Professor Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at Microsoft, is here at the Cannes Advertising Festival to give a seminar that, I'm told, will look at whether "the web and big media are friends or rivals".
He is looking at all manner of media issues including how newspapers have no "god given right" to survive online but just might if they can break news within a five minute window; why the music industry deserves to be a smaller digital business; and how TV might just beat PVRs.
The key thing, says Cole, is that the whole "death of other media" scenario may have been true, according to trends, in the early days, but a more complex picture has now emerged.
Lets start with TV, from 2000-2005 it is true that internet usage came from time spent watching TV.
But that is only part of the picture. The threat to TV was not the internet per se but the fact we had dial up connections, tended to log on in the "back room" of the house (not the living room) and usage was in 20 or 30 minute stints with a serious "to do" list.
"Using the internet was a big deal, what we analysts call a BFD,"says Cole to laughs all-round,.
Welcome to the broadband generation - people log on 20-40 times a day for 2 to 3 mins at a time in the "most humanly networked room of the house".
The result is internet use is not so much displacing TV with people logging on before TV or after with the "threat receding" - someone call Tess Alps at TV marketing agency Thinkbox, she'd love this man!
Ah, but what about PVRs,? He has the (long term) answer on that one too.
He dives a bit into how TV has faced challenges for 30 years - remote controls, the rise of cable and satellite channels, VCR, DVD and, now PVRs but will once again survive.
A lot of media "will survive as much smaller media". The film industry is much reduced from its halcyon days of the 1940s.
The music industry will thrive, albeit in a smaller fashion and only on the web, but then Cole argues that maybe "it never deserved to exist as such a big business" built on the back of "extortion" at selling albums for high prices when people only ever wanted one or two tracks.
As for newspapers and magazines he doesn't know whether there is a " god given right" that they should be as big online as offline,. More on this in a minute., he says.
Apparently TV is the exception. It will become a bigger business online or in conjunction with the enabling power of the internet.
Microsoft's research has shown that mobile TV will be far more than just a few clips, that people will watch 30 and even 60 minute and longer programming.
The rise of opportunities to watch TV during "downtime" - when previously people wouldn't have had an opportunity - means "TV is escaping the home".
Back to, gulp, newspapers and magazines. Christ, apparently the next crop of teens will "never" read a newspaper but will selectively buy the odd magazine.
But wait, the internet has opened the "greatest opportunity in 87 years" for newspapers to become "TV-like" and actually break news.
"No one goes to a newspaper to read who wins an election or the World Cup," he says,
The "breaking of news" 18 hours after it has happened is a death knell that the internet has opened a door on.
This is interesting: a study has shown that in breaking live sports news and updates onloine newspapers and magazines have "about 30 seconds"or consumers will decide the information is better sourced elsewhere; three mins for a barebones breaking story.
For news it is about five minutes to get a skeleton up, a headline like TV.
In terms of advertising the shift in attitude from 2000-2005 means - except for pop ups which are verboten - users "accept" advertising as the "price" for digital content..
But advertisers have to be "nimble and agile"and be contextual not intrusive.
He ends with a bit about the importance of community. Apparently 43% of teens think that online community is as important as 'real world' community.
The next generation of teens is less interested in TV than any other generation, that "does not mean they are not interested, they are very much so, but TV doesn't dominate their lives like it used to for that generation," cautions Cole.
