Twenty years ago today I was sitting in a mass media class as a junior in college working on my Communication degree. (I can hear the wheels in your heads clicking… next month I’ll be 41.) Me and 399 of my closest friends were learning about the Great Splintering of Media. I lifted my head off of the sliver of a desktop at my auditorium seat, probably drooling, and though “hmm… that sounds like a good thing to remember.”

For those not familiar, there’s a phenomenon that runs like clockwork: media becomes more diffuse and specialized over time. Maybe it’s the ever-increasing proliferation of content, maybe it’s the natural evolution of advertising spending and maybe it’s the appetite of audiences becoming more specialized over time. It could be technology too. Regardless, it is a fact. Death, taxes, media splintering.

GE bought Marconi’s company, American Marconi, in 1919, creating the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and the race was on. (Actually, you can argue that Gutenberg started it all, but it doesn’t matter.) Later, when the radio pioneers turned to TV, media began to spread in local markets with the backing of national networks like NBC and CBS. NBC was the first to begin daily broadcasts in 1939. Then in 1944 ABC was spawned out of NBC by government intervention and we had the 3 major networks. These three essentially locked up the VHF spectrum and no major networks emerged. Public TV also lived on that fuzzy temperamental cousin of VHF called UHF, but not much was going on for a while until the Cable networks came along. Unless you like the old black and white I Love Lucy episodes, I guess.

What’s interesting is this: on April 29, 1961 Jim McKay led the first broadcast of ABC’s Wide World of Sports – remember? “The agony of defeat?” and it signaled an area of the big guys beginning vertical franchises. I could go on all day, but the important thing is that within the big networks they began to verticalize. This is the expression of splintering.

As all splintering does, it starts within the big networks and then, ultimately spawns independent channels. The advent of Cable TV technology was an unbelievable accellerant… Now we have the Golf Channel, Extreme sports channels, thirty-five flavors of ESPN, Speed, Adrenaline. Maybe we’ve got enough sports channels on cable now. Maybe not.

All just history. Interesting to me… maybe to you, too.

So, that’s the phenomenon. It’s been repeated in magazines, newspapers, movies. Clockwork.

Why do we care? It’s repeating itself right now. As we speak. The big “networks” of Yahoo, AOL and MSN are now experiencing the inevitable dis-aggregation of their previous value bundle. In non-MBA-speak, they’re getting picked apart by smaller, faster, specialized competitors. It’s a natural process and it’s been going on for a while – initially there’s utility for users in going one place to experience the content. As the user seeks more and varied sources, they branch out and ultimately have a menu of choices where they can get their guys-crashing-on-motorcycles fix.

What does it mean to us today?

Recognizing the trend creates opportunities. Historically, creating successful verticals online has been tricky business. Many fail. For instance, shoppers don’t necessarily go somewhere other than their usual search engine to search for products. You have to look deeper though because behaviors evolve. Users DO shop at shopping specific sites. Amazon. Zappos. There’s a microcosm of verticalization right there.

Where is this trend going? We already know that there are a few key modes of online activity: News, Communication, Information exploration. Think them through to the logical extension. There’s opportunity there – the emerging social networking sites (corollary to cable?) have made very little separation and specialization around those key dimensions. I see opportunity there.

If you look at it in retrospect, you can see broad evidence of diffuse and specialized media consumption. How about feeds? Mobile? Alerts? Interactive TV? The internet is already blasting apart into a million pieces and it’s not going to slow down.

Also, cycle time is a critical thing. Mobilizing to fill the gaps and push the splintering further requires rapid iteration and very sensitive feedback loops. Some of the insight we can gain from that is that a) platforms take a long time to build, only do it if you really need one. Customers and Users interact with PRODUCTS – put your time there as much as possible b) don’t skimp on business intelligence c) the old way of approaching the first two probably need to be updated to adapt to the realtime, or Now Web.

And business models… I’m keeping those thoughts to myself for now.

And, to bring up the obvious… what does the current economic situation do to the splintering trend? Not sure. I’m going to bet that it’s accelerated. Big.

I believe there is an entirely new way to conceive, architect, market and iterate products to meet the Great Splintering of Media. I’ll keep thinking. Let me know what you think, too.