The recession is making the change away from “old media” far more rapid than it would have occurred otherwise. While we are concerned about the downfall of some traditional companies, like the NY Times, the rise of some of the newer companies is being missed.

Hulu.com is now one of the best, yet legal sources for watching shows and movies. They have a wide array of videos ranging from over a half decade to some that were aired the previous night. Youtube is now following in their footsteps, and they have the backing of the all-mighty Google. The “old media” are just now discovering the importance of these, on-demand, sites. Watch the video to the right.

Each of these services, Hule and YouTube, are being paid by simply displaying ads just like on regular television. Why did the big media corporations like NBC miss this obvious opportunity? To be fair they actually are posting some of their shows, like Heroes, on their own site, and the imbedded video on the right is also hosted their, but they could easily have led the wave of the television merging onto the internet. They missed the opportunity because many “old media” executives don’t want to change their entire method of making money. They’ve made money the same way for so many years, and they’ve seen no reason to change it, now. Instead, they’ve spent most of their time trying to make television more relevant to the lives’ of the average person.

What they misunderstood was that the concept of television isn’t what is becoming less relevant. What is becoming less valuable is the medium on which television is being played across. The same is true in the music industry.

The music industry has tried punishing individuals that have illegally downloaded their music on the internet for years. The record companies successfully took down Napster in the early 2000’s and used the courts to fine thousands of its users. The backlash from the internet users was profound.

Swedish courts just sent four of the people running the Pirate Bay, a popular file-sharing site, to jail for allowing users to illegally exchange movies and music files. Alas, this will not stop the users either.

It should be noted that I am not endorsing the illegal sharing of files. I am simply noting that the number of people sharing files illegally has gone up significantly over the years, and stopping them appears to be a losing battle.

Two lessons any company must learn when approaching the internet are:

  1. The spread of information cannot be stopped. One can only try to affect how people view that information.
  2. People naturally follow the path of the least resistance. Rather than stop the way users act on the internet, take advantage of their habits.

With so many people needing to cut costs, they will inevitably cut the least important costs first. How about TV? It can all be seen online. What about land lines? Cell phones work perfectly fine. Don’t we need newspapers? We can get all our news and classifieds online as well. What will we do for entertainment? Maybe we’ll pick up a pack of popcorn at the store and spend a night watching episodes of The Family Guy on Hulu.com or read interesting information on Digg.com or Reddit.com.

The fact is that businesses are going to have to adapt to the internet users. They can’t continue to do business the way they always have, or they will no longer be in business.