Fred Wilson, affable tech ven­ture cap­it­al­ist and A-list blog­ger gives an anec­dotal insight into media pro­spects based on the tastes of his kids (one of whom blogs too). I try, but it’s hard not to like Wilson. Here are his obser­va­tions:

1) When they walk into a DVD store, they rarely walk out with a movie. It’s almost always the first sea­son of a TV show they’ve heard is good. They’ll go see a movie in the theatre but don’t really enjoy watch­ing movies at home or on their computers.

They feel that TV shows are bet­ter writ­ten and more inter­est­ing. And the enter­tain­ment value is cer­tainly more com­pel­ling. For roughly US$40, they got some­thing like 25 epis­odes of Broth­ers and Sis­ters. That’s almost 17 hours of entertainment…

It makes me won­der where this is headed. I don’t know enough about the eco­nom­ics of TV shows versus fims, but it may be that digital tech­no­logy is chan­ging the way the younger gen­er­a­tion will con­sume filmed enter­tain­ment in some import­ant ways. Some­thing to think about. And maybe why the writers are striking.

2) They will play games whenever given the oppor­tun­ity … It doesn’t mat­ter what game it is and what device it’s on.

3) When we were without broad­band inter­net for three days in the Bar­rier Reef, they were a little antsy but were able to stay on top of Face­book mes­sages via my Black­Berry. When we got back to a broad­band inter­net con­nec­tion, they spent the after­noon hap­pily enter­tained by the Inter­net for hours. Emily had a huge smile on her face so I asked her what she’d do without the Inter­net. She said, “Dad, the Inter­net is my primary form of entertainment”…

4) The only time they listen to radio is when we have it on in the car for short rides. If it’s a long ride, we almost always plug in the iPod and they’ll take turns DJ’ing … they find all of their music on the Inter­net via myspace, last.fm, hype machine, mp3 blogs, and social net­work­ing with their friends…

5) They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit…

6) They love magazines and read all the fash­ion, cook­ing, and gos­sip magazines they can get their hands on…

7) They don’t seem par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in news­pa­pers. They get most of their news on the Inter­net. Josh will read the sports pages over break­fast and the girls will glance at the front page. Import­ant cur­rent events and polit­ics will some­times gen­er­ate enough interest that they’ll read the front page por­tion of a story and then launch into a dis­cus­sion over break­fast. But I don’t see a com­mit­ment to news­pa­pers like we have in my gen­er­a­tion and my par­ents generation.

So what does that tell me…

• Video games and Inter­net should be enjoy­ing the highest mul­tiples but there’s no sur­prise there. the mar­ket has that figured out.
• News­pa­pers and radio should be suf­fer­ing from the low­est mul­tiples and again the mar­ket has that figured out.
• There are sec­tors of the enter­tain­ment busi­ness that are bet­ter than oth­ers. If my kids are a good sample…then TV is a bet­ter cat­egory to be in than films.
• The music busi­ness is still a good busi­ness, kids are still listen­ing to music the way we did. They are find­ing it dif­fer­ently and pay­ing for it dif­fer­ently, but they still con­sume it as pas­sion­ately as we did … those who fig­ure out the new model in music are going to do well. It won’t be the major labels though.
• Mass mar­ket magazines might be undervalued…
• Books may be the one cat­egory of media and enter­tain­ment that aren’t dis­rup­ted by digital tech­no­logy. or maybe we just haven’t seen the tech­no­logy that will do it…but at least in my fam­ily, books are still a growth sector.

Of course, my sample of three kids who live together, were raised by the same par­ents, and have access to most of what they want may not be and prob­ably isn’t representative…