Technology360

Do Public Media Believe in the Public

Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, was one of the speakers at a conference I attended this week and gave an excellent presentation about the democratization of production and distribution and the impact of same on public media.  He writes about his points in his weblog.  Link:  Center for Citizen Media.  --Dennis

Three steps to convergence

Nico Flores has more on Terry Heaton's Local Television's Perfect Storm essay.  He writes:

... I agree that convergence will happen, but [not] so fast. As I see it, before we are all consuming web video on the TV, three things need to happen:

1. There needs to be enough bandwidth. That's nearly there
2. The last ten feet need to be bridged - i.e. we need devices that will stream video from the net to the TV set. There are already some devices that can do this, but they are still nascent
3. A necessary consumer practice needs to emerge. That's years away

I wrote about the last point in my previous post. In a nutshell, what is needed is not just a way to deliver content to the TV set, or a way for consumers to find content using the TV set. What is needed is a socially shared practice that relies on web video content and the TV set. ...

Link:  On Demand Media.  I'm pretty sure that Flores meant to insert "not" where I've placed [___] Nico confirms that the original should have had "no" inserted where I've put the brackets.  --Dennis

Online video advertising

ClickZ Network has a pair of articles giving optimistic assessments of the future of advertising and online video.  See Pete Blackshaw, Will Video Save the Agency Star? (link: ClickZ) and Pete Lerma, A Rallying Cry For Ad-Supported Video (link: ClickZ).  --Dennis

Open Media Network 1.0 release

After 17 months as a public beta, Open Media Network has released version 1.0 of its client software.  Congratulations to Mike Homer, the former Netscape (et al.) exec whose vision this is and who has overseen the development of this great gift to public media.  The group of us from the public broadcasting community that has been working with Mike on this since before the public beta is greatful for his willingness to consult with us on design and features throughout the process. 

If you haven't checked out OMN in a while or at all, please go to the site and download the client and start browsing the audio and video there.  I'm working on a couple of posts for this blog about it, one covering features that may not be obvious (like its ability to be distributed with your branding) and another giving a "top 10" list for how stations and independent producers can use to transform their future.  --Dennis

A Video Business Model Ready to Move Beyond Beta

Richard Siklos writes:

... It is wholly unclear which, if any, of these or any of the dozens of other recent efforts that have been announced will break away from the pack, which is why many of them are couched as “tests” and “experiments.” (Whoever thought up this idea of Web sites forever being in “beta” deserves a prize as the spinmeister of their generation.)  ¶    Still, a few things are clear from the recent news flow. First of all: yes, the world has gone batty over video. Thirty-second clips, three-minute spoofs, half-hour sitcoms, TV dramas that haven’t been shown in decades, rap videos, Hollywood blockbusters and feeds from TV news outlets big and small are flooding online. The term video itself is already starting to sound old — the equivalent of songs before the advent of MP3’s and downloads. ¶  The good news — and my second point — is that there’s gold in them there hills. Video delivered over the Internet is clearly shaping up to be an actual business that advertisers are interested in. The broadcasting (netcasting?) of television programs and clips on the Web moves the debate away from Internet-versus-TV because if TV executives put their best material online and get paid for it, the proposition becomes Internet-cum-TV. ...

Link:  New York Times.

Local Television's Perfect Storm

Terry Heaton has a new essay which, as always, is worth your time to read.  He tees it up as follows:

This one ... examines the confluence of events and innovations that are leading to what many believe will be a major collapse of the local broadcast hegemony by the end of the decade.  ¶  This is largely due to the disruptive innovations in media — what we at AR&D call "Media 2.0" — that are relentlessly marching forward and into which we've barely dipped out toes. The essay compares a future broadcast signal to a single pixel on a digital page, one in which eyeballs and revenue follow groupings of pixels rather than single dots of color. ...

Link:  The PoMo Blog.  Read why media companies are like pixels. 

Updated 23 Sep 2006:
Nico Flores comments on this essay in Three steps to convergence.  He writes:

... I agree that convergence will happen, but [___] so fast. As I see it, before we are all consuming web video on the TV, three things need to happen:

1. There needs to be enough bandwidth. That's nearly there
2. The last ten feet need to be bridged - i.e. we need devices that will stream video from the net to the TV set. There are already some devices that can do this, but they are still nascent
3. A necessary consumer practice needs to emerge. That's years away ...

Link:  On Demand Media.  I'm pretty sure that Flores meant to insert "not" where I've inserted the brackets [].  --Dennis

Video explodes

Jeff Jarvis writes:

A global study by Accenture — which I find only at Media Guardian — reports that nearly 40 percent of internet users download and watch videos on the web and — get this — 54 percent of young people want to create or share their own content on the web. “The global study by consultancy Accenture found that audiences want more control over where and when they watch footage, and they want to make more of their own.” Amen to that. ...

Link:  BuzzMachine.

HD Radio prices coming down

Sangean America has announced two HD Radio receivers (actually, one receiver and one component tuner) at price points under $250 and under $200, respectively.  Here's the company release.  Engadget has a picture of the table model.

Many other manufacturers are selling these in the $300 range, so that got me thinking about how that compared with the cost of my first transistor radio.  It was a handheld 6-transistor model that sounded a lot better when you laid it speaker-side down on top of a large empty water glass.  As I recall, it cost me $21.  I was in high school and remember listening to the earliest Beatles releases from WLS and KOMA on it, so it had to be at least 1963 (the earliest releases were in March).  But it also seems like I bought it in the summer, so it may have been the year before.  I made 75¢/hr in 1962 and $1/hr in 1963, so it cost me something like 21-28 hours to pay for the radio (harder work then, too, in some ways).  So the cost of the new Sangean table model equates to the same amount of work at $9-$12 per hour.  You can also plug any amount of money into this inflation calculator to see what it was worth in 2005.   --Dennis

US spectrum auction closes

Eric Bangeman writes:

The US government's big spectrum auction wrapped up yesterday with bids totalling $13.9 billion. Touted as one of the largest spectrum auctions in Federal Communications Commission history, the sale was for 1,122 licenses covering 90MHz of spectrum in the 1710-1755MHz and 2110-2155MHz bands. ...

Link:  Ars Technica.

Also see T-Mobile's $4 Billion Tops FCC's $14 Billion Spectrum Auction (link:  Information Week) and Big Guns Dominate Spectrum Auction (link:  Light Reading).  --Dennis

Goldhaber: How Attention Works, part 2

A week ago, I posted a link to a draft of the first part of chapter 3 of Michael Goldhaber's new book, which he is serializing online.  He's now posted the second part of that chapter.  Both are links to pdfs.  Part 1.  Part 2.  --Dennis