MaaS - Media as a Service

Jeremiah - my friend and fellow Media 2.0 Workgroup member wonders out loud if media is becoming a service much like software.

I think it's an interesting question. I have recently re-downloaded the Joost Beta and started playing with it. A lot has been made about Joost's platform and how it is actually based on an elegant combination of on open standards technology.

It occurred to me that Joost (or something like it) could become for TV what the browser is for the Web.

While they are focusing on content deals with premium content providers right now - they have an opportunity to become the generic user interface for loading, remixing and socializing around streaming video content.

This would seem to me a step closer to Jeremiah's premise of Media as a Service (MaaS). If Cable TV is replaced by Joost, and Joost becomes an open service for the distribution of high-quality video content on scale, then we are indeed creating a series of tools, platforms and services that give us enormous capacity for media creation and distribution on demand.

Other companies like Microsoft, SplashCast and others are working towards similar services with very different implementations.

How can up and coming artists, enterprises and established media players take advantage of this emerging trend?

If media services are on tap, what are the implications for user choice and Attention Scarcity.

Follow up: Social Media is dead... or not

Looks like social media is not dead after all - but only just being born.

Stowe Boyd posts about his painful experience with a group of PR people as they talk about how to make 'Social Media Press Releases' - apparently they totally missed the point.

Brian Oberkirch also posts along similar lines talking about the fear felt in PR firms when trying to craft new forms of press releases and start blogs.

He hits the nail on the head:

"Blogs aren’t killing traditional media — attention scarcity and the decay of their business models is. Craigslist and other efficient attention allocators are draining media revenues, not East Chumuckla Joe and his online opinions about the Iraq war. Likewise, social media aren’t a replacement or extension of your traditional marketing tools. The question isn’t whether an online press release format should replace a traditional one. It’s much more gamechanging than that. Given the erosion of the traditional media system and the extension of a much more connected, distributed information ecosystem, how should companies communicate with those who matter to their business?"