The failed merger of Comcast and Time Warner and the probable merger of Charter and Time Warner will be looked back upon as significant events. They mark the end of the cable era of television. In the United States, cable began in the post-WWII years as a way to bring broadcast television to hard to […]
We have all lived through a lifetime of technology changing the media and content landscape. Satellites allowed cable television and later satellite television to erode and then eviscerate the traditional broadcast network business model. Then the analog to digital transition eliminated the physicality of the product in the music industry. Then the universal, immediate and […]
In the last year I have written often about disintermediation. It is a force that is affecting numerous industries. Residential real estate, as I have written here, is one of those businesses. Any business that has historically inserted itself between buyer and seller and has also kept market information to itself is a business that […]
There have been many posts on the subject of disintermediation in this blog. For those new to evolution shift, please check out this post and this post. I firmly believe that we are living in one of those short periods of time when the world gets rearranged in large part due to historically powerful agents […]
The other day Tivo announced that it had created software to allow Internet Video on Television. The expected convergence of video, TV and the Internet is now in full force. As I wrote in an earlier post about Apple’s announcement of iTV, everything is converging onto the big flat screen in the living room. Channel […]
The stock brokerage business was one of the first industries that was fundamentally disintermediated by the Internet. In an earlier post I both wrote about the history of the stock brokerage business and about William Yeh, the Chairman of Sogo Invest. Yeh was the man who, by launching SogoInvest where active traders could take advantage […]
Disintermediation is a favorite subject here. Regular readers know that I believe that we are in one of those historical eras when the world gets reorganized. As I have defined it in earlier posts, disintermediation always occurs during these significant periods and there is usually a dominant agent of disintermediation that forces the reorganization. In […]
Steve Jobs made the expected announcement that Apple would market the iTV , the gadget that will link the Apple computer in the den to the television set in the living room. Most of the reporting on this announcement was around the coming wave of downloading movies onto the computer and then transferring them to […]
Yesterday we looked at how Media has been disintermediated and transformed during the past 30 years. Today we look at two industries that are on the threshold of some degree of disintermediation. Using the four part definition of the term , it is clear that real estate and insurance are going to be reorganized from […]
In the last post on disintermediation , I gave a deeper definition and current meaning to the term: 1. Disintermediation is the removal of the intermediary or entity 2. If the intermediary remains in place, it will be drained of any excess compensation 3. Industries that hold information hostage for financial gain will be disintermediated. […]