spc-cu-261-50 0002 Before it all goes splat!

All media has been based on restricting access to a scarce resource.

Among his other quotable quips, Leibnitz famously said: "The Power Of The Press Belongs To Those Who Own One."

That was fine for print... The cost of a printing press and the distribution options for printed material were effective limiting factors.

Not so with the advent of radio, and television, which was dependent on some thing which was inherently free, but access to which was inherently uncontrolled.

The FCC was created to bring order out of chaos and made the air waves a scarce resource.

As such, the price of entry has been going up since its creation in the 1920s.

Now auctions of chunks of spectrum of the air waves bring it billions of dollars in revenue, and that is before anyone can even say "boo!" (That costs extra.)

The inevitable result of this is the largely successful attempts at media consolidation to extract maximum profits from the resources bid on.

Ideally, the FCC is whittling the players down to an oligopoly of media conglomerates.

In print, audio and video, its a close see-saw between a diminishing number of players chasing a diminishing number of dollars and a slowly increasing potential pool of audiences who are abandoning the media and getting lives and other addictions.

Soon there will only be Clear Channel, Infinity Broadcasting, Cox and a smattering of very minor players responsible for the megaphones and loupes, (along with PBS, NPR, PRI and Pacifica on the non-profit sector.)

But while this consolidation continues, (abated by the weakness of the economy and by the lack of any political will to do anything about anything,) there is something else at play outside the purview of any broadcaster.

We have a situation of tighter and tighter fists clutching harder and harder at a shrinking range of broadcasting, but media are escaping the rules and regulations of the FCC, and the high cost, highly leveraged options of broadcasting.

The rise of the internet and its evolution into a fabulous, formidable and nearly free communication infrastructure is a golden opportunity to toss aside the tyranny of the transmission tower.

In addition the development RSS provides us with a golden opportunity to toss aside the tyranny of the clock. You can receive any media, as soon as it becomes available, as soon as you are ready to receive it. (No more missing missives because you weren't there. [A criticism that can actually be levelled to a lesser extent at streaming media which can be set up by anybody, played while dismissing the lessons of TiVO and ignored by all. {If nobody's listening, why not just shut up?}])

Finally, the digitization of written, oral and visual content means that any and all of these can be sent from a specific location to a specific location and that the transfer of a perfect copy is verifiable and trackable. (There is no need for a "Nielsen" "guess"timating the size of your "potential audience" since you have the statistics on your dowloads by your "real audience".)

In fact, it will only seem that everything is going "pear shaped" because the level of granularity of the detail is something unparalled in history.

The media businesses are entirely unprepared for it.

But their customer's aren't.