Thursday, September 28, 2006

Norwegian new media group aims at Delfi?

An Estonian newspaper has published a story saying that Norway's Schibsted media group may be looking to buy the Delfi Baltic and Russian language internet portals.
This could be a challenge to all of the conventional press and fledgling internet media in the region. In Norway, Schibsted owns the VG newpaper and multimedia portal, whose managers are said to have tired of hosting visitors to their futuristic operation, where much content is reader generated (both news, photos, video and sound/podcasts).
This may well be the media of the future, with a live, constantly changing "page" on the internet that will slowly eat away reader/user/participant attention from the printed press and ordinary TV.
One would like to think that Lattelecom is moving in a similar direction, where "My Page" generated by a broadband internet connection with user input will greet and guide everyone who logs on through a range of personal and business services. But that is probably a couple of years off and worthy of a seperate post.
The basic issue for this kind of media, if it already hasn't captured and engaged an audience, is whether it may be preempted by a programmable software agent (perhaps open source freeware or an advertising-supported version) that allows the user to define and manage his or her experience entirely from the edge of the network. That sort of leaves the operator, like Lattelecom or anyone else, holding little else but the network. After all, why, having paid for a broadband connection (flat rate) should user A (on the edge of the network) share any more revenue with the operator for providing (for payment, perhaps) user B with entertainment or information?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just read a couple of weeks ago in The Economist that this is really succesful and innovative company and they set it as exapmle for all other media companies.

Juris Kaža said...

Marci,
This was the death of newspapers issue, I read it too. :).

Anonymous said...

i just wondering that you made typo in link to russian delfi

Juris Kaža said...

The link seemed to work back in November. Did you find Russian Delfi anyway?