Posted by Graeme in Business & Investment at 12:53 pm on Tuesday, 3 May 2005

I have previously written about how the media are changing, but, with most of the benefit likely to go to consumers and individual content creators, the more difficult question is how investors can profit from the change. However there are some areas likely to produce winners:

Aggregation and search: The increase in the amount of available content means people need to find what they want and organise content to suit themselves. So far these are most developed in the form of web search but there will be an increasing need to find and organise audio, video and news.
PR: The lower barriers to entry and lower production costs will attract small players. If they are to successfully market their products with a restricted budget they are likely to use viral marketing and similar approaches that are based on PR rather than buying space in the media.
Film and video: Investors can not buy into bands or authors, but types of content that are too expensive to create on a small scale will tend to stay in corporate hands. Film is in this category for the moment (thanks to the cost of production).
News wire services face a distant threat from collaborative equivalents but they appear to be hard to replicate as they need a global presence.
Book publishing: In general consumers seem to be fairly content to replace newspapers, but they also appear to be very attached to books. It is possible that better display technology will change this, but so far consumers are reluctant to read anything as substantial as a book on-line.
TV news and documentary producers require enough content for a full days broadcasting every day, is cheap to receive anywhere for consumers, offers regional targetting to advertisers and production costs are unlikely to diminish.
Talk radio: Much the same scenario as for news and documentary TV
Fixed line telecoms: the increased amount of content, particularly multi-media, will create demand for bandwidth. Its happenning slower than was expected during the dot com boom and both regulators and competition may hold back margins but volume growth is near certain.
Mobile telecoms: the same drivers as fixed line telecoms, but the mobile networks also have a small change of being able to sell content and services to their customers – something the internet has spoiled for fixed line operators.

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