OPEN

Forrester Vice President, Josh Bernoff, got in a useful soundbite when the was interviewed by Time magazine for a piece about new ways of selling content on the Web:

There
are big motives to make deals, [he] says…
namely, "fear and greed": fear of being flat-footed by new
technology, as the music business was, and greed, because "all of these
new distribution formats look like they have the potential to generate pretty
significant revenues."

The Time article (read it in full here) was called "Wanna buy a slice of sitcom?", and is a pretty good overview of the thinking going on at major US networks and studios following the launch of the video iPod, with iTunes now punting episodes of Desperate Housewives at $1.99 a pop to early adopters.

Fear and greed. In summary, they none of them want to end up having the party being taken away like the head-in-sand music industry with its fumbling of file-sharing etc.  They also know that new formats make niche content not only profitable but sometimes more profitable than lowest common denominator tat (long tail effect, anyone).

Examples cited are Family Guy (a show "un-cancelled" because of its massive sales on DVD, despite poor ratings, the traditional success metric) and the US version of the British comedy The Office, which has a small but very wealthy audience – exactly the sort of people networks think might shell out a couple of dollars to get the show to watch on the way home on their iPod..

Fear and greed. Interesting to think of the old players’ motivation for this scene, as
it were. You could take the fear and greed combination and immediately
understand, say, ITV’s acquisition of Friends Reunited (fear: buy
something on the web, anything… quick!) or AOL and Weblogs (greed:
let’s go monetise that phenomenon…).

: : While I’m on the subject of monetising. BBC’s Go Digital (available as a podcast, pod-fans) reported from the first dedicated podcast exhibition, Portable Media Expo in its last show. In signing off the reporter concluded that podcasting as a new industry was obviously beginning to take off, but that it was worrying that there were far more conversations and pitches aimed at how to monetise it than how to create great content, new formats for shows etc.

Independent podcasters have a great chance to compete with the mainstream media for listeners / viewers. But, as with blogs, on a level playing field it will be the quality of the content that will win out.