Why Is Old Media Being Perverse ?

I was going to use the term 'lemmings' but the United Order of Lemmings have written to me and asked me to stop giving them a bad name.

How did ITV get Friends Reunited and ITV Local so wrong ? And where did NewsCorp managed to get MySpace from 100m to 5m users - and why are they now seeming to do the same with The Times online sites?

Yet, with video they have leveraged this positions well and become dominant in the provision of online video in the US and the UK. In the US no major TV company has tried to stray beyond what they do, and at the same time they've come up with concepts such as Hulu.

Collaborative ventures like this have critical mass in the US, but seem futile in the UK where only the BBC count.

Traditional media has great sales capabilities, good production discipline, but the content is what counts.

Great video content is much more difficult to produce than a great article. Volume of video content is even more difficult. For example, by my experience, a minute of high quality video takes an hour to edit on average.

Likewise, audiences now form themselves and generate their own 'content'.

So why can't old media monetize this ? This, perhaps, is the most valuable question in media.