been debating with the CEO’s and senior level executives of advertising agencies for well over two years now.  (And I completely understand see their point of view: ’cause when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail — and, after all, their existence is based on pitching brands, so it’s hard for them to see that brands matter less in a world of constantly iterative products. But that’s the natural result of TheCurve. So, please, if you won’t take my word for it, take James Surowiecki’s.)

The reason, as noted earlier in “Consumer Goods and TheCurve,” is that as the cost of production and distribution drop, goods inevitably become mass produced commodities — not just consumer goods but all forms of content and entertainment.

(Oh, and once again, before everyone goes pointing to Apple as being the most obvious exception to the rule that brands mater less, please read (“Apple Stumbles Along the Curveabout how Apple is as much a service company as it is a product company.  And how, in a world of iterative products, service matters more than ever — which is something that Microsoft has never understood and, alas, something far too many technology based companies, especially start-ups, fail to understand.)

More on how technology moves things to the extremes — including the world of sports and sports fans’ behaviors — in posts to follow.

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