Watching the Nervous Little TV Networks

A recent article (Watching the Nervous Little TV Networks) notes that the death of traditional TV itself is inevitable and is going to happen soon. I agree. In fact, I implied some of these things myself in a recent post. I think it is definitely the future and that future isn't very far off. BUT, it will take a visionary leader in the space. One that will really be able to capitalize on the fact that the Internet is so much more targetable, so much more measurable and so is so much more valuable than a random 30-second spot.

A person who commented on the article also noted that the effectiveness of ads not only depends on context, but also timeliness of the ad. He gives the example of holiday shoping. I agree with that, but I also think that the dynamic nature of online can easily accomodate that. For instance, instead of ads being frozen in time within a given content block (e.g. think of renting an old movie from Blockbuster and seeing those "coming soon" ads for "Coming to America" or some other ancient movie), by allowing ads to be dynamically placed in ad slots (like how iFrames are used for online ads now), current and timely ads can be rotated in and out, depending on the time of year and even the time of DAY that the content and ad are viewed.

Anyway, I think the age of TV over the Internet is just over the horizon. It's just going to take someone with vision that can come up with the technology and the ideas to make it work. It's that easy... kinda.