May 14, 2005

The Myth of Media Monoplization

Via the excellent Technology Liberation Front blog, I came across Benjamin Compaine's fascinating report on The Media Monopoly Myth. Subtitled, "How new competition is expanding our sources of information and entertaiment," the report looks primarily at media consolidation in the broadcast industry and concludes that "the empirical reality does not support any notion that in the United States, in 2004, consumers of content via the media have fewer choices of sources or fewer choices in diversity for any type of content that has been available in the past."

Compaine has an executive summary of the report here on his Who Owns the Media? blog.

The Internet is one big reason that media "consolidation" is more myth than reality. From Compaine's report:

Perhaps one of the most intriguing developments from the point of view of "voices" is Live365. Besides a service that offers both free and premium connections to thousands of radio stations, Live365 provides services to allow personal Webcasters to offer their own "station." Starting at $9.95 per month, Live365 will provide 100 megabytes of server storage, handle royalty payments, and offer the user up to 100 PCs signed on at a time for programming that is non real-time streaming. For $550 annually, a serious personal broadcaster can offer a live Webcast with as many as 100 simultaneous PCs signed on.122 Thus, radio begins to approach blogs and basic Web sites as a medium where everyone can be a speaker as well as a listener. Live365 claimed 5,000 such personal Webcasters in 2004.