3 powerful opportunities in next generation media

For those who have not seen it, go to Betaworks's site and view their PowerPoint. It is simultaneously an investment ideal and a manifesto on areas of opportunities in the Web space. It is powered by prezi as well so it is also damm fun to play with.

Betaworks has really nailed it in terms of what a next generation media company is about. It is not about content. It is about using data to create powerful context for users in a distributed manner.

Next generation media will be about creating contextual platforms, data services and auxiliary revenue to let the users do their thing. Media will no longer be centralised. Rather, it will be massively distributed. There will be big rewards for anybody that enables this to happen.

Contextual platforms
Content platforms are as varied as they come. More often that not, content and context are bundled together in the platforms (see Twitter: tweets are content but the timing, the retweets, the @, the favourite etc are all context). Going forward, with content APIs becoming more open, I see pure contextual platforms being the next value drivers. StockTwits and Outside.In are 2 great examples. These service don't produce any content. They take what is out there and layer powerful context on top on it to value add to the content. This is how future aggregation should play.

Data services
I have blogged about the importance of data to media. Increasing, filtering data to uncover new business models and opportunities for individual media producers will be a real gold mine. Real time data analytics will also be where the action is. Services that analyses the data but presents only the nuggets of wisdom will be the winners.

Auxiliary revenueAs media become distributed, so will the services that enable the content producers to get paid. There will be specialised services that focuses on one particular way of revenue generation. Music for example might have services that focus on band tours, some on music merchandise, some on selling of music etc. The important thing is that these services will be open. Content producers will have the choice of mixing different revenue streams to suport themselves. There are opportunities to become the default provider for all the different sources of revenue.

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