Last Mass Medium Standing Could Be TV

So radio isn't mass media?

No. Radio is basically a niche media. In fact, I think radio is a declining media. You can see that with declining values of radio stations. There are three major competitors to radio. The first is a small little thing from Apple called the iPod. Radio gets listened to in three places. It gets listened to in the car, right? Well, increasingly, cars come with iPod connectors.

The second place is the office. When people listen in the office, they listen to stuff on the Internet, but they don't necessarily listen to Internet radio stations. They listen to things like Pandora and Lost.fm, which basically allow them to customize their music. And they listen to satellite radio, most of which is commercial free.

I believe that newspapers and radio are a couple of fast-declining businesses. I believe that large segments of magazines will also start declining. I believe that television and out-of-home and the Internet will be OK.

What other things should TV stations be doing when you consider new opportunities that are either here today or about to take place?

My basic belief is that local television stations' biggest single advantage is that they happen to be local. There are things that they can give to people that are unique. The first is to become involved in local events. Radio stations are used to doing that, but I think TV stations need to do that more.

Like concerts and festivals?

Concerts, festivals, remote broadcasting, coverage of events. In the old days it was easier to broadcast remotely with radio versus TV. But now with digital video you can go anywhere you want. What you put together doesn't have to actually be broadcast on TV. It can be broadcast on the TV station's Web site.

The second thing they can do is to let local people get famous by covering things like local sports. People like becoming famous, and there's nothing that makes people feel more famous than saying that they were on TV. That's the reason why you have all these thousands of people waving like crazy at Good Morning America and The Today Show.

TV stations have created channels on YouTube to showcase their video content. But some of them have noted that while they're getting a lot of traffic on YouTube, it's not being monetized. Do you have any thoughts about when operations like that will start to really make money for broadcast stations?

I don't understand why they would go and put their stuff on YouTube. I don't think of it as a place that I go to look for local information. The way you build your brand, in the case of the local station, is to say, "Hey, look -- I've got my own Web site, which has all this local information."

If I'm looking for Chicago information, let's say Chicago newspaper information, will I go to the Associated Press or will I go to The Chicago Tribune site? What people are forgetting -- as they think about all this technology -- is what would people do?

Let's talk about Canoe Ventures, the new cable business that's building a national platform for advanced advertising. Is that more of a threat or opportunity to TV stations?

If it works, it will probably be both. It will simply allow people to get a national footprint, and my sense is national advertising is not competitive with local advertising.

Today, spot cable basically sort of sits in between the worst of the programming, and it's hard to buy. Canoe is partly about making it easier to buy. Part of it is basically going to be make it more measurable. Local stations will have both the opportunity of trying to figure out how to be more measurable, and the threat that they've got some other measurable media [competition].

Denuo has equity stakes in a lot of different technology companies with futuristic agendas. Are there any among them that will really change the game for TV?

Inherently, almost everything that we are sort of aligned with does two or three things. They allow for better targeting or more consumer control over video. I truly believe that the Internet is the best way to get better targeting and better control over your video, and most of these companies are Internet-based technologies.

The single biggest encouragement I would give to local broadcast companies is to pay a lot of attention to your Internet presence. Through it, you can sample all these new technologies and see for yourself what's an opportunity or a threat. Because the reality of it is, there's very little technological innovation that takes place on television. But there's a lot of stuff that's taking place on the Web about how to play with, adapt and target video.