Audiences are hungrier than ever for content. iMedia's editor in chief explores the role of strategic content delivery in helping marketers deliver what they're craving.

At this particular cultural moment, Americans are investing more and more of their free time in media but, ironically, finding eyeballs for content has never been harder. Media is fragmenting -- both across channels and within them -- as cable TV channels proliferate on one hand while online video sites and services explode on the other. Meanwhile, no matter how much more time they spend, audiences can never catch up, and so they are learning to carve their own path rather than be led.

What we're seeing with television programs and movies today is exactly what we watched happen to music a few years back: the anatomization of content. Just as the concept album has been broken down into its component songs that listeners buy piecemeal, the idea of a "Must See TV" Thursday night evening of programs that audiences will sit still to watch in a block is as antiquated as a 300 baud modem. The days when you could categorize a person as a CBS watcher (translation, "old") or an NBC watcher ("hip, ironic") are gone. Even individual programs and movies are getting broken down, with the good bits showing up on YouTube and other sites.

With music, what we've seen is that the combination of iTunes and the iPod recentralized the experience to the small box that so many of us carry around. That centralization hasn't happened yet with video content.

The simple question that ought to be burning into the minds of everybody working in media -- but doesn't yet seem to be -- is in which room in the average American's house will all these different media slam into each other? The clear answer is the living room with the big-screen television. That's where most people want to lean back and zone out, but the problem is that most streaming or downloadable content is going to the wrong place, which is the room with the cable modem or DSL box.

But it's the rare home in this country that has figured out how to lay the 10 feet of wire to plug the internet into the back of the TV. Here's how Henry Jenkins -- the MIT professor who has arguably spent the most time of any person thinking through these things -- describes his own experience in his book, "Convergence Culture":

I don't know about you, but in my living room, I am seeing more and more black boxes. There are my VCR, my digital cable box, my DVD player, my digital recorder, my sound system, and my two game systems, not to mention a huge mound of videotapes, DVDs and CDs, game cartridges and controllers, sitting atop, laying alongside, toppling over the edge of my television system… The perpetual tangle of cords that stands between me and my "home entertainment" center reflects the degree of incompatibility and dysfunction that exist between the various media technologies… what we are now seeing is the hardware diverging while the content converges. (Page 15.)

Crossing those last 10 feet is as great a challenge today as delivering physical goods -- the "last mile to nowhere" in the words of a fascinating Strategy & Business article from back in late 2000 -- was in the first internet bubble.

Late last month at our iMedia Entertainment Marketing Summit, I had the pleasure of opening the show with a research presentation on changing audience behavior and how entertainment companies are following rather than leading (you can download the slides here).

What I argued onstage is that audiences are hungrier than ever for content, but have to work harder to find it. Online, internet use increased in 2006 to 8.9 hours per week (according to the Center for the Digital Future). And Nielsen Media Research tells us that TV watching time increased to a staggering eight hours and twenty-one minutes per day in 2005, yet as of March 2007 the average American only watched 15.7 of the 104.2 channels available to them.

In the near future, media and technology companies that figure out how to make it easy for people to find programming wherever they happen to be will be the big winners, while those that think of their IP first and their audiences second will watch those audiences wander away.

For a good look at changing audience behavior, download my deck, and for a compelling overview of how the media companies are and aren't responding to fragmentation, I can recommend James L. McQuivey's recent Forrester report, "Paid Video Downloads Give Way To Ad Models."

McQuivey convincingly argues that online content distribution will break down into two flavors familiar from the dawn of cable TV: the majority of television programming will be free and ad-supported rather than pay-per-download, while movies will be subscription based (a la HBO and other premium cable channels). But media companies should play the field rather than marrying one particular channel. In McQuivey's words:

Bet on all possible distribution partners. You don't pick which gas stations sell your DVDs today, so why should you be so finicky about your electronic distribution partners? Plus, if you liberally distribute, no one player can do to film and video what Steve Jobs did to music labels like Sony BMG and Universal. Let Wal-Mart sell, let iTunes sell, and if you're holding short-form content, stream it every possible place you can…

Any company that bets on a single distribution channel will find itself standing in the shoes of CBS, which had such a failure with its "Innertube" online channel that CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith recently quipped in the Wall Street Journal that it should have been called "CBS.com/nobodycomeshere."

Another worthwhile focus of the report is in-home sharing, what I call "the last 10 feet."

Here's a key passage:

Media distributors, when you are solicited by CE [consumer electronics] makers, online video retailers, web-streaming software developers or service providers to lend your content to their new solution, ask them to explain their strategy for in-home sharing. If they don't have one, let their name fall to the bottom of the list, even if that name is Wal-Mart.

In-home sharing is particularly important to younger audiences. According to the Center for the Digital Future, the 12- to 24-year-old set is particularly focused on moving content from the iPod to the laptop to the big-screen and back again, all without paying extra.

Another perspective on how different media streams all converge in the living room is called "OTT" or "Over the Top," in which the back of the TV has a wire leading to the  internet as well as the one that connects to the cable box. This is a big deal because it can change the default screen that you see when you turn on the TV from whatever your cable box is on to just about anything on the internet, so rather than moving YouTube videos from the PC to the TV you'd simply stream directly from the TV. Media thinkers like Shelly Palmer and David L. Smith are spending a lot of time contemplating it these days. Stay tuned for a cover story by Smith about OTT coming later this summer.

The takeaway from all this is that while the media landscape itself is fragmenting, individuals and families will increasingly have the opportunity to reintegrate their media at a hardware level, and this should further complicate an already bewildering advertising universe. One constant is that people will always want to be entertained and will always need help finding new and exciting shows to watch, and that's where entertainment marketers step into the situation.

Brad Berens is editor in chief and chief content officer at iMedia Communications. Read full bio.