Last Thursday, there was a media time bomb buried in a small article that ran in the NY Times Style section.
The piece, ostensibly, was about how MatchesFashion.com, a very successful online high-end clothing site was opening its first bricks and mortar store in London.
The headline read: The Death Knell for the Bricks-and-Mortar Store? Not Yet
You have seen this kind of story before: successful online business goes to bricks and mortar. It’s not exactly ground-breaking. Amazon, after all, is also opening its own bricks and mortar bookstores.
But buried in the article, way down in the 20th paragraph, was an explosive piece of news. Explosive for the cable and TV business:
“The space will have two floors of retail as well as floors for private shopping, but equally important will be the floor that is to house the company’s broadcasting and content hub. Classes, panel discussions and events will be held there, all of which will be streamed on Facebook Live and YouTube, its social channels and its website.”
(In journalism school we called this burying the lede.)
Wait a minute! “the floor that is to house the company’s broadcasting and content hub..”?
That’s right.
Along with selling luxury high-end fashion items, MatchesFashion.com is getting into the broadcasting business, or more specifically getting into the online video production and ‘broadcasting business’.
You know... online.. like Netflix.
And why not?
It used to be that the ability to put television or video into people’s homes was held by a small group of broadcasters and cable companies. They owned the frequencies and the wires. Anyone who wanted to get access to those homes had to go through them. This was called a barrier to entry.
Then, along came Netflix.
As it turned out, the Internet let you bypass CBS or NBC or Discovery and take your content directly tumor than 100 million American households, pretty much for free.
Now, in the ‘olden days’ (which ended yesterday), a big company like Nike (for example) would effectively lease out 30 second swaths of a TV network’s programming time to run their own content. These were called commercials. The money that Nike and others paid to the likes of CBS or ABC or Discovery for those 30 second spots were used by the networks to pay for programs that would attract an audience. Nike and the other advertisers rode on the back of those shows so they could slip in their own spots.
But.... in what is clearly a brilliant and earth-shattering move, MatchesFashion.com has figured out that you no longer need to rent 30 second spots from NBC or CBS. Thanks to the Internet, you can bypass them completely and put your own content out there for free.
And why not?
Why should MatchesFashion or Nike or anyone else bother with paying a network any longer? Those networks are effectively middlemen. They once held the keys to access to the viewer, but no longer.
Now, here is the really interesting part, (as if this were not interesting enough)...
If, in theory, Nike, for example, were to simply produce their own sports programs (I bet they could), and run them on Nike.com, online, then anyone watching NikeTV, online, would only have to click and buy right there, on the screen. No need to go anywhere else.
Let’s take the theoretical example yet one step further. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that Nike bought the rights for, oh, say The Olympics. Then, if you wanted to see the Olympics, the only place you could do that would be on Nike.com. And while you were watching, say, gymnastics, you could at your leisure simply click and buy.
Cool, no?
Do you see where this is headed?
It used to be that networks sold advertising spots to companies like clothing manufacturers and used that revenue to pay for the programs that the commercials supported. But why not cut out the middleman entirely? That is what MatchFashion.com has done. Video direct from the store to you. Online.
Like I said, genius.
Like I said, ‘time bomb’.
Good luck MatchesFashionTV!
as previously seen on TheVJ