Month: January 2006

Here’s an article on Rediff.com about the possibility of newspapers becoming extinct. The premise is that the Internet as a distribution channel, with online newspapers, blogs, wikis and message boards as the content, supported by online (in place of print) advertising, is threatening the very existence of newspapers. According to the article, newspaper circulation is declining, and there’s a vicious circle being formed, with newspapers wanting to shore up revenues by charging advertisers more, who won’t pay until circulation goes up.

In the context of India, though, the threat to the print medium has little to do with the Internet. The penetration of this medium is so poor in India it doesn’t even matter. So from a newspaper’s point of view, blogs, wikis and other online sources of news can take a hike, they don’t even register on the threat radar in this country.

The real threat to newspapers is from Television. From the 24×7 news channels in most major regional languages, and English and Hindi, of course. From the fierce competition among them to provide up-to-the-second updates on everything from cricket scores to the stock market to politics.

The usage model I’m increasingly seeing is: most folks catch up on news throughout the day via TV – or at least in the morning and then during prime time. (which is why the 9PM news bulletin is such a big deal). The next morning they don’t want to see the same news again, this time in print – they’ve already seen that.

What they want is analyses and opinion pieces with regard to that piece of news. They want special reports on a range of topics. Something to complement what they’ve already seen on TV the previous day. That’s the challenge before newspapers today. Content matters more now. I realise that I’ll probably be raising a few hackles here – given readers’ loyalty to newspapers – but the Indian Express seems to be gaining in popularity and readership over the past year. It’s got to do both with the steady improvement in the op-ed section of IE, and the gradual but unmistakable tabloidization of the Times of India. The newspaper is taking the place of the “weeklies” that used to dominate this kind of print content in the 80s and 90s – they’re becoming “dailies” in a different sense.

Now this is really exciting – “MTNL, BSNL to kick-off IPTV from Mumbai, Chennai“. Television via telephone lines! [ via]

It remains to be seen if anyone can offer these services, over MTNL and BSNL’s lines, or if the two state-owned telcos will attempt to “lock-in” users into their content. The problem, of course, is MTNL and BSNL have not yet decided what business they are in. If they are telecom companies, then they ought to stick to maintaining the telecom infrastructure around India. But they imagine that they are ISPs, too – so they’ve “locked in” consumers into using only MTNL’s Triband and BSNL’s DataOne Internet services over their copper-wire infrastructure. Now they also imagine that they’re content providers. Going by past experience, there’ll be a messy “licencing” and “bidding” process for channels/content providers to provide television over, for instance, MTNL’s Triband service.

It would be interesting to see how MTNL would react if there were a service that offered, let’s say, an ad-supported, web-based TV-channel that operated via the RealPlayer or Windows Media Player plugin inside a browser.

I’ve set out to read up on as much as I can on the immense penetration (and hence usage) of broadband internet in South Korea, which Wired Magazine had dubbed “The Bandwidth Capital of the World” a couple of years ago. Even though I can just look and wish we in India’d pull up our socks and get that kind of (or even better) infrastructure here. Anyways, I’ll leave wishful thinking for another day, and list what I’ve been reading:

Om Malik: How South Korea got its Broadband Mojo
Om Malik: 200 KBPS is Not Broadband
Om Malik: Broadband? What broadband?
ZDNet: Broadband: Lessons from South Korea
Wired: The Bandwidth Capital of the World
San Francisco Chronicle: The future is South Korea
CNet: South Korea’s house of the future
Emergic.org: Venture Capital in South Korea
The Standard: Online Social Network Scores Hit in South Korea
Newsofttechnology: South Korea Pushes Mobile Broadband