"Quickly...I must set the time machine's controls for the heart of EastEnders!"

A friend of mine who lives in the US recently told me that his children no longer watch television in what might be described as the traditional manner – the traditional manner being to tune into a channel when a scheduled programme is due to air. Instead, my friend’s teenage offspring  either watch programmes on Hulu and YouTube, two video sharing  websites, or they record them using  Tivo, a hard driver recorder like Sky+ and watch them later. Their other way of consuming television programmes is to watch them on a DVD.

What  these children in Florida are doing is time shifting – using technology to consume media content at a time of their own choosing rather than at the time the medium dictates. The ability to time shift has been brought about by new technology: the video recorder in the late 70s, CDs, DVDs, recordable hard drives, and now broadband internet and mobile communications, and innovations like the BBC’s iPlayer and podcasting.

While initially a feature of TV viewing, time shifting has also now begun to affect radio and print media – why wait for the hard copy edition when I can read it online now? It’s also begun to create what could be called content aggregation. In the same way that Google’s news page draws content from a huge range of sources to create Google’s own front page, the web allows me to identify what interests me and create, in effect, my own newspaper or magazine to be browsed at a time of my choosing.

The effect of time shifting and content aggregation is to turn TV channels into content providers and brands. It’s no longer about viewer loyalty to a channel; it’s about loyalty to specific shows which can be consumed in many different ways – most entirely unrelated to the original channel. For example, BBC News has morphed into a trusted news brand rather than the scheduled news output of the BBC. I can watch BBC news – or at least snippets of it – in any range of places and at any time. I trust that news because it’s the BBC, in much the same way as I trust a Mexican ready meal from M&S.

Print news is also being systematically deconstructed by technology. Once the Daily Telegraph was a newspaper to be delivered in the morning and read over breakfast or on the train: now the Telegraph is a provider of hundreds, if not thousands, of packets of news content to be distributed all over the media, backed by the Daily Telegraph brand. One can easily foresee how the content from different B2B trade magazines could be branded and used in a range of other places.

For communicators, these trends mean the loss of reassuringly familiar advertising spaces and the inability to know when a customer will actually receive a message. They mean that reaching a broad based audience is becoming harder, but reaching a niche audience is becoming easier. Control is being eroded in some ways but added in others – for example, if I place a video on YouTube I can tell precisely how many viewings it has had.

What we’re seeing is the democratisation of news and entertainment content on a massive scale. The old control and command style of communication is holed below the waterline and what’s replacing it is something altogether more diffuse and with a longer tail. If I may speak metaphorically, once upon a time communicators believed they could send a message in much the same way as someone shoots a bullet from a rifle at a target; today, it’s more a case of crafting your message like a product in a supermarket and waiting to see if the shoppers bite. It may fly off the shelves, or it may be consigned to the bargain basement bin!

The B2B space is just beginning to feel the impact of these changes, but the effects are real. The key is that it will be the businesses who adapt best to the new style of messaging who reap the rewards of the newly-opened media content supermarket.

Written by Adrian Beeby