Moving to Digital Media Worlds: Three Successive Transformational Waves

Abstract

An upheaval is taking place in media circles globally. There are new programme services, new distribution vehicles and new devices; at the same time, financing sources are being eroded, with a growing competition for advertising revenues. The companies must deal with changing expectations of the viewers, especially younger viewers. The legacy models, formerly based on geographic boundaries and scarcity of certain kinds of resources (i.e. spectrum) are under pressure; new services (server-based distribution of content) are location-agnostic (customers can access, for instance, YouTube or DailyMotion from any location). The ubiquity and rise of the Internet are turning upside down the legacy media logic (Busson and Pham, 2010). Media and telecommunication networks were hierarchical and had centralized architectures; the Internet has a decentralized architecture, open and flexible, allowing interaction at both ends (the receiver can become the transmitter), forging a major schism from that model.