BPN 1350 Back to the future (2): AOL Time Warner

The AOL and Time Warner separation of last week is no real news after eight years. But when the merger was announced everyone saw advantages. So did I. In fact I went back into my writing of 2001 and I must say, that I went with the stream and pointed to advantages of the two companies: the content factory and the advertisement hold. When the merger was announced in 2000, I was writing a white paper with Professor Paul Rutten for the Dutch research institute TNO. The white paper was intended to start canvassing publishers for assignments. We saw the movement towards content factories and pointed to this merger, to the Walt Disney and Pixar merger as well as the merger of Telefonica and Van der Ende Entertainment, which has been undone also in the past years.

When all the talk about mergers came up, it looked good. The landscape would be rearranged dramatically. AOL was a veteran online consumer company, which would bring along its host of subscribers, while Time Warner was an analogue publisher of radio, television and print, which possessed a large copyright library. Both companies had a lot to offer to each other. In fact it could form its own complete integrated content cycle from market research to content development, multi-platform marketing and distribution. This was expressed in the fabulous merger sum of $147 billion.

But it all turned out differently. AOL lost many of its dial up subscribers to broadband services. It once had 26,7 million subscribers and at the point of separation has 6,3 million subscribers left. Also the process of digitising analogue content has proven to be more difficult than expected. Technically it has not been a problem, but organisationally and marketingwise it has been. Publishing companies are famous for forming islands in an organisation, which are defended for content and copyright. So, exchanging and marketing content for the digital market has never worked in AOL Time Warner.

What is going to become of the demerger of AOL and Time Warner. The press release says “The separation will be another critical step in the reshaping of Time Warner that we started at the beginning of last year, enabling us to focus to an even greater degree on our core content businesses. The separation will also provide both companies with greater operational and strategic flexibility. We believe AOL will then have a better opportunity to achieve its full potential as a leading independent Internet company.”
“After the proposed separation is complete, AOL will compete as a standalone company – focused on growing its Web brands and services, which currently reach more than 107 million domestic unique visitors a month, as well as its advertising business, which operates the leading online display network that reaches more than 91% of the domestic online audience. AOL will also continue to operate one of the largest Internet access subscription services in the U.S.”

The press release is very optimistic and of course both parties have to be with an AOL stock market offering in the near future. But to me it sounds like Time Warner is happy to be able to continue like they did before the merger in 2001. In the meantime AOL is depicted as the best online service in the US world, which, of course, it is not. Even Google was glad to get rid of its 5 percent stock holding it had in AOL.

Will the stock market be interested in buying AOL stock? Or would AOL be better off by being bought by a company. Google has excluded itself already by selling the 5 percent interest in shares. Is AOL then prey for Yahoo or even Microsoft? Yahoo could use the company to shape it up and start a world expansion program. And Microsoft could use AOL is a testing service for its new products.

Blog Posting Number: 1350

Tags: content,
content factory

My museum of content-related artefacts (end)

The mini-series has ended. I have been showing artefacts I have kept, which I consider part of 30 years new media history. I can not say that I collected them as I kept them more than especially acquired them. When I moved last year I had to make a selection of what I should keep and what I should discard. That was a tough choice. But looking back in the series I think I kept the artefacts dearest to me and discarded material that was still around.

The series also made me realise that I have still a lot of material in boxes. With some 880 CD-ROMs and 88 CD-I discs and some of their boxes and covers I can show the time spirit, while I can still play most of the mini-disc electronic books.

I got a telephone call from a journalist, who complimented me with the series and asked me what I was going to do with it. That was a good question. In the Netherlands we do not have a special place, theme park or a museum for it. The journalist phoned around to potential stakeholders, but he did not come back with good news. In the Netherlands there is a computer museum, but it consists of a depot and does not have any exhibition space. Personally I do not keep my e-book readers for the particular chip or the software, but for the application. Still once there is a computer museum, you can show applications. There is another foundation in the Netherlands which wants to start up a virtual museum. The principle is to photograph and film machines, put them on line, but leave the physical machines with the owners such as companies or private individuals. Personally I think this will not work. Of course big companies like Philips will take care of their company heritage. But with smaller companies a new boss comes in, has other plans and the vintage machines have to move…to the rubbish dump. The same goes for individuals; the family does not have any interest and puts it on the street for garbage collection as soon the individual goes to the old folks home. So a virtual museum without a physical museum is no option to me.

Looking more at the content museums, there are a few options. There is a museum of communication in The Hague. It is the museum of the incumbent telecom company PTT later KPN. The museum is focussing on communication devices. It recently acquired the iPhone gadget. So they might be interested in the videotext executive terminal some day. But not for the time being. As the CD-ROMs and CD-Is are content products the National Library might be interested in them since it has a depot for electronic (mainly textual) products. So some of the text CD-ROMs might be of interest some day. The multimedia products would also fit in the collection of the Institute of Image and Sound, the former broadcast museum. So far they are interested in broadcast and movie material and not in the vintage multimedia products.

You would think that there is still a market opening for a computer museum with a section for applications. Perhaps the idea of a museum is too limited and one would have to organise a hall in a theme park like Walt Disney World Resort with the Epcot centre (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). It could contain vintage computers, vintage content products and services, contemporary products and services and of course vintage and contemporary computer games.

Looking back at the mini-series I realise that the term digital heritage is an ambiguous term. In circles of museums and libraries it is used for digital representations of physical treasures like rare manuscripts. But it is seldom used for artefacts, which have been created with computers and only exist in digital form. Many of these products and services have already been lost as there was no collection policy or any stakeholder. I have already made a plea several times to produce a European database of nominated and winning digital products and services for research in content and economics as well as for entertainment.

I guess that I will return to the subject of digital heritage in the future.

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Blog Posting Number: 834

Tags: digital heritage