The Influence of Digital Convergence/Divergence on Digital Media Business Models

The key objectives of this article is to analyze and discuss the influence of digital convergence/divergence on digital media business models. The identification of sustainable and hyper-competitive digital media business models is an urgent priority as continuing decline in audiences, collapse of traditional/old media organizations and the decrease of the economic and social influence of traditional media pose a major threat to media, democracy, ICT and telecommunications industry, with scholars agreeing that further erosion of media industry also have major implications for the advertising industry and a wide range of content producers. The successful digital media and ICT corporations will have to act more as corporate planners, as well as 'cloud', 'on-demand' and 'ubiquitous' content and distributor disaggregators, than traditional content and advertising providers. In summary, the second decade of the 21st century digital media is apparently becoming increasingly interactive, mobile, immersive, and ubiquitous. Furthermore, the future of the media appears to be specifically oriented towards the establishment of, networked, 3D, on-demand, broadband and unicast as well as multimedia and hypermedia models of distribution, communication and content creation. Therefore, it is crucial that profitable digital media companies realize that media divergence can successfully perform as vendor lock-in a top-down corporate process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. The digital business models influenced by digital convergence/divergence will focus on aggregate multi-platform distribution, complementarities, vendor lock-in, interoperable and networked media and ICT ecosystem, massive personalization/customization, user interface.