Funny how fast things happen. This morning I blogged about the changes Brockhaus and Polaroid have to go through because of the digital revolution. And I asked, who would be next in joining them. Tonight, it turns out it’s German commercial TV broadcast group ProSiebenSat.1!

OK, it’s not exactly the end of TV that happens today, but its the preliminary end of a technology that came to change our sense of quality of TV content: High Definition Television. The Munich-based broadcast giant said today they would stop their HDTV programmes ProSieben HD and Sat.1 HD. Only 150.000 households in German have the technical prerequisites today to receive and display HD programmes. Too few to justify the production cost, although the only content that was true HD were Hollywood blockbusters, the rest was scaled-up to HD. From 2010 on, their management said, they might consider coming back to HD as the group will have an additional satellite transponder channel and more capacity for high-resolution signals.

The TV business truly is an interesting one. Broadcasters in Germany have been extremely slow to embrace the Internet and integrate web offerings in their programmes. For the privately-held, advertising funded stations the web still is little more than a place to promote their shows and series. Public broadcasters ARD and ZDF are funded by each and every household by law (paying 55 Euro per quarter) and have billions to spend on online activities – much to the dislike of the private companies, of course. At least they have started some decent web initiatives offering self-produced content like news shows and magazine programmes in online video archives.

Now, the technology that was so heavily promoted by consumer electronics companies two years ago before the football world cup in Germany, is being abandoned even before its breakthrough. That’s not just sad, it’s short-sighted. As a consumer, I feel betrayed. Why would I pay €1500+ for a brand-spanking-new flatscreen HD ready TV, if not – at least on the medium run – for having a dramatically improved viewing experience? HD is great for entertainment, for Hollywood on the big flat screen at home. It had the chance to kill movie theatres and now failed. Or did it?

Maybe not. In this country, federally organised and regulated, we have so many players claiming their stakes, securing their grounds, fighting for dominance. It’s unlike any other TV market in the world. We have 30+ free TV channels, at least 10 of them with decent to high-quality programmes. We have Premiere, the only pay TV company (with HD channels by the way). But we also have an extremely heterogeneous landscape when it comes to accessing the TV signal. In larger cities, most have cable right into their homes. In rural areas, and that’s still the majority of the households, satellite is the technology of choice, terrestrial signals have been changed to DVB-T in many regions a few years ago but still don’t offer HD quality. HD, as ProSiebenSat.1 broadcast it, came via satellite. Both, cable and satellite demand different technical equipment (i.e. set-top boxes). Not very user friendly, that is!

So as long as the technical requirements, or barriers I should say, are so high mass market adoption of HD TV will be hard to achieve. It’s up to the entire entertainment and consumer electronics industry to come up with something really simple, really easy to use. But as long as vanity reigns and industry egoisms prevent an open discussion, the consumer will just be an afterthought and HD will take a few more years to make its breakthrough. Maybe even longer than 2010.

In the meantime, the Internet is here to change the game and bring HD to our PCs – and even flat-screen TVs as Apple suggests. Probably more quickly than the TV dinosaurs would like it to. But that’s a different story.

On Tuesday, German publishing icon Brockhaus announced that the lastest, 21st edition of their 24-piece printed encyclopedia is the last one they will market the traditional way, via bookstores and subscriptions. From April 15th, the entire Brockhaus encyclopedia will be available online, for free, paid for by advertising.

This move hails the end of a legend and German household brand. And it shows that companies who fail to adapt to the sea change in media consumption and access to knowledge will have a very hard time surviving. Brockhaus is at least 4 years late and literally signed its surrender to Wikipedia. Ironically, on the same day, Spiegel Online launched a new knowledge portal with Bertelsmann and Wikipedia that joins content from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia Wissen.de and Spiegel’s archives. They call Spiegel Wissen the “next generation encyclopedia”. Given Spiegel Online’s huge daily traffic it will be a success, no doubt.

The next victim to digitalisation of technologies, of life, is Polaroid. They have been making instant films and cameras for 60 years now and became an industry and cultural icon too. Now, they are stopping film production for both professional and amateur use and are laying off people, inevitably. I wonder how photo artists who work with the 7,9 x 9,1 cm amateur format like German photographer Stefanie Schneider will continue to work without. And even our team at Hotwire will miss the quick pics which we used in our graduat recruiting workshops to create a bit of a casting atmosphere…

I’m taking bets and good guesses on who’s going to be the next to lay down in this race of old economy against 01010110110.

I admit, we PR people tend to beat around the bush and to butter things up (love these English terms!), i.e. the opposite of straight talk. Personally, I try to spot and eliminate empty phrases in PR texts whenever possible but I’m sure I’m guilty of more than an occasional “innovative solution” or “next-generation”.

What John Gruber does here, translating an internal memo from Yahoo!’s Jerry Yang into plain English, is a bit mean, but just a bit. In essence, it appeals to us PR folk not to take our audiences for fools and that’s a good thing to take away from a little mean post. I especially love this one:

“today we launched zimbra 5.0, a next generation e-mail and collaboration suite that’s a great milestone in our open platform and starting point strategies.

Zimbra will be the first product taken out back to be shot in the head once the Microsoft takeover goes through.“

(via Mediacoffee)

Geht’s nach Apples Job-Seite, steht demnächst die Eröffnung des ersten deutschen Apple Store in München an. Ich wüsste auch schon ne Location für Frankfurt, denn mitten auf der Zeil entsteht gerade ein riesen Shoppingkomplex, in deren Erdgeschoss sich der Apfel sehr gut machen würde.

Online-Werbung wächst, ist dieser Tage allerorten zu lesen. So hurtig, dass von FAZ bis W&V alle ausführlich berichten, wie schnell das Werbesegment wächst. Eine große Verschiebung von Klassik zu Online wird prophezeit und die MicroHoo-Story füllt wie zur Bestätigung dieser Vision gleich Doppelseiten der Wirtschaftsteile.

Was in diesem Trubel untergeht ist die Frage nach dem, der auf die vielen Banner und Flash-Ads und InText-Anzeigen am Ende klicken soll – dem Nutzer. Was bringt ihn dazu, auf Online-Werbung zu klicken? Ein animiertes Banner wohl kaum, ein lustiger Flash-Spot vielleicht, ein zum Suchergebnis passendes Google-Ad schon eher. Es gibt soviel Inventar da draußen, dass es schon schwierig wird den Überblick zu behalten, wie auch Holger Schmidt zu berichten weiß.

Bemerkenswert in diesem Zusammenhang ist aber ausgerechnet die Webseite des Werber-Wochenblatts Werben & Verkaufen. Die Online-Präsenz wurde kürzlich aufgefrischt, optisch klarer und lesbarer gestaltet. Gut so. Was aber blieb ist ein Relikt der Web 1.1-Zeit, als man – dem Fernsehen gleich – den Lesern mal eben Unterbrecherwerbung präsentierte. Ich glaube der Fachbegriff ist “Overlay”, also eine Anzeige, die sich nach dem Laden der Homepage über den redaktionellen Inhalt legt. Warum eine Nachrichtenseite für die Kommunikationbranche mit eine so antiquierten Brachialmethode sein (Fach!-)Publikum so belästigen muss, ist mir ein Rätsel. Es ist fast egal, wo man hinklickt, welche Rubrik man aufruft. Ein Drüberlegwerbeunterbrecher ist schon da. Und das “schließen”-Knöpfchen ist kaum zu treffen. Da macht der genervte Mac-User mal schnell Apfel-W und w&v ist weg…

Dass es besser geht, zeigt die w&v-Konkurrenz aus Frankfurt. Auf Horizont.net sind die Overlay-Anzeigen allem Anschein nach verschwunden, aber auch erst seit kurzem, als auch diese Seite neu gestaltet wurde. Komisch, wie träge ausgerechnet die Fachblätter sich Nutzergewohnheiten und -abneigungen anpassen.