COMMENTARY

Don't Predict The Future --- MAKE The Future In 2020

• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, December 11, 2019

This is the time of year when columnists and pundits bore you to death with their predictions for the coming year.  Reading these can be the least valuable way you spend your time.  

I’ve been writing predictions for 20 years now (ever since I started writing this column in 2000), but this year I will spare you with what I foresee.  Instead, I’m going to make a simple request from each of you.

As you enter 2020, I would ask you set aside some of your time to improve the world around you.  

All of us work in media, marketing and advertising.  All of us have an influence in what the world sees.  I am honestly inspired by seeing the efforts of my friend and colleague, Ian Schafer as he launches Kindred, which aims to link influencers and nonprofits.

I am inspired when I read about the TD Foundation created by Tom Deierlein, which helps veterans’ families.

I was inspired this morning by seeing OneRepublic perform at a corporate event for the company I work at and hearing singer Ryan Tedder tell stories about the things the group is doing to improve the world around them.  

These are people who are as busy as I am and yet they find the time to make the world a better place.  I am even inspired by my wife, who started a company to focus on sustainable corporate merchandise.

 Why can’t I do the same?  Why can’t we all do the same?

Many of us have been in media for a long time.  Some of you are newer to the business.  All of you have a pulpit and a sphere of influence.  All of us have the ability to make a difference.  

I personally want to have a more positive impact in 2020 and I request that you sit down and think about how you can do the same.  There are lots of ways you can do so.  Here are just a few examples for you think about:

Can you help your company have a reduced carbon footprint?  

Can you see what charitable organizations your company supports, and pledge to get involved?

Can you create awareness of charities you support by working with your media organization?

Can you have your company set aside paid time off for employees to get involved with charitable organizations?

Can you donate paper or technology to youth organizations and help them become more progressive in how they adopt technology or learn to express themselves in a positive way?

Can you get involved in education, either for youth or even for job retraining efforts so people can take advantage of the jobs afforded by high technology industries?

There are literally thousands of ways that media can change the world, and you are media.  You are the people responsible for the dissemination of information in the world today.  You can ensure that information is balanced, or you can use the power provided to you to leave a positive watermark on the world you inhabit.

In 2020, let’s not predict what the future will look like.  Let’s try spending time to actually make it what we want it to look like.  Also, take a second and check out the people and foundations mentioned above.  You will should be at least half as impressed and inspired as I was

Another reason to build controllable local-direct business in 2020! Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.
 

COMMENTARY

In 2020, Marketing Challenges Will Be The Same As 2019's

• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, December 13, 2019

It’s almost the end of the year, and the end of the decade, so it is time to do some crystal ball gazing. Don’t worry, I am not going to do an overview of the biggest issues that defined marketing in “The Tens,” which is what Wikipedia says we call the period of 2010 — 2019. But, hint: it was content, integration and transparency.

I am also not going to tire you with clickbait like “The hottest marketing trends for the new decade.” (Spoiler alert: it is more of the same: content, integration and transparency, according to industry research).

And I am going to refrain from reviewing or commenting on the large crop of (global) Christmas ads. John Lewis wins again, and Coca-Cola and (here in the U.S.) Academy Sports are awful. Peloton is either brilliant or brilliantly misguided.

Instead, I thought it would be more useful to look at the economics of the year ahead, as we have seen a deluge of ad spend and marketing spend predictions coming out over the last two weeks. We have Group M’s Brian Wieser gazing in his crystal ball, Zenith has been reading the tea leaves, and Magna Global revealed what it has seen in the future. If you want the numbers, they were usefully summarized in this MediaPost Agency Daily story.

All forecasts agree on moderate growth, roughly in the 4% range. That is, as your CFO will attest, better than nothing. But it is not very robust, especially when you take into consideration that media inflation is going to eat all that growth, and then some, as it is forecast to hit just over 6%. 

This means that, net-net, your ad dollar will yield 2% less of whatever-you-measure versus 2019. On top of that, audiences across all media are continuing to decrease (by 1.6% in 2020, no longer driven by declines in just print, but now also by declines in network and cable TV audiences).

By the way, 2020 should be a bumper year if you are looking at historic factors driving marketing and advertising investment. There is the U.S. election — which used to always drive up TV ad demand and therefore cost, but spending is now focused in online advertising because there politicians and political influencers can say whatever the hell they want with little oversight). 

There is also the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, and the EURO2020 football/soccer tournament across Europe. These are all traditional audience drivers — but despite all these heavy hitter events, the industry is still predicting declines..

That puts us all in a serious predicament. Audiences for video continues to grow, but sadly on unattractive online platforms (because fraud, bots, and poorly measured), or platforms that do not depend on advertising income at all (Netflix and chill). Digital is being questioned on effectiveness, but also on appropriateness. 

What is a marketer to do? Where do you take your dollars to drive an audience? How do you build a brand if the very backbone of brand-building is less and less effective? How do you run an agency if marketers keep diverting cost away from advertising vehicles you used to manage? How do you develop the all-important content as a media company if the cost of doing so keeps going up, while audiences fragment?

I guess these are the REAL questions for 2020. And I am sure that this time next year, we still won’t have the answers…

COMMENTARY

SVOD Vs. Traditional Pay TV: Do You Get What You Pay For?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 11, 2019

TV consumers are looking for a deal. Is the $12.99 deal for Disney+, Hulu (on-demand) and ESPN+ that deal? How about the $4.99/month offer for Apple TV+?

The current disruption of the traditional pay TV industry continues to excite, and for others, discourage.

Consumers hope streaming will eliminate the expensive TV service price, which costs most of them $100 to $150 a month.

Bringing that down to a $15/month price tag seems too good to be true. Well, Tom Rutledge, CEO of Charter Communications, says there is a lot more to it.

During the UBS Media Conference, Rutledge said: "When you add them all up, [it's] a lot of money. ... The [pay TV] bundle is very expensive, and the dis-aggregated a la carte repackage [emphasis here] product is even more expensive."

That’s the fear: That the business is breaking down only to be built up, reconfigured at a bigger price tag. Is that what consumers want?

Right now, Rutledge says many of these discounted packages don’t have much in the way of live sports or 24-hour news. “So there are a lot of reasons why those products aren't going to satisfy the full needs of television consumers.”

Be forewarned: Increasingly, many of the broad-based virtual pay TV services, looking to replace cable, satellite and telco pay TV products, have already start to raised their prices -- including AT&T Now (formerly DirecTV Now) Sling TV and Hulu+Live TV.

The reasoning is easy to figure out -- no one is making any money from this stuff. Profit margins are razor thin -- if at all.

Rutledge points to one reason why: Those big content producers. The major studios heading into the D2C (direct to consumer) business do lot of business with traditional pay TV companies, like cable operators.

“Our ability to sell that product is ultimately constrained by our relationship with content [companies]. We have to manage that in terms of the kinds of power the content companies have."

More troubling: Rutledge also blames the pure glut of content and multiple ways of getting it. Another financial issue: Consumers are increasing just doing more password-sharing.

It’s that time of season. Everyone is looking for a deal.

COMMENTARY

Is Channel Surfing Coming To Video Streamers?

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 12, 2019

"Channel-surfing" on streamers may be coming to a home screen near you. Analysts are keeping a sharp eye on future TV behavior, manifesting itself in what is called “churn.”

Think about new video streaming consumers who drop one service, only to add another — then change back after a month or so. Here’s some indication of things to come:

Take two big individual streaming hits: Netflix’s movie “The Irishman” and Disney+’s Star-Wars-themed series “The Mandalorian.” Both are posting massive viewer interest, according to third-party surveys and the companies.

Over a recent seven-day period,  “The Irishman” has pulled in 26.4 million U.S. Netflix accounts (households) that have watched more than 70% of the three-and-a half hour film so far.

While that’s a big number — by any measure — it could also be a nagging concern. Laura Martin, media analyst at Needham & Co., said on CNBC the “Irishman” number would represent about half of all U.S. Netflix accounts, now at 60.5 million. After some period, says Martin, Netflix subscribers might move to Disney+.

“‘The Mandalorian’ is a huge hit on Disney+,” she says. “It is quite possible some subset of 60 million subs [will] stop paying for Netflix and go to ‘The Mandalorian’ for three months until it is over — and then go back to Netflix.”

She says Netflix doesn’t need many of its U.S. subscribers to cause some damage, which could be losing 4 million subscribers in 2020.

HBO has historically gone through some of this, such as when “Game of Thrones” had long periods between seasons of original episodes. When off the air, the premium, ad-free cable TV network would see some “churn” — the loss of subscribers. HBO also witnessed this in past years with “The Sopranos.”

Smaller niche-TV ad-supported networks have seen this when it comes to overall declines in Nielsen-measured viewers. AMC’s big show, “The Walking Dead,” was the cause of lower overall channel viewership when it wasn’t on the air.

For Netflix and others, it comes down to a modern activity: channel surfing. (Or call it channel dropping.)

Decades ago — before time-shifting technology/machines — channel-surfing was a major problem for traditional TV executives. The technology problem back then wasn’t with a DVR unit, or VCR machine. It was with something much simpler -- the TV remote control.

In the future, surfing around to other streamers' services might just end with a flick or two of your mobile phone. Catch the big wave.

A definite reason to grow local-direct to stay ahead of technology! Phiip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

COMMENTARY

Forecast: Local TV Ad Revenues Trend Downward In Future

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 6, 2019

Tired of that every other year up-and-down TV advertising revenue? The good news is much of this up-and-down stuff seems to be ending. The bad? It might just be in the negative direction.

Brian Wieser, global president of business intelligence, GroupM, wrote in his latest reading of the marketplace:

“National TV advertising will be closer to zero [in 2019], or even up very slightly, while local is down by low-single-digits. We expect this declining trend to persist, even with new forms of premium TV advertising regularly emerging.”

And now we dig deeper. For this year, Wieser expects total TV ad revenues to sink 7% to $65 billion. Taking out the every-other-year bump of political, there is still a 2% decline in total TV.

He says new SVOD (and AVOD) platforms will help replace some of the erosion of traditional TV’s reach and frequency, but “the core set of advertisers that have historically driven TV spending are likely to reduce the budgets they allocate to the medium.”

Perhaps all this is why it is increasingly harder to get traditional local TV advertising estimates. Financial data continues to be downplayed by local TV stations groups as they talk up retransmission and other digital revenues.

Still, we dug up this from BIA Advisory Services: Traditional local TV advertising will be $18.6 billion this year, going to $20.2 billion in 2020. But looking out four years from now little changes: $20.6 billion by 2024.

Increasingly, big TV station groups, such as Tegna, Sinclair Broadcast Group, Cox Media and Nexstar Media Group, are selling local/regional video inventory from thousands of OTT platforms.

No problem there. But a sizable chunk of their monetization in future years, will continue to be with traditional TV advertising spending on their own TV station airwaves. 

And we’ll continue to get those positive headlines in big political years. Political TV advertising will improve, in part due to rising local TV news content impressions from more news programming. BIA estimates that could total another record next year: $6.6 billion.

Back to traditional TV ad stuff, Wieser notes: “Many of the digital-first brands we’ve been discussing will also spend on traditional media, especially television. [While] defining a “digital brand” is highly subjective, those marketers are undoubtedly making up for most of the cuts in spending that other marketers appear to be making.”

Political advertising typically goes hand-in-hand with rising Olympics advertising in recent years. TV stations -- beyond digital-first marketers, beyond political advertisers -- will need to find a new category of TV marketers to count on in future years.

Cannabis, plant-based hamburgers, self-driving cars or really fast-food businesses, anyone?

 Something to share with your local-direct client to help build your value to them: Philip Jay LeNoble, Ph.D.

 

4 Keys to Exceeding the Expectations of the Evolving Customer

Sun, 12/08/2019 - 19:34 

      

Author: Marie Rosecrans

 

With social and mobile tech now at our fingertips, people today are ultra-connected. And with artificial intelligence integrated into our daily experiences, consumers are also more intelligent than ever. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here, and it’s brought a major shift in customer expectations.

The incredible rise of smartphones and social media has been pivotal to this cultural shift. Imagine this: Today’s smartphones have 1 million times more memory and 100,000 times more processing power than Apollo 11’s guidance computer that put a man on the moon. Crazy, right? But true to form, customers have easily adjusted to the extraordinary power they wield right from their palms.
The trickle-down effect of this reality applies to companies of all sizes – but might be most crucial for small and midsize businesses. With the advances in mobile phones and social media, “instant” isn’t always fast enough. Those changing expectations are today’s major hurdle for SMBs in terms of building customer engagement and long-term loyalty.

Customers today expect highly connected, personalized experiences from all organizations, with even business buyers expecting simple, easy-to-navigate, consumer-like ones. The lines between such experiences are fundamentally blurring. SMBs must be willing and able to create highly connected, personalized experiences to stay relevant amid the churn.

4 Keys to Consistent High-Quality Engagement for SMBs
For small and medium-sized businesses, the equalizing forces of mobile technology and social media are a double-edged sword. With more opportunity than ever to market and sell to a global audience, SMBs are also exposed to a customer base whose expectations are continually shifting. And with limited resources, small businesses need to be especially savvy about how they respond to customer questions and needs.

Small business owners are feeling that pressure, with 53% saying they feel they’re at a competitive disadvantage in terms of meeting customer expectations compared to their enterprise counterparts. Ultimately, they can compete through judicious use of technology. If an SMB is resource-constrained in terms of workers, it has to get smarter about how it uses technology to not only find or engage prospects, but also win customers and keep them for the long term.

How can your small business team exceed the expectations of the evolving customer and achieve consistently high-quality engagement? Here are four ways:

1. Elevate customer success to a company value. If a brand wants to differentiate itself, it first has to believe in customer success as a value (or find another compelling differentiator to stand behind). Customer Success is one of our four core values at Salesforce, alongside Trust, Innovation, and Equality. Valuing customer success as a company means everyone from the sales team onward invests in anticipating customer needs and solving them proactively so customers are happy, successful, and flourishing. Why is this important? Because customer happiness and growth is essential to your company’s success. The two go hand in hand.

2. Build trust with transparency. Among SMB leaders, 90% value trust above all other facets of their customer relationships. Putting customer success front and center requires building trust between brand and buyer, and fundamental to that trust-building is transparency. That means creating open, honest, personalized experiences with people. Leveraging technology like customer relationship management, and the connections it helps to create, helps open the lines of communication and keep customer trust strong.

3. Personalize using AI. In 2019, 62% of customers say they’re open to AI fueling their improved buying experiences, and almost half of SMB owners think their businesses are ready to implement it. Businesses can use AI to learn from each click the customer makes to get smarter, cut down on manual tasks, and translate insights into more personalized experiences over time.
Let’s look at an example from my own life. Every day, I wear the same bracelet. What’s interesting about my experience as a consumer is that I was marketed to on Instagram based on my prior engagement with photos of jewelry on my feed. I bought it through Instagram. When I had a question about the shipping, I also posed that question on Instagram. So these social media platforms have been equalizing forces for companies of all sizes.

4. Create community around products and services. Small businesses are increasingly creating community around the company’s product or service.

Take, for example, the small running shoe store in Healdsburg, California, where I buy my favorite shoes. That patch of wine country is remote for some shoppers, but the owner has built a community around the store — throwing barbecues, organizing running groups, and recommending scenic hikes and wine tastings. The store has become the town’s running culture hub because the owner has created a personalized experience for customers that borders on a lifestyle.

Businesses can also establish these communities online, posting regularly on social media and growing their followings, or they can form these relationships offline like in Healdsburg. Either way, those personalized experiences — and the relationships they cultivate — are key to differentiation for companies in the age of instantaneous customer expectations.

As senior vice president of SMB marketing at Salesforce, Marie Rosecrans focuses on empowering small and medium businesses with the tools and resources they need to grow. Before joining Salesforce in 2008, she held positions in customer support, professional services, product marketing, and program management at Oracle, Peoplesoft, Evolve and Primavera.

Pittman: TV’s Downfall Is Radio’s Opportunity

December 4, 2019

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iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman and COO Rich Bressler were in Las Vegas, Wednesday, for a financial conference hosted by Wells Fargo. With a much lighter debt load post-bankruptcy, and a multi-platform media company to brag about, Pittman and Bressler were more than happy to pitch investors on the scale of iHeart and the power of radio.

With television audiences dropping due to the growth of subscription services, and consumers cutting the cord, Pittman pointed out how stable radio has been over the years. “From 2014 to 2019 AQH radio listening is down only 1.9% — virtually unmoved.” And, he added there has been no degradation in reach: “It’s the same 92-93% that it was in the 70s.”

“Television has always been the foundation buy because it provided reach,” according to the iHeart CEO. But times are changing on the television side. “At 75% you’re not reaching anymore and when you’re down to Gen Z at 50%, you’re certainly not. And, does radio have the opportunity to fill that? It should. If you look just at rational economics.”

Pittman said that advertisers are also beginning to act that way, coming back to radio. “Three years ago I think Proctor & Gamble was not in our top 100 advertisers. This year they may be the number one advertiser. Radio has turned out to be a wildly efficient medium to reach a lot of people. People still like video but most of the great scripted shows have moved to subscription, off of ad-supported vehicles, and television just doesn’t reach as many people.”

Pittman also discussed how iHeart’s many platforms (radio, digital, events, podcasts) leads to expanding relationships with advertisers. “Someone came to us a couple years ago initially just to advertise within one of our events. Now they are one of our biggest advertisers on broadcast radio as well as one of our biggest event sponsors.”

And he says the engagement consumers have with iHeart is huge. “We have more monthly users than Facebook and Google. In terms of engagement, Facebook has 18 minutes, Google has 26 minutes, and iHeart has 30 minutes of daily usage. We reach the people and we have an engaged relationship with them. We’re doing extraordinarily well. And that’s just the broadcast platform. In November, we’ll hit an all-time high for digital reach, approaching 100 million. On social media we’re now over 200 million fans. When we did the iHeartRadio music awards we had about 300 billion social impressions, about twice the Super Bowl did or the Academy Awards. So we now have all of our platforms working together. Instead of them being silos or bolt-on businesses we can now talk to the consumer through all of these relationships.”

AT&T Snags Lady Gaga For Its Super Saturday Concert

• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, Yesterday

AT&T has secured Lady Gaga as the featured performer for the Feb. 1 edition of its high-profile Super Saturday Night concert on the eve of the Super Bowl.

The event — which has no official link to the Super Bowl, and had been dubbed DirecTV Super Saturday Night since its launch in 2011, has been renamed AT&T Super Saturday Night. 

The 2020 concert, which marks its 10th anniversary, will be held at Miami’s Meridian at Island Gardens, and live-streamed at twitter.com/ItsOnATT. 

The concert’s name change — it had been dubbed DirecTV Super Saturday Night since its launch in 2011 — will presumably enable more seamless promotion of AT&T’s May 2020 HBO Max launch and broadband and wireless services, in addition to whatever promotion the telecom giant sees fit to bestow on DirecTV, U-verse and AT&T Now (also recently renamed, from DirecTV Now). 

While all three have been seeing declines — with DirecTV by far the biggest loser, down by more than 1 million net paid subscribers in this year’s third quarter alone — they still have nearly 23 million combined. That not only represents substantial revenue, but a substantial owned channel for promoting HBO Max. 

“Year after year, in cities all across the country, we’ve built specially curated venues from the ground up to provide both our mega-star performers and their adoring fans a one-night-only concert experience they will not forget. And this year will be no different,” enthused Valerie Vargas, senior vice president – advertising and creative services, AT&T. “In Miami, we’re going to go big and bold — two words synonymous with Lady Gaga.” 

Previous years’ featured performers have included Taylor Swift, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, Rihanna and Kanye West, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, and Foo Fighters and Run The Jewels.

Live-attendance concert tickets will go on sale Dec. 10 at att.com/supersaturdaynight.

Newspapers Invading The Audio Space

Newspapers Invading The Audio Space

By

 Radio Ink

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December 4, 2019

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This week with the launch of El Washington Post, the newspaper now has 18 podcasts on its website for readers to consume. The paper has produced podcasts about war, politics, every President of the United States and, of course, a daily show on impeachment. 

Podcasts put out by newspapers are highly produced, easy to find on their websites and not yet cluttered with ads. Newspapers use the web pages hosting the podcasts for additional digital inventory, such as banners, bringing the newspapers additional cash. And, those newspaper podcasts are just another battleground for the ears of the consumer, as well as advertisers that use audio to reach their customers.

Most national newspapers have caught on to the popularity of audio and podcasting and the potential for another lucrative revenue stream. The most listened to news podcast in America is The Daily from The New York Times. The Book Review podcast from The New York Times begins with a pre-roll ad from Chanel perfume. The Times’ November book review podcast was also recorded live in front of a studio audience.

The Los Angeles Times is all in on podcasts. From Dirty John to Man in The Window to its latest hit with Wondery Detective Trap, The L.A. Times has its own production company called L.A. Times Studios which helps crank out these popular shows. All original content with minimal interuptions, in-depth reporting and no restrictions on time per show. 

The Washington Post’s  El Washington Post, is the Post’s second Spanish-language podcast produced from The Washington Post newsroom. The 20-minute twice weekly show is hosted by Juan Carlos Iragorri, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and author with more than 30 years of experience in print, radio and television. His co-hosts are Dori Toribio, a broadcast journalist who has covered Washington since 2010 for outlets including Spain’s Mediaset TV group, and Jorge Espinosa, radio journalist for Caracol Radio in Bogota.

Many local newspapers are also finding ways to incorporate audio, whether its reporters discussing the local news they cover or sports writers talking about the local football rivalries. All of that extra audio was not available to the public just a few short years ago. Should radio be worried about the return of newspapers?

Now even the FBI is warning about your smart TV’s security

Zack Whittaker@zackwhittaker / 12:47 pm MST • December 1, 2019

Image Credits: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

If you just bought a smart TV on Black Friday or plan to buy one for Cyber Monday tomorrow, the FBI wants you to know a few things.

Smart TVs are like regular television sets but with an internet connection. With the advent and growth of Netflix, Hulu and other streaming services, most saw internet-connected televisions as a cord-cutter’s dream. But like anything that connects to the internet, it opens up smart TVs to security vulnerabilities and hackers. Not only that, many smart TVs come with a camera and a microphone. But as is the case with most other internet-connected devices, manufacturers often don’t put security as a priority.

That’s the key takeaway from the FBI’s Portland field office, which just ahead of some of the biggest shopping days of the year posted a warning on its website about the risks that smart TVs pose.

“Beyond the risk that your TV manufacturer and app developers may be listening and watching you, that television can also be a gateway for hackers to come into your home. A bad cyber actor may not be able to access your locked-down computer directly, but it is possible that your unsecured TV can give him or her an easy way in the backdoor through your router,” wrote the FBI.

The FBI warned that hackers can take control of your unsecured smart TV and in worst cases, take control of the camera and microphone to watch and listen in.

Active attacks and exploits against smart TVs are rare, but not unheard of. Because every smart TV comes with their manufacturer’s own software and are at the mercy of their often unreliable and irregular security patching schedule, some devices are more vulnerable than others. Earlier this year, hackers showed it was possible to hijack Google’s Chromecast streaming stick and broadcast random videos to thousands of victims.

In fact, some of the biggest exploits targeting smart TVs in recent years were developed by the Central Intelligence Agency, but were stolen. The files were later published online by WikiLeaks.

But as much as the FBI’s warning is responding to genuine fears, arguably one of the bigger issues that should cause as much if not greater concerns are how much tracking data is collected on smart TV owners.

The Washington Post earlier this year found that some of the most popular smart TV makers — including Samsung and LG — collect tons of information about what users are watching in order to help advertisers better target ads against their viewers and to suggest what to watch next, for example. The TV tracking problem became so problematic a few years ago that smart TV maker Vizio had to pay $2.2 million in fines after it was caught secretly collecting customer viewing data. Earlier this year, a separate class action suit related to the tracking again Vizio was allowed to go ahead.

The FBI recommends placing black tape over an unused smart TV camera, keeping your smart TV up-to-date with the latest patches and fixes, and to read the privacy policy to better understand what your smart TV is capable of.

As convenient as it might be, the most secure smart TV might be one that isn’t connected to the internet at all.

COMMENTARY

Will Streaming And Media Concentration Lead To Another Vast Wasteland?

• by Marilyn Greenwald , Op-Ed Contributor, 9 hours ago

When Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow gave his famous “vast wasteland” speech to broadcasters in 1961, he warned that the three television networks had become so commercialized that they had all but abandoned programming in the public interest.

Instead, he implied, they focused on repetitive low-brow content that offered immediate gratification for viewers and a quick jolt to the networks’ bottom line.

Minow's phrase “vast wasteland” became part of the public lexicon, and indeed, the phrase endures nearly 60 years later. But in those six decades, the media environment has grown far more vast, and definitely more complex.

The recent explosion of streaming services, combined with the continued consolidation of large entertainment companies, should make us want to revisit Minow's warning.

Unless modern viewers become educated about the workings and structure of the current entertainment industry, the “wasteland” Minow described could return in a much more virulent form.

A growing number of television viewers who for decades passively sat back and surfed the channels their cable companies offered have voluntarily cut the cord.

But switching to streaming services today requires that viewers acquire a sophisticated and updated understanding of the new media. Without that knowledge, they may find themselves paying for an expensive array of multiple streaming services without getting the programming they want.

Most viewers don't spend a lot of time wringing their hands over the fact that nearly everything they see on their screens is controlled directly or indirectly by four mega-corporations; after all, this is the province of the FCC, business writers and perhaps a few CEOS.

But the complicated intermingling of these four huge companies (Disney, AT&T, Comcast and Viacom) with each other, and their own relationships with their sister companies, could eventually impact almost everything we watch -- on television and in movie theaters.

The newly revamped structure of the industry began to trickle down to consumers when Netflix switched from offering DVDs of films by mail and began streaming existing films and original shows.

Now that trickle is a torrent, forcing us to become amateur network programmers just to watch our favorite shows.

Take, for example, the popular show "The Good Place." NBC aired the show's fourth season this fall at 9 p.m. Thursdays on network television, while NBC had loaned seasons 1 to 3 for viewing on Netflix for those who missed those first three seasons.

It's a good bet, though, that when NBC launches its streaming service Peacock in the spring, it will yank the show from Netflix over to Peacock. Ditto for some of the NBC shows offered on Hulu.

That process could repeat itself many times over. Millennials who notoriously never had cable -- and may not even own a television -- have grown accustomed to relying on Hulu to watch some new shows the day after they air on the networks.

That will no doubt change as Disney now owns the lion's share of Hulu.

As Julia Alexander of The Verge recently noted, Peacock, WarnerMedia and Disney are likely to reclaim shows that once aired on Hulu as they launch their own streaming services. Alexander notes that the launching of so many individual streaming services has made Hulu a “child of divorce,” and a service that might soon be fighting for survival.

Confused? But that's just the beginning. Media consolidation along with the government's seeming reluctance to regulate it will also affect what we see in movie theaters -- and giants will prevail.

The explosion of streaming has so blurred the line between conventional content creators (like movie studios) and content distributors (movie theaters) that small and independent studios and films can't help but take a hit.

Netflix and Amazon Prime began as distributors, but their entry into original content gives them dominance in the content-creating field; they are becoming so big that they can call the shots regarding what movie theaters show.

As is the case with most mass entertainment, whatever becomes a hit and makes money is replicated over and over. This smothers small and original independent films, which are often written, acted and produced by unknown names.

Complicating things further is a move last month by the U.S. Justice Department to end 70-year-old anti-trust legislation that regulated exactly what is happening today: the overtaking of movie theaters by large studios.

In U.S. vs. Paramount Pictures, the court ruled in favor of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers and prohibited studios from purchasing large theater chains. The ruling ultimately brought an end to the old Hollywood studio system.

Ironically, a supporter of that 1948 anti-trust legislation and a member of the independent producers group is a name that is familiar today: Walt Disney.

Still, we need not be completely pessimistic about the changing entertainment environment.

When viewers realize that they could be paying lots of money for content they don't like – and if they are unable to find content they do like -- they may indeed take a more aggressive role in learning how to control their entertainment destiny: by taking an active role in understanding how government and business control what they and their children.