Online Media vs. Offline Media

According to a story on Yahoo News, Google doesn't believe that television should fear the threat that the Internet poses to more tradtional media. "We're computer scientists,"said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, "We're not brilliant storytellers or content creators."

Currently, television producers are concerned that video sharing sites like You Tube could cut into their marketshare, but Google pooh-poohs it. "[T]here are social reasons that will cause both mediums to survive," says Mayer.

However, both television execs and Google execs have a common interest in turning online video in profits. The challenge is for network execs to take their content to "new, and rapidly evolving, delivery formats." Google merely wants to be "one of the players providing that platform."

This is more evidence for a trend that is clearly developing as an increasing amount of video content is being delivered through the Internet. Big media players are going to start producing content for the web, and the online shows that will attain the most popularity will have the biggest budgets, so they will look very much like television. That will not be good.