What, you may be wondering, has come of our MogulWatch superspecial reports on megalomania and the failure of convergence? Well, it is with pleasant surprise that we note a slowdown in news on the entire topic. Could it be, could it possibly be, that people are coming to their senses?
No such luck. Next you’ll be wanting the kids on IRC to learn to use the Shift key, or office ladies to override irksome Microsoft Outlook mailer defaults. It ain’t gonna happen.
What is the recent news, though?
An intelligent, thorough, mensch-like appraisal of every extant interactive-television technology comes to us from Jake Richter, whom we regret to have discovered only now; he’s taking an hiatus. Richter lists five categories of interactive TV:
The man warmed the cockles of our stone-cold hearts by pointing out the manifest utility of the laughably primitive medium of teletext, the earliest mainstream multimedia technology.
We just hate the smug, faux-worldly tone of Canadian Business articles, but this piece on media convergence here has a zinger or two on offer.
[T]he meltdown in tech stocks and the continued freefall of Internet advertising have resulted in U.S. broadcasting giants like NBC and MTV seriously scaling back-or even pulling the plug on-their convergent offerings. By contrast, Canadian TV executives who dragged their feet on merging television with the Internet came away looking clairvoyant. For now, at least.... “Just because you own a new channel or a newspaper doesn’t mean that I want it.”
Yes, fine, whatever. It’s simply about greed. Or megalomania, as we put it. Remember, these plutocrats don’t even watch TV, and their office ladies wrangle their Microsoft Outlook for them.
Posted on 2001-05-20