As for the bigger kids, I think ESPN is a good analogy. Also, you can’t tell me that it doesn’t matter if a news/interview show appears on FoxNews or MSNBC, right? Those channels are happy to mess with our national political dialogue to define and keep their brand loyalty.

It’s not that I totally disagree with you. I think the days of pre-programmed TV schedules are in dinosaur mode. Actual, physical channels (tune to #232 for NBC) will probably go away as well, replaced by menu-driven content categories – much the way On Demand is structured now. But those content categories are the channels. They lend credibility, manage expectations, define social networks, etc. – just like their online counterparts. Heck – even Facebook has “channels,” as defined by how you categorize your friends to read your news feed. I’m more than happy to kick back with my “Friends from College” channel for a couple of hours once in a while…

I would love to be able to describe existing media companies as follows:

“Like newspaper owners, media moguls are looking for new ways to increase return on their investment given the rapid growth of the Internet.”

“Channel” was just shorthand for the business who owned a particular part of the broadcast spectrum. It should have been dead a long time ago (since cable eliminated the need to own a chunk of spectrum). How about “content curator”?

But I also realize that for people who are native to the on-demand world, this just isn’t the case. One of my younger employees cut her cable and just does online video and Netflix.

So overall I’d say “channels” may be a vestige, but “trusted creators” of content are certainly not. In fact, more than ever, people could rally around certain creators of content, regardless of what distribution platform they happen to be on. Whether it’s Josh Whedon, J.J. Abrams, ESPN or Jib Jab, WHO made the content is going to be more and more important than WHERE it is displayed.

I don’t think that younger people miss this as much, though. For most of their lives they have been consuming in this way–there have always been DVDs and computers that play DVDs, playstations, etc. How can the channel not die? Who loves CHANNELS? There are a few exceptions of channels who do inspire brand loyalty, like maybe Animal Planet, the Food Network, Cartoon Network, (maybe MTV) where everything is generally really similar, but highly dispensable. It’s dead.

I would like for someone to redefine the channel so that a channel becomes learning content listing service. The closest metaphor that I can point today is Amazon. They have the personalized store that suggests items that I would like to buy based on my past history. I’ve seen Tivo try to do this, poorly. My “Channel” would be based on my watching habits but it would also be based on suggestions that I get from “my Friends” in my “TV Social Network”. So we can suggest shows to each other and even send each other clips from our favorite shows.

Will this happen via Uverse, Satellite or Cable? I doubt it. Maybe Hulu or youTube (Google) will get us there one day. The lawyers and the TV companies that they represent will not go easily. One day soon TV, as we know it, will be in the same position that the newspapers are in today.

We *know* today that the “channel,” as currently defined, will eventually die. The only question is: “How long will it take?” In the future, rather than transmitting the same content to all system subscribers, what we’ll have is “all-on-demand-all-the-time.” The Cable providers will become just ISPs. Each subscriber will choose what content flows to them. This is not a guess. It is what will inevitably happen. It is just as inevitable as the decline of news on paper, photos on film, music on physical media, movies on tape or only in theaters, etc.

Sometimes, we can see the future long before it happens and sometimes others who see the same future can act to slow its arrival. But, the best they can do is slow things down. For instance, my grandfather worked on “on-demand” delivery of movies to home televisions back in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s (Zenith’s “Phonevision” had several hundred subscribers in the Chicago area for a short period.). It was clear even then that on-demand movies were inevitable. The mere fact that it took 40 years before the technology became widely deployed is irrelevant. My grandfather’s problem wasn’t in seeing the future, it was only in not realizing how long it would take to arrive.

The impact of technological innovation is largely inevitable. Those who resist the inevitable will eventually fail. At best, they can only hope to delay change until after they retire or otherwise cash-out.

bob wyman