Andrej Koelewijn

Newspapers are looking to the ipad/islate/itablet to save their business, assuming that they can just copy their paper business to the tablet. Sell editions or subscription so customers can read their newspaper on the tablet.

However, every new technology starts with copying existing concepts. Initially on the web we saw copies of concepts that already existed: web shops, web magazines, web newspapers, web encyclopedia’s. But after a while people discover that the new technology has more to offer than a better/faster/easier way to do old concepts. It adds a whole range of new possibilities. The internet enables you to collect the knowledge of your visitors and customers to your product. Your visitors enable you to improve or completely create your products and service.

Similarly, tablet applications will initially resemble concepts we currently know which would work better on a tablet: books, newspapers, magazines. But tablets will bring their own wave of innovations. Newspaper can’t expect to just be a digital version of their current newspapers. They too will have to evolve and use these innovations, otherwise they will be surpassed by better solutions.

I have written before about what i think initial innovation on tablets will look like: media convergence. This will shake up all existing media companies.

It will also enable interactivity with these media. One of the most interesting ways to add interactivity is by adding gaming. Gaming enables better learning, working for free, and audience feedback. I think tablets will have a big impact on gaming as part of other media. Currently most of these media forms don’t allow user participation. This will change big time when tv, books, magazines and newspapers all converge on tablets.

The internet and web has created some expectations around media that media consumers are probably going to expect from media made available on a tablet:

• Findability – Using Google we can now find most content on the internet. How findable is your content in the app-store? Are we going to accept content that isn’t findable using a generic search engine?
• Aggregation – Feeds have made it easy to follow multiple websites. No need to visit all sites to find new articles. News is a lot easier to follow using feed readers. Some say this has become less important since twitter, but for twitter to work you need something else:
• Deeplinking – People like to directly link to interesting information on the internet. Can you send friends a link to a specific page? Can you send a link to a specific book in amazon, a video in youtube, a house on some real-estate site? Currently you can, but can you do this when everything becomes an iphone-app like closed application?
• Picking the interesting parts – Consumers currently expect to be able to just pay for the music or video that they like, without having to buy other stuff. Bundling popular information with less popular information like is done with magazines or music albums is less and less accepted.

Even if media offer their content on the tablet, consumers will have different expectations than they have with the old distribution format. Can media evolve and fullfill these expectations?