Is Twitter the final nail in the coffin for the press?

While all the talk over recent years has been about the death of how the newspaper, it has always been said that the news industry is alive and kicking. So when Stephen Fry comes along and says:

“I’m not someone with press offices and all that kind of thing, but those like me in the public eye who have, have discovered it’s a magnificent way of cutting out the press.”

It got me thinking – could this really be the nail in the coffin for the press industry? Will we just follow the companies/people we are interested in to get the news?

I don’t think so.

For the people/companies we are interested in absolutely. I want to hear the minutest detail about Liverpool FC; I also want to know about the latest technology and I also want to know what is happening right now in the world.

The first two are easily solved in Twitter – I can find out the latest news about those two things in real time. The third is a bit more difficult – who should I follow? Do I rely on whats trending in Twitter search to find it?

No.

Here are the top trending items in Twitter right now:
Real Madrid, Chuck Norris, Ellen, Watchmen, Apple, Chelsea, #sxsw, Tweetie 1, #etech, #sf09

As you can see, it is somewhat populist (at least for the tech crowd) Not all the news I want to hear is populist. What about the news that Shakespeare’s first theatre has been found? That is interesting to me but I’d never see it if I was just using Twitter.

I also cannot subscribe to every person or company I am slightly interested in. I do not want to know every little detail about some companies just the key news stories.

For me, Twitter is a great news source for topics I am very interested in and telling me about populist news/events. But I do not always need real-time news. I want a place where I can also catch up on news and find out news that is deemed of interest to the general public.

For me that means news companies like the BBC, Sky et al need to have a presence on Twitter to monitor the major companies and catch the news, before packaging it up as a news story as they already do today. Twitter for them is just another source.

It looks like Sky have already started doing this..

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Having looked at the future of bandwidth, I started thinking about video as this is the major consumer of bandwidth today is video.

There is a huge amount of growth in this area online. Amazon’s Unbox, Cinema Now and iTunes all provide movies online and each file is 1.7GB in size. At 24Mbps this would take just under 10 minutes.. at 50Mbps the same movie would download in (unsurprisingly!) half the time. The time saving is nice but it’s not instant – from a consumer standpoint, you cannot beat now. Some form of instant start with it downloading in the background is much better. As per Virgin Media’s TV on Demand service. Using this method the speed increase makes little difference.

So where does the speed increase really start to help? The Livestation service allows you to deliver TV quality content via broadband. But so what? I can already get TV quality content. It’s called my TV They need to offer more than just the normal TV does. I am looking forward to seeing what this will be, at the moment the service is in beta and I wonder if it will end up being a platform licensed to existing TV providers instead.

BT Vision is an example of where the TV is being improved upon, but it is nothing new. Cable and satellite providers have been doing it for ages. Video on demand. So same thing just via a different medium. Still using the quickly evolving internet technologies may allow for a faster evolution of services than others. This evolution of services would increase bandwidth requirements if only because they would make the user consumer more content.

One improvement that has already rolled out on cable and satellite is HDTV. Providing HD over broadband for example would use around 15Mbps of bandwidth (compared to around 8Mbps for standard TV) so suddenly 24Mbps doesn’t sound like much. Whilst quality content and ease of use is still the major decision maker, things like HDTV, cross platform integration and other technologies are going to have an effect.

It strikes me that bandwidth will matter eventually. Homechoice was one of the first to integrate the TV and broadband connection but everyone I know who tried it has left now, which speaks volumes. It will be interesting to see what Tiscali will do with it now they have bought the service. It is no small ask but potentially, Virgin Media can put themselves in a strong position. They obviously need to provide quality content on demand and improve its interface but if they can innovate and take advantage of their bandwidth scale then there would be little the other broadband providers could do.. except Sky. They have been the innovator, bringing out products like Sky Plus and integrating its online services with its TV packages. Today, Sky is the company in a strong position.

Sky also have the bandwidth scale at least one way (the way that matters) via its satellite system, Virgin Media has bandwidth scale both ways. Historically, the old cable companies haven’t taken advantage of this but maybe now they are owned by one company – Virgin Media – things could change. BT doesn’t have the bandwidth scale past 24Mbps in the short term – will Sky and Virgin be able to take advantage?