Digital tools will definitely make traditional content better, and platforms like Joost (if it sorts itself out) or VideoEgg (if they get enough traction in the market) and many others will follow YouTube’s path of creating truly innovative ways of delivering and making a few bucks from content online.

Online content can certainly rival traditional TV. Why? Because apart from a few exceptions like Lost (which owes much of its success to being digitally enabled) and Studio 60 (which the idiots canceled after one season) and The John Stewart Show (which the dinosaurs loath to have online in the first place) the vast majority of traditional TV sucks!

It isn’t that hard to compete when the bar is so low.

That’s to say nothing of the fact that you can create inherently more engaging content online than in a one-directional medium like television. McLuhan was right about that one …

So JB, given this latest wave of love for professionally produced online content, does this mean that the sun set on Terry Semel’s old-school content reign at Yahoo a bit too soon? See: Say goodbye to Hollywood

Personally, I’m not so sure that folks like Rupert, Sumner, Barry and co. can pull it off. If other media dinosaurs like newspapers (print in general, actually) and music have proven one thing, they’re incredibly slow to react to changes created by the internet. And make no mistake, they react. They do not innovate. I can’t think of one real innovation that MSM has successfully brought to the internet. Sure, they’ve bought a lot, but what have they brought?

And then there’s Google – always ready to get in the game, whatever game it is. See the Guardian:
Google turns to X Factor’s Fuller for push into TV.

Who knows where that’s going? I sure don’t …

Even given all that opportunity, there’s still the need to convince people like Mary Turner (CEO of Tiscali UK) that the internet can support video in the first place:

“The internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite,” she says. “If the (BBC) iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the internet will get very slow service and will call their ISPs to complain.”

In Japan, they’ve got 100MB connections over fiber, and Mary wants us to think that the internet wasn’t set up for video … Next, she’ll be convincing us that the internet is just a series of tubes.

Classic, isn’t it?

More on that gem is here.