I love, love, love this article about why TV is loosing the war against computers as the preferred medium for advertising and entertainment. It’s what I think about whenever I am forced to watch live network TV (which I limit to new episodes of Lost). While I know some very lovely folks in traditional advertising and marketing, the industry as a whole has been broken for a very long time.

Paul Graham breaks down the reason for this outcome into four main factors:

1. Open platforms that support innovation through the creation of an open market;
2. The exponentially increasing capabilities of internet bandwidth over the past 15 years or so;
3. Piracy (the ease-of-use of iTunes, the Kindle, and Hulu are reactions to this trend that have only recently become succesful);
4. Social networking (which is most popular and useful to teenagers, who have grown/ are growing into the new media professionals of the future).

I’d also add a fifth point, which Graham touches on in his article:

5. The increasing globalization of pop culture makes local programming (previously a strenght of TV) almost entirely irrelevant.

Overall this is great food for thought, not just as a (recent) history lesson, but as an indicator what types of strategies succeed online. Increasing relevant social connections, improving ease-of-use, contextualizing related materials, planning for future technological capabilities – these are some of the tactics you hear about in reference to successful startups all the time. It’s time that traditional media embraces its failure as a learning opportunity, instead of ceaselessly fighting it.

Via Boing Boing.