Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore's Blog

"They want to move from a content company to an audience company, giving the audiences control and learning..."

Martin Stiksel, one of the Last.fm founders, explaining why CBS just bought his company.

Now that is really putting the audience at the heart of everything you do!

However wonderful broadcasters think they are at Making Great Content, this content's success in reaching big audiences came in a world of very constrained live-only distribution, where scarcity of spectrum resulted in incredibly limited choice.

As Bob Eggington, the mercurial BBC lifer who launched bbc.co.uk/news, puts it:

"Broadcasters often think their popularity stems from their own merit, when in truth much of it is down to the control they exert. That control is being lost, due to the internet."

CBS has clocked the existential nature of the threat, and is busy reinventing itself, and its relationship with the people it used to call an audience.

Murdoch has a couple of years head start, following his MySpace coup.

Others are still deluding themselves that their uniquely wonderful content will see them through.

Monks and bibles, my friends, monks and bibles...