Times are changing

One of the reasons I love teaching and doing research in this field is that things are never static for very long. As many of you know, I'm teaching a programming strategies course here at IU. One of the challenges of doing that is that traditional strategies seem to be less and less relevant with each passing day. Now I don't mean to suggest that there's an "paradigm shift" happening, and all my old lecture notes, have to be completely thrown in the dustbin. But take a look these two announcements from the homepage of Broadcasting and Cable magazine:

Beginning February 1, ESPN ("the worldwide leader in sports!") Will launch a new service called mobile ESPN. This will piggyback on Sprint cellular phones to deliver what ESPN calls one touch real-time access to personalize content. Could it be that the days of the programmer having to deliver a large enough audience to satisfy advertisers are over? Now, if a sports enthusiast out there is interested in the national logrolling competitions enough to pay for it over mobile ESPN, then perhaps ESPN programmers need to consider it as content. Maybe not content for SportsCenter -- but it may not be justifiable to ignore it totally anymore. Logrolling of course is just an example here. Insert your own of obscure sports programming topic. Then consider mobile CNN, mobile E!, mobile Comedy Central.

CBS has continued to embrace the pod casting future. Last week they announced that they would offer each edition of 60 Minutes is a pod cast. And now they are offering three selections from their radio network to listeners who want to download it and listen have their own convenience. Today. I'm continuing a lecture on primetime scheduling strategies. The idea being scheduling shows at days and times to increase the likelihood of an audience being there. Now that the audience can choose to "be there" whenever they want... times are certainly changing

Gone are the days of the programmer having to balance delivering programming that attracts a large enough audience to satisfy advertisers Beginning fib or he first make less and less In this