IP Democracy: Must-Read: The Primordial Soup of Media Convergence

Saul Hansell has an excellent overview in today’s New York Times about the arrival of convergence and how, despite the decades-old predictions that convergence is on the way, media moguls and traditional content distributors are nonetheless flummoxed about how to deal with it.

My favorite passage contains an assesment from a media visionary who is not much quoted these days.

“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.”

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 25, 2006 7:47 AM to IP Democracy