TELECOM Digest OnLine - Sorted: As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind

As Gadgets Get It Together, Media Makers Fall Behind

Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)
Sun, 29 Jan 2006 01:24:03 -0500

By SAUL HANSELL
The New York Times
January 25, 2006

AMID the cacophony of the sprawling Consumer Electronics Show in Las
Vegas earlier this month, the main action had little to do with
electronics. Sure, booth after booth claimed to have the biggest TV
screen, the smallest music player and the niftiest wireless gizmo.
But that was to be expected.

The real news was neither shiny nor tiny. The question in the air was
what people will watch, listen to and do with these machines now that
they are becoming interchangeable and interconnected.

This should not be a pop quiz. For decades, nearly every gathering of
media or technology executives has defined the future in a single
word: convergence. What exactly was converging remained in dispute,
but most saw some combination of television, computers and an
intelligent network that would give consumers much more control.

For once, the visionaries were right. Video is popping up on
cellphones, iPods, TiVo's and Web sites. And as for blogs,
photo-tagging sites like Flickr, podcasts and the rest of the bubbling
digital stew, it's clear that lots of media are coming together in
lots of devices in lots of ways.

Yet for all the time that media executives - from the towers of Sixth
Avenue to the back lots of Burbank - had to prepare for convergence,
they are now scrambling to figure out what to do about it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/technology/techspecial2/25converge.html?ex=1295845200&en=98a3113619054d4b&ei=5090

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