One Media, One Purpose: To Inform, Move and Inspire

I usually don’t reproduce TechCrunch even though I would encourage everyone to put them in your RSS readers – they are quality – full stop. But this speech I read today was so inspiring, I thought everyone, whether you’re new media socialite or old media guards, should make it a point to read it.

YouTube Founder Compares Online Video To Nascent TV Market by Michael Arrington on October 16, 2008.

Where we are today is not the YouTube era. It is not the digital content era, or the multi-platform era. Where we are today is an extension of the work you have all done, built on the shoulders of CBS, RCA and the other innovators who came before us. There is no old media. There is no new media. There is one media with one common purpose: to inform, move and inspire the world through information, art and entertainment. Together, we can find a solution that will benefit everyone in this ecosystem, from consumers to advertisers to the content owners alike.

Innovations that are “disruptive” can disrupt fundamentally (e.g. scientifically / physically) but more often what it shakes is the business models that holds conglomerates together, the policies and regulations that holds the social fabric together, and the dynamics between various players in the ecosystem. That’s why even though many books have argued that throughout our civilization, innovation is the only thing that have fundamentally improved the well being of human beings, businesses, governments and sometimes even individuals are averse to disruptive innovations.

YouTube is one of the great many examples of companies who have succeeded in shifting consumer behavior, enabling a platform for disseminating video while the broadcasting and communications infrastructure of the world catches up with times. But what’s inspiring to me about this speech is that, Chad Hurley positioned the disruption that he brought to the market as an everyone-win situation for established business and young consumers alike, without belittling past innovations, think “video killed the radio star” times.

In the world of innovation, it is very important to be humble about your greatness, to put your “plus 1” effort that changed the world as standing on the shoulders of giants. Every dead wood is fertilizer to some other plant. Especially in the world of media, where different people have different sentiments about how it ought to be, passing the media mantle to the dumbed down masses with limited collective intelligence have to be balanced against the original intent of media, as so eloquently concluded by Chad: To Inform, Move and Inspire through Information, Art and Entertainment. We all have to believe that there’s a win-win situation for all players in the old broadcasting world, and the new IP based world. It might not be universally accepted, as culture varies across every inch of earth, but I’m confident that any innovations in that direction is going to be worthwhile.