Audience Fragmentation

Much of the discussion at last week’s Digital Media Innovation Forum was around the continued fragmenting of viewership. As Limelight CSO Mike Gordon put it, ” We all pretty much have watched the same things, and used the same gadgets and tools. But today, convergence and conformance are shattered. Convergence is over and it isn’t coming back. Welcome to fragmentation.”

Two articles published this week provide even more backup for this very point. The Wall Street Journal reports that network viewing audiences are eroding, and the declining numbers aren’t being offset by DVR viewing. Quoted is Alan Wurtzel, president of research at General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal., who says that “The hard truth is that we are in a hugely fractionalized environment, which continues to become more fractionalized.”

Also reported this week is that Apple sold over 6.9 million iPhones, making the company the third largest cell phone manufacturer. What this means is that in the past three months alone, almost 7 million people can now access rich, streaming media on a handheld built for multimedia. Not only are they fragmenting their viewership, they’re untethered.

If you are interested in seeing the presentations from last week’s conference, they are now available on-demand by clicking here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 7:40 am and is filed under Content Delivery Network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.