Technology360

HD Radio ramping up competitive efforts

Bear Stearns hosted the Interep 2007 Radio Symposium from which Ryan Saghir quotes Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck with these takeaways and more from an iBiquity presentation:

• HD Radio is planning on offering features like enhanced PAD data to show sports scores, stock tickers, and even text-ads.
• On-demand radio, including traffic and weather
• Time-shifting capabilities with pause, record and playback functionality
• The ability to purchase music
• Subscription or opt-in services ...

... And perhaps the most significant announcement was that iBiquity envisions the HD chipset built into MP3 players, PDAs, eTablets, and Smartphones. They expect to make announcements around 2008.

Link:  Orbitcast.  --Dennis

Internet Video: A Stream Becomes a Virtual Deluge

Phyllis Korkki reports that 71% of Internet users used streaming video in March 2007 according to comScore Video Metrix.  Link:  New York Times. 

See charts in comScore press release from which comes this one (click for larger image).  --Dennis

Low Power Radio Bill Introduced in Congress

Josh Wolf writes:

        Early this morning, Free Press announced the introduction of a new bill in both the House and Senate that would remedy legislation from 2000 which prevented low power FM stations from obtaining licensing in major media markets. The Local Community Radio Act of 2007 has achieved bi-partisan support and is sponsored by Reps. Mike Doyle (D-Penn.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) in the House, and Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the Senate. ...

Link:  Media Sphere.

Gorman and Shirky on authority vs. openness

The Britannica Blog has hosted a very interesting exchange of essays between librarian Michael Gorman (ex-Dean of Library Services at California State University, Fresno) and Clay Shirky, teacher (New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program), writer and consultant.  I've been reading Shirky for years.  It's the openness vs. authority argument; Wikipedia vs. Encyclopædia Britannica (though of course, not just that); or, in book length, David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (reviews) vs. Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture (review).

Gorman begins with The Sleep of Reason, Part I (11 June) and Part II (12 June).

To which Shirky responds with "Old Revolutions Good; New Revolutions Bad" (14 June).

Gorman continues with The Siren Song of the Internet, Part I (18 June) and Part II (19 June).

To which Shirky responds with The Siren Song of Luddism (19 June).

Gorman continues again with Jabberwiki: The Educational Response, Part I (25 June) and Part II (26 June).

The Britannica Blog follows up with other responses:  Publisher Roger Kimball (The New Criterion, Encounter Books) also contributes to this debate in Technology, Temptation, and Virtual Reality.  Doctoral candidate (U. C.-Berkeley) danah boyd in Knowledge Access as a Public Good (27 June).  Reference librarian Thomas Mann in Brave New (Digital) World, Part I: Return of the Avant-Garde and Part II: Foolishness 2.0?.

I've not gotten through the essays in the last paragraph yet, but so far it's good reading.  --Dennis

YouTube represents 10% of North American Internet traffic

Steve O'Hear writes:

YouTube accounts for ten percent of all North American Internet traffic, according to a recent report (PDF) by Ellacoya Networks. Based on data of approximately one million broadband subscribers in North America, the study also revealed that — bucking a four year trend — HTTP traffic now surpasses that of p2p, largely due to the proliferation of video streaming sites such as YouTube. Remember that for years it has been p2p traffic that’s dominated broadband usage, as users download pirated music and movies over p2p file-sharing networks. ...

Link:  last100.

Feeling addicted to Personal Broadband Broadcasting

VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver writes:

There is a trend in the air. And it is already beyond the “Alpha Geek” stage. This trend is something I have been referring to as “Personal Broadband Broadcasting Networks.” The fact is that today, anyone who wants to have their own Internet TV channel can have one. Getting and keeping an audience is a different issue (Kfir Pravda has ideas about this), but these days it is possible to broadcast your own Internet TV show for free. And the fact a bunch of companies (BlogTV, Mogulus, Operator11, Ustream.TV, Veodia and more to come) are all now appearing at around the same time means to me that we will see a feature war evolve which will force these companies to push the feature sets forward on their respective products. And I wonder how long it will be before the folks at YouTube decide that “LIVE” is just a feature that they should be supporting too. ...

Link:  The Jeff Pulver Blog.

VeohTV

VeohTV from Veoh Networks is in pre-release testing and getting great press.  Here's a sampling of articles:

Veoh Networks Launches VeohTV.  Link:  Veoh Networks press release.

Veoh Networks VeohTV delivers online video promise.  Link:  informitv.

Ryan Stewart, VeohTV - The killer desktop application for video?  Link:  ZDNet.

Erick Schonfeld, VeohTV: Turning the Web Into TV.  Link:  The Next Net.

Rafat Ali, Veoh Launching New Online TV Service, Takes Streams From Content Sites Directly Into Its Player.  Link:  paidContent.org.  Ali writes:

... VeohTV is positioned as a video browser, meaning it can pull in video feeds from other sites, Veoh CEO Dmitry Shapiro explained to me last week in a demo of the service. The downloadable player, for example, can pull in videos from ABC.com, without ABC’s own player (and without ABC’s permission), and be played in Veoh’s player. This could be controversial as content companies may want to keep their own branding and player experience. ...

Michael Arrington, Veoh Announces VeohTV, A Sort of Distributed Joost.  Link:  TechCrunch.

-- Dennis

Seth Godin on Radio's Future

Mark Ramsey has published (audio and  transcript) an interview with marketing guru Seth Godin (The Dip, Permission Marketing, et al.).  Ramsey calls it the most important thing you'll read this year.  I'm not sure about that -- it's only the end of June -- but it's definitely well worth your time.  Here's a sample (Godin speaking):

... terrestrial radio is a zero-sum game. In fact, it’s worse than a zero-sum game. It is clearly headed towards a dead end. There’s no dip ahead. There’s no breakthrough that’s going to occur.  ¶    But, you have all these assets. You have advertisers. You have access to creators of content like record companies. You have access to some listeners. Why not use those assets, use that leverage to build something new where there may very well be a dip.  If I ran a radio station today, I would say, “How do I get every one of my listeners to sign up so I can have a direct relationship with them by phone and by email? How do I learn what their zip code is? How do I discover what they’re interested in?”  ¶   Because if I could do all those things using the assets I have now, I could find a new dip and get through it. I could be the go-to source for where listeners should go when they want to party, where they should go when they want to go out for dinner, where they should go when they want to buy a car. ...

Link:  hear2.0.  --Dennis

What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies

Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, has a very interesting two-part essay with this post's title on his blog.  It's based on a keynote that he gave at this week's National Media Education Conference.  Link:  Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Part 1, Part 2.

A Better Way to Stream TV?

Neal Sandler writes:

... a startup called Arootz ... says it has devised a solution [to bandwidth problems for video content] that greatly increases the Net's ability to deliver video without requiring substantial new infrastructure. The approach takes advantage of two existing (and not very esoteric) technologies: a standard Internet feature known as multicasting, by which the same information can be sent simultaneously to many recipients using just one data stream; and off-the-shelf hard drives that can store vast amounts of data fast and cheap.  ¶  The combination of the two represents a radical new approach to using the Net. Here's how it works: In today's world, when a person sitting at a PC clicks a link to watch a video, a series of servers delivers the content from its source to the end user in what's essentially an individualized person-to-person channel. If 10,000 people in a city all want to watch Desperate Housewives, each one of them gets their own personal bandwidth-hogging data stream. ¶  Imagine, instead, that by keeping track of basic patterns and preferences, an ISP could anticipate that those 10,000 viewers might want to watch Housewives in a predictable time window—say, within 24 hours after each episode was released. So rather than delivering 10,000 individual streams whenever the viewers choose to watch the show, the ISP can blast it simultaneously via multicasting (using far less bandwidth) to capacious hard drives in all 10,000 homes, and then the customers can watch the show at their leisure directly from an in-home media server. ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.