Jake King
Newbold
ENG 213 Section 004
10-20-10
Emerging Media Paper
How Will People Afford the New Media?
Article: Emerging Media: The Cookie Monster
The proliferation of new media channels presents an interesting conundrum: How will consumers be able to afford all these new services?
In class, we have been discussing how advancements in technology have made an impact in our world, whether it be how we communicate, learn, collaborate, or view the working world as a whole. We have seen positive and negative impacts, such as how schools are dealing with their teachers having limited knowledge to teach their students regarding technology or how luxuries like Google give everyone the same availability to knowledge. But something that is brought up in the article Emerging Media: The Cookie Monster by Damien Stolarz is the role of money in all these new advancements, whether it is how technology companies make more money from it and how none of it may matter if hardly anybody can afford it. The main topics he addresses are how consumers end up paying for media from several places and what businesses do to continue gaining new consumers.
Stolarz states in his first sentence that TV companies are always looking for what they like to call the “triple play” customer. This means that the customer subscribes to a home phone, cable, and TV from the same carrier. At times nowadays, companies can even find the “quadruple play” customers, those who have the triple play services along with the mobile phone. “Although this seems like hitting the customer convenience jackpot, a rule of thumb for subscription services is to not let that bill get too big,” Stolarz states. But Stolarz then brings up a problem concerning that fourth piece of media. “Now that you can watch video content online, on your phone, on your portable media player, and even in your car, the real question is how many different subscription fees consumers can endure.” These are the same new types of media we have been looking at in how our world has changed due to them, but the convenience of them may not matter in the future if the availability of them in so many areas becomes too much for the average consumer to handle financially. Stolarz says, “The prospect of developing new businesses that expand demand for their content on new platforms is exciting, but the threat of cannibalization of their existing revenue streams is also real.” An example of this would be the DVD industry. Many content owners feared DVDs at first, yet the market of it grew enormously. So to think that mobile, internet, and in-car content won’t continue to fight would be ludicrous.
But despite some of the disadvantages businesses have in selling their emerging media in this manner, there is still light at the end of the tunnel that keeps them alive. Stolarz uses the example of when TV came into our country. “Consumers don’t want to view ads. But there’s one thing they object to even more: spending money. This is how TV in the U.S. took hold. The availability of a world of free content compelled penetration into 99% of U.S. households. Building value-added cable and, later, satellite services on top of this unmatched installed base proved not only feasible but profitable,” he writes. The same type of advertising is taking place when it comes to internet and TV has come along for the ride. There are TV screens at gas pumps, in taxis, and don’t forget about the huge plasma TVs at the mall, which are strategically placed in purchase-decision locations creating a vicious cycle where continues to be made. Stolarz gives his opinion of how the same type of deal will take place with our new emerging media and the internet. “It starts with location. Your phone asks for your zip code. Gradually, with GPS, carriers learn where you are at any time. Then they can stream some (ad-supported) video newscast relevant to the place you’ve just driven to. Most importantly, the phone remembers, "OK, this phone owner goes between these two places a lot. I bet they’d prefer JetBlue." This will lead JetBlue to be advertised near this customer for it to be purchased.
The point of this article is to explain how the industries in charge of the new emerging technologies in our world are comparable to the loveable cartoon addict we know as the Cookie Monster. The Cookie Monster knows one thing and one thing only, and that’s that cookies are absolutely delicious just like these industries know that the internet, mobile phones, etc. are all in great demand for convenience. And just as the Cookie Monster doesn’t know when to stop eating cookies, these industries don’t seem to even be looking for a way to have these medias at rest. The internet is becoming a necessity, and they know that people will continue to purchase several methods of access to it. As this activity grows, so will prices and internet bills leaving the power and convenience of the new emerging media almost worthless since it will be at a point where hardly anyone can afford them.
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