Soundoff: Executive Soundbytes on “Content”
Songs capture a moment in time. They play in background as soundtracks to our lives. Games become pastimes. TV episodes, appointments. Movies remain our escapes and fantasies. At water coolers and barstools, we critique and borrow their dialog : “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “Phone home.” Don’t believe it? Fine, “No soup for you.”
From blogs to movies, webisodes and clips to comics and film, from ha-ha funny, to tear-jerker sad, we live in a world hungry for media. We feed that hunger with mass media and the alternative; with songs and sound bytes, in features and micro-chunks. We engage with it on computers, at home, at work, in the car, on the go. We consume it. On a phone. On a TV. Via consoles and portables, real-time and “time shifted” too.
“Content is King” or at least, esteemed royalty. Today, in acknowledgment of how the media world continues to evolve Metue presents a third brief collection of recent notable quotations, this time on “Content,” the manna that fuels our entertainment appetites:
"We are now in a fragmented search economy, which means we need to extend our content beyond our own destination sites so consumers can reach it more easily … The content mountain has officially relocated." Sumner Redstone, Chairman of Viacom at Nielsen’s Media and Money conference.
“There’s still a place for appointment media — a home-delivered newspaper on the porch each morning or an evening newscast while making dinner. But it is a smaller place. People, of course, want the news when they want it. Even more difficult to accept, they want control over what they get…. readers and viewers are demanding to captain their information ships. Let them. … More people are accessing news more frequently than ever before the world over. All media platforms — video, audio, digital and even text — are seeing growth. Demand for the four major content areas — news, entertainment, sports and financial — continues to rise….. The adjustment we’re being asked to make is to a world of increased access, new competition and different business models. It’s not about easing onto the obit page.” Tom Curley, President of the Associated Press on the future of media during a keynote speech at a Colombia University School of Journalism event.
"Sometimes you feel like sitting back and – as William Hurt said in the Big Chill – letting “Art wash over you.” And sometimes you want to be creative, and there’s no reason why you can’t have both of those experiences.” Tom Abernathy, co-founder of gaming studio Pandemic Studios on what kind of experience people want to have. ( via Gamasutra ) (Note: Pandemic was recently acquired by EA).
"Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money. They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing. … We don’t want to replace the dollars we wer making in the analog world with pennies on the digital side." Jeff Zucker, CEO NBC Universal (via New Yorker)
"The relationship people have with their cell phones is very personal. We can’t ignore that…. We need evolve from being a content company to an audience company.” Cyriac Roeding EVP CBS Mobile (via New York Times)
“If we look at this connected world we’re entering, sports is sort of a social and cultural glue that reaches across the globe. There is am opportunity for EA Sports to evolve beyond a games brand to become a true global sports and entertainment brand, and I think we can compete there.” Peter Moore, President EA Sports upon leaving Microsoft to join Electronic Arts.
"Media is transforming, audiences are transforming…. It would be easy to say that the sheer pace of this revolution is too fast for the BBC … but I think we can see both here and around the world the price you pay for taking what looks like the safe option.” Mark Thomson, Director General of BBC after cutting 1,800 jobs in mid October.
"The larger media companies are beginning to understand that the market place is really fragmented, meaning people consume content in a lot of different places. What they are realizing is that they can’t hoard all the content in one place, they have to distribute it to where people are spending their time, and people are spending time on sites like MySpace so it makes sense to do distribution deals with us as well as with other video sites." Chris DeWolfe, co-founder MySpace. (The Independent, July ‘07)
"Our ambition has always been to emerge as one of the world’s leading Internet movie firms… It took several years for us to turn our DVD rental business profitable and our online video expansion may take just as long." Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix During the Q3 Earnings conference call.
"I think the newspaper industry has stood there and watched while other media enterprises have taken our bacon and run with it." Sam Zell, recent buyer of the Chicago Tribune, to the newspaper trade group The Inland Press Association at their annual meeting.
Parting Shot: “Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted” – Groucho Marx
Related Metue content:
•Executive Quotes: Collected Quotations, Episode 1
•Executive Soundbytes: Collected Notable Quotes, Episode 2
