Technology360

The future of public access cable

Dan Gillmor and Jason Crow are doing a workshop on the future of public access cable at today's Beyond Broadcast 2007 conference and engage in a pre-conference debate on Dan's blog.  Link:  Center for Citizen Media.

What should local radio be?

Jeff Jarvis has some interesting thoughts on the notion that radio should be more local, even "hyperlocal."  It came out of his participation in an NPR+bloggers meeting the week before this one, links from which I've been collecting under a Jarvis title, National Public Whatsis ... .  However, I'm several days late in adding it there, so am also posting it here because it deserves to be noticed.  Jarvis writes:

... I’d start and the end and say that a local radio station must stop thinking of itself as radio. It has the power to develop local communities of news, information, and interest. It can use its promotional power to drive people there. It could, for example, get people in a market to record every damned school board and town council meeting and put them online, served by the station. It could create the meeting place where people share news and information, competing with or even in cooperation with local papers. It could be a home for talk about local issues and news.  ¶  So what is the on-air content? It’s not hyperlocal. But it could be a meta version of that: talk about the issues that cut across the region with reporting from the best of the local communities. It could feature the best citizen critics giving you reviews of local arts and entertainment. I don’t come up with much here. So I’d say that the station has a limited time frame in which to use its promotional power. ...

Link:  BuzzMachine.  --Dennis

XM & Sirius: What A Merger Won't Fix

From an unsigned article:

Sure, XM ... and Sirius ... would wring out plenty of cost savings as one company. But the two have yet to earn a penny of profit. Their combined losses for 2006 are expected to hit $1.7 billion. And competition is everywhere. Car salesmen are pushing new iPod jacks. More than 57 million Americans now listen to some form of Web radio each week, says radio-audience tracker Bridge Ratings, compared with 14 million subscribers for XM and Sirius combined. Broadcasters are beginning to offer high definition, or HD, radio. While consumers need to buy a special receiver to get HD, which squeezes more programming into the same frequency, the service is free.  ¶  Meanwhile, 240 million folks listen to regular radio at least once a week. And who knows what's around the corner?  Maybe a form of WiMAX will be capable of streaming Web radio to a speeding car. ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.  Maybe a form of WiMAX?  Not maybe -- it's here. 

Also see Olga Kharif's Satellite Static: The XM-Sirius Merger.  Link:  BusinessWeek.  --Dennis

Martin's Must-Carry Plan

Ted Hearn writes:

In a new must-carry proposal from Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, cable operators would be forced to carry the programming of certain “eligible entities” that had leased excess spectrum from local digital-TV stations, FCC and industry officials confirmed last week.  ¶  “The chairman wants to do all that he can to facilitate entry by small business and other eligible entities in an already-crowded field of broadcasting,” an FCC official said last Tuesday, one week after Martin and his aides began reaching out for support. ...

Link:  Multichannel News.  Follow the link for details.

He's made the executive director of the Minority Media & Telecommunications Council happy.  See Honig Cheers Martin for Bridging Multicast Must-Carry Divide.  Link: Broadcasting & Cable.  Also see FCC's Martin Floats Leased Multicast Must-Carry Proposal.  Link: Broadcasting & Cable.  Both articles by John Eggerton.  --Dennis

Half of all US households will have broadband this year

... says Park Associates via Nate Anderson:

US broadband growth, though slower than that in some other countries, is expected to hit a significant milestone at some point in 2007. Consultancy Parks Associates has just released its annual report on US broadband, and it concludes that more than 50 percent of US households will have a high-speed connection by the end of the year. ...

Link:  Ars Technica.

Joost Internet TV Set to Revive Net Neutrality Battle

Andrew Grossman makes the case that the extraordinary video bandwidth requirements of Joost will put unrealistic burdens on ISPs, especially if net neutrality was enacted.  Link:  Technology Liberation Front.

In Joost Viacom warning: expensive bandwidth means IPTV not free, Alex Zaharov-Reutt attempts to quantify:

... Joost promises to download around 330Mb per hour for a high quality, TV equivalent experience at high resolution. Joost say that if a lot of people in a particular country or in the world are watching the same program, the data can be spread more widely and can drop the per hour download requirements in the current best case scenario to 220Mb – but in the initial stages 330Mb is obiviously more likely.  ¶  On the upload side of things, Joost will upload around 150Mb of data for every hour of TV you watch.  ¶  If you watch 10 one hour shows, that’s 3.3Gb you’ve just downloaded, and 1.5Gb you’ve uploaded. Watch a single one hour show for 30 days, and that’s 9.9Gb. If you’re stuck on a 10Gb download limit, you’ve just used it all up watching a Joost TV show every day. Where does that leave the rest of your Internet experience, sending and receiving emails, downloading other programs or new music, watching Youtube or anything else that requires bandwidth? ...

Link: iTWire (thanks to TVover.net).  --Dennis

Dying for Television

Adam Thierer points to the following story: 

... The (New York-based) North County Gazette reports that the mummified body of a man was discovered in his Hampton Bays home this week. He had been dead for a year, but his television was still running and showing programming! ...

Link:  Technology Liberation Front.  So bizarre that I had to share it.  --Dennis

 

Changes in TV advertising to be evident at upfront

Diane Mermigas writes:

... traditional media players eventually will find a way to retain the more than $60 billion advertisers spend annually on television by leveraging their branded networks not only across many new interactive media platforms but through a new interactive television-connected media hub that Apple, Microsoft and others plan to carve out of the average American living room beginning this year.  ¶  While the continuation of the upfront ritual is assured until there is a well-constructed business model to replace it -- which most likely will take years -- the logic behind the value proposition, metric and create bets on which it is based have never appeared more suspect given the kinds of innovative and constructive advertising and consumer measurement practices emerging on the Internet and various interactive media platforms. ...

Link:  Hollywood Reporter.

Hope is not lost: Radio and TV and Everything

Rob Paterson is writing about this week's sessions at the Public Media Conference 2007.  This compelling insight is from a post about a two-day pre-conference meeting for public broadcasting CEOs:

... For me, motive and hope is the key to change. As Alan Deutschman shows us in Change or Die, being told you are going to die - the substance of much of what we heard in the last 2 days - is not the great activator for change that we think it may be.  90% of seriously at risk patients do not act on their doctor's advice.  ¶  So why don't we change, even if we know that if we don't we will die? To make a big change - to think web versus terrestrial, to think collaboration versus me alone -  often means to change our identity.  If our identity and our personal story is attached to these things, then in 90% of the time we would rather die than change the identity that we had come to rely on.  We martyr ourselves for this identity.  This is what is the real barrier. ...

And then:

... Ideas do not change us. Only experience changes us. Changing experience has to be deep and repetitive to change the habits of a career. ...

Link:  Rob Paterson's Weblog.

In a later post, Hyperlocal - Saving the World, Rob addresses mission directly:

One of the powerful trends that I am witnessing is the growing recognition in Public radio and TV that There is a huge opportunity for public media to secure a viable future by serving the hyper local community. I will post more later about what I have seen and heard about how this can be done for very little money. Please take it on faith for now that the how is now known.  ¶  The big idea is that in a hyper linked global world - the hyper local becomes the most important place. If the 20th century was about nationalism and the nation statee. The 21st will have to be about a shift in power back to the small local community.

Link:  Robert Paterson's Weblog.  Bingo.  While we're all scrambling to see how we can make money on the web, mostly by monetizing repurposed legacy programs in new ways (and there are ways to do that), the truth is that the real power of the web is to help us be more significant institutions in our community.  It's way better than our time-limited hit-dependent broadcast delivery.  For non-profits, it's about mission.  Show me the money! the mission (and the money will take care of itself).  --Dennis

The DDC Decloaks

Hearts of Space producer and web content pioneer Stephen Hill has posted a critique of the public radio Digital Distribution Consortium report.  I just learned that the report had been posted from Stephen's piece, so I've had a chance only to peruse it quickly.  I'll try to give it a closer read over the weekend and then decide then if I want to add to comments that I made earlier without benefit of the document.  Here's a quote from Stephen to get you started:

This week the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) decloaked after six months silence and released a carefully written proposal, not only for a new distribution system for digital public media, but for a new business model for the public media network of the future. The full proposal is available as a .pdf file at the DDC Wiki here or the IMA site here and is worth reading carefully if you want to understand the full scope of these ideas.  ¶  It's a serious piece of work by well-intentioned professionals with some of the best new media experience in the system, so I'm unhappy to report that it is deeply prejudiced in several of its core assumptions. ...

Link:  Spatial Relations.  --Dennis