Barry Diller: Convergence Contrarian

At this year's Spring Internet World conference in Los Angeles, I had the good fortune to witness an unusual keynote address that not only linked directly with the title of this new column, but which also illuminated the essential creative assumptions that underlie all of our efforts to create this new medium.

The keynote speaker was no less than Barry Diller, currently the chief executive officer of USA Networks, but more importantly one of the most successful new media innovators ever. Diller was creating new media before the term came into fashion. Decades ago, as an executive at ABC, he was credited with inventing the Movie of the Week. Later, he led the development of the first successful fourth TV network, Fox. And then, against all expectations, he went on to break into his first truly interactive media venture by becoming CEO of QVC when, as he described it, home shopping "had been derided as a cheesy bazaar selling fake diamonds." (This sounds a bit like some of the things that they've been saying about e-commerce lately, eh?)

Now, as the leader of an old media/new media conglomerate that, in addition to owning numerous cable channels, also owns Ticketmaster (which Diller reports is selling an impressive 30 percent of its tickets online), he is able to play the role of a savvy media mogul elder statesman who is willing and able to share some well-seasoned wisdom.

More than Technology

As we transition through what Diller implied was something like "the end of the beginning" of the Internet, those of us who believe in streaming as a viable new medium find ourselves challenged in many ways. As Diller told the Internet World audience (which was significantly smaller than last year's), "Everyone here has been deluged, bombarded and beaten down by the promises and predictions of the new media world order." What we need, according to Diller, is to build a solid foundation in order to deliver on the promise of a streaming media future.

Rich new media experiences, with streaming or any media, will be a "fusion" of technology and the creative process, says Diller. Underscoring a common sense approach that any creative person could appreciate, he reminded us that "digitizing video, text and audio, and then popping them in a computational Cuisinart, doesn't necessarily create a new product. We make a mistake - a serious, crippling mistake - when we insist on defining convergence primarily along the dimensions of technological innovation."

Discovering the New Medium

Clearly, new online media experiences will come about as much because of the creative talents of producers and developers, as because of never-ending technological innovation. In fact, going a step further, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if, when we look back a decade from now, the real catalysts of the killer, breakthrough streaming media formats are executives like Diller -who not only have creative chutzpah, but also enough of a vision to know that there is more to developing a new medium than pasting together pieces of old ones inside a new technological envelope.

Pardon the pun, but Diller hit the nail on the head this way: "Give a child a hammer and the whole world looks like a nail. So, silicon chip companies look at convergence and see a giant microprocessor. The telecommunications companies look at it and see a huge multimedia network. And the movie studios and book publishers are trying to define it only in terms of the content that they have already created."

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