Technology360

Teen Radio to Return

Public radio friends should note the "Youth News" item below.  Playing "the radio fortune teller," Bridge Ratings president Dave Van Dyke writes:

... One of biggest - and quietest - radio industry issues to come out of the last ten years has been the theory that one key reason radio is experiencing such attrition from teens and young adults is the perfect storm that was created as technology eclipsed radio's lack of compelling youth radio content. The logic goes that if radio had been a bit more aggressive with radio programming geared to 13-24 year olds over the last ten years, it is possible that radio time-spent-listening among this group would not have fallen so sharply. ...

... I pointed them to a Bridge Ratings' study we published earlier this year that glancingly mentioned some new youth radio formats that had tested extremely well. Not really a mystery since the radio formats were put together and researched with the help of a pretty smart group of average 13-21 year olds.  ¶  Formats of particular interest to these media buyers had working titles of "Youth News" and "Current Blend".  ¶  "Youth News" is fairly easy to figure out - only you wouldn't believe how good it sounded in testing. That's because this new youth information format was written and delivered by no one older than 24 and it had music throughout.  ¶  "Current Blend" is a bit more difficult to decipher. However, I can tell you that it's a music-focused radio format that is not currently heard anywhere on the planet on traditional, satellite or Internet radio! ...

Link:  Navigate the Future.  Encouraging to those who may have written off everyone under 30 to iPods.  Although not aimed at teens to my knowledge, there are a couple of projects in the public radio community aimed at younger audiences.  One such is NPR's Bryant Park Project.  Disclosure: I'm on NPR's board of directors.  --Dennis

P2P-2-ISP Peace Pipe Could Ease Bandwidth Crunch

Michael Calore writes:

... Faced with a surge in network usage, internet service providers are grumbling about rising traffic levels. The increase is driven so far mostly by internet video from YouTube and similar services, which don't actually employ P2P technologies.  ¶  But ISPs say the looming growth of true peer-to-peer applications threatens to overwhelm them. Some ISPs have even started sniffing out P2P traffic on their networks and curbing it, either slowing file sharing to a trickle or bringing it to a halt.  ¶  Responding to this adversarial relationship, some P2P companies are adopting a posture of engagement with ISPs, and have formed a new industry working group to help broker relationships that, they say, will enable ISPs to better manage and distribute traffic loads on their networks.  ¶  The P4P working group consists of content-distribution-technology providers like BitTorrent, Pando Networks, LimeWire and VeriSign's Kontiki, as well as broadband companies like Verizon and AT&T, and hardware makers like Cisco Systems. There are close to a dozen members so far. The P4P operates under the guidance of the Distributed Computing Industry Association, a group that wants to foster legal peer-to-peer content distribution. ...

Link:  Wired.  It appears to me that Clearwire, which is my WISP, is throttling P2P traffic.  I've not noticed it with Open Media Network, which is powered by Kontiki, but the other day I installed a Torrent client to get a (legitimate) file that was only available that way and it downloaded exceedingly slow.  One sip of water does not a well make, but I think there's a good chance that's what's going on.  Also, while it used to let me connect to the university's VPN so I could sync my Outlook, that's no longer the case.  So it's sniffing out what I'm doing.  Maybe Dick Cheney is a shareholder.  --Dennis

Welcome "back," Sen. Tim Johnson

This week I've watched excerpts of two speeches from U.S. senators, each of whom I have met briefly and whose careers I've followed over the years.  One is noted for speaking in a stentorian orational style that is off-putting to some people (I'm one) because it seems affected.  The other is noted for having a quiet, deliberate style of speaking, when he speaks at all.  The first was one of my own senators, Larry Craig of Idaho, explaining at an outdoor podium in Boise that he did nothing wrong and wasn't gay after pleading guilty to soliciting sex in a Minneapolis airport restroom (YouTube clip).  The second was Sen. Tim Johnson, who had emergency surgery in December after suffering a stroke-like episode from malformed blood vessels in his brain and nearly tipping the balance of power in the Senate.  Johnson, who will be returning to his Senate office after Labor Day, gave an interview to Bob Woodruff (himself recovered from severe brain injury) on ABC's "Nightline" (YouTube clips of him this week and in better times).

Johnson and I are the same age and went to high school in nearby towns in South Dakota.  He played basketball for Vermillion High School (my ex- was a classmate) and unless my own brain is playing tricks on me, I can still remember his unusually bright red face running up and down the court in a game against Beresford circa 1964.  We are both graduates of Doc Farber's Government Department at the University of South Dakota (Tom Brokaw is another), though he was already in law school by the time I enrolled as a freshman after Air Force service.  So for these small personal connections, it was wonderful, not to mention emotional, to see him coming back from what could have been for him and his family the ultimate disaster.  Welcome back, Tim!  --Dennis

Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet

Little did I realize reading Joseph Schumpeter as a political theory major in college that his classic "creative destruction" coinage would be applied some 35 years later to news on the Internet.  Thomas E. Patterson has prepared a report with this title from the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  It was brought to my attention by John Bracken, who has written two posts citing data from the report (on PBS.org and on NPR.org).  Patterson writes:

... This report examines trends in Internet-based news traffic for the purpose of peering into the future of news in America.  In light of the continuing migration of people to online news and the evolving nature of Web technology, our assessments are necessarily preliminary and speculative.  Precise judgments are also made difficult by the range of Internet-based news outlets.  Thousands of siges offer news and news-related content.  Nevertheless, there are emerging patterns.  Like the cable and broadcast revolutions, the Internet revolution is redistributing the news audience in ways beneficial to some news outlets and harmful to others. ...

Link:  Kennedy School of Government [pdf].  NB: The comparative graph is from usage of each site by people who have elected to have the Alexa Toolbar installed in their browsers, so isn't necessarily representative of all users.  --Dennis

Big Love

Let's face it, I'm unfaithful -- to my technology, that is.  I have two cell phones and normally whenever my contract is up I'll go out and buy the latest one. 

My work cell phone is an Audiovox PPC-6700 from Sprint.  This is a Swiss army knife of a phone -- or to be more accurate, it's a Microsoft Mobile PDA that lets you make phone calls and take pictures.  It has a great web browser, its synchronization with Outlook is terrific, and as an email machine it's decent keyboard makes it above average.  When I'm traveling, I use it as a radio to listen to the two radio services that I manage back home.  Sprint's great EV-DO Rev. 3 network makes that a pleasure.  The camera is pretty lame and doesn't really work with scanR, which I use as a substitute fax machine and to make documents from various presentation slides I see -- so I have to carry a small real camera for that.  Most everything is a two-handed operation requiring that darn little stylus to do stuff.  They're easy to uses and Sprint stores don't stock them so you're forced to order replacements online.  Like me, it could stand to lose some bulk.

My personal phone is a T-Mobile BlackBerry 8700g, by far the best-designed phone-and-email-handheld I've ever used -- and that's a lot of them.  What I mean is, for telephone and email functionality, it's terrific.  But it doesn't have a camera, it can't play media, it runs on the not-so-speedy EDGE network, and its web browser is only adequate.  Except for the Pearl, no one has ever accused a BlackBerry of being good-looking.  I've had five email accounts, including my work account, merrily pushing mail to me since I got it about 16 months ago, but only this week did I get my IT guy to make it work with the Exchange server at the university where I work.  He wishes he'd never seen it.  But this, too, works great, and now all my Outlook stuff is syncing with it.  It's sort of like one of those second weddings that some couples do as a recommitment.

But that renewed relationship with my BlackBerry comes at a time when I'm thinking, wow, I've only got eight months to go on this contract.  What else is out there?  There is the iPhone, of course, but my reading and talking to a few users has led me to believe that it's fabulous industrial design but its only fair in the functionality department.  Beautiful, but not real bright.  I need bright.

The phone that threatens my BlackBerry fidelity the most is the Nokia N95, which just came out with a U.S. version that solves most of the minuses noted about the original European version.  No U.S. carrier is offering it, so you currently have to buy it unlocked and pay full price.  The new one has shed her shutter skirt to make room for a larger battery.  She has more memory and operates on the AT&T 3G network, so she's much speedier than the iPhone operating on the old slow network.  She has a 5-megapixel camera -- so you don't have to carry a "real" one -- and she seems to do everything as well as both my current phones do.  Oh, and she has VOIP software, WiFi and a built-in GPS.

Om Malik has a review of the U.S. version at GigaOM.  Symbian-guru.com has pictures.  More info at PC World and PC Magazine.  Be still, my heart.   --Dennis

Transition to Media Systems Engineering

It's a rare broadcast engineer who becomes a GM, and if the GM didn't come up by that route, the engineering department is pretty mysterious.  Still, most CEOs are aware of the sea change in broadcasting technology toward information technology.  In an interesting unsigned article in Broadcast Engineering, the author states that "neither broadcast engineering nor IT are absorbing the other; in reality a new engineering discipline is being born."

Still, the changes underway have a profound impact on the capabilities and capitalization requirements of an organization.  The author discusses how using the Capability Maturity Model and Six Sigma can help broadcasting management understand and manage this development.  The article ends with a half dozen links to resources on these two models.

Link:  Broadcast Engineering.  Thanks to Ralph Hogan for the tip.  --Dennis

Television 2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium

"Mediaeater," whose real identity I don't know but whose bookmarks on del.icio.us I find invaluable (if I ever get hit by a truck, del.icio.us/mediaeater is a pretty good substitute for this blog, though more like drinking out of a firehose than this effort), recently added the new master's thesis of Ivan D. Askwith with this title.  Askwith's thesis supervisor is Henry Jenkins, Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, blogger at Confessions of an Aca/Fan, and author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, among other books -- and whose bona fides prompted me to read the first few pages of this quite interesting 174-pp work.

Askwith's abstract:

Television is in a period of dramatic change. As the mass audience continues to fragment into ever-smaller niche audiences and communities of interest, and new technologies shift control over the television viewing experience from network programmers into the hands of media consumers, television’s traditional business models prove themselves increasingly untenable. In an attempt to preserve these models, television executives are attempting to shed television’s long-standing reputation as a passive medium, which emphasized the viewer’s role as a consumer of television content, and which critics often decried as vacuous and mindless.  ¶   The current discourse suggests that television’s future now relies on the industry’s success recasting it as an active medium, capable of capturing and holding the audience’s attention, and effective at generating emotional investment. The single most important concept in this new industrial discourse is that of audience “engagement”, a term that has generated a tremendous amount of debate and disagreement, with television and advertising executives alike struggling to understand what engagement is, how it works, and what its practical consequences will be.  ¶  This thesis argues that television’s future as an engagement medium relies not on inventing new methodologies that define engagement in terms of quantifiable audience behaviors and attitudes, but instead in a new conceptual model of television, better suited to a multiplatform media environment and the emerging attention and experience economies, which focuses on the development of television programs that extend beyond the television set. Such a model must understand television not as a method for aggregrating audiences that can be sold to advertisers, but as a medium that draws upon media platforms, content, products, activities and social spaces to provide audiences with a range of opportunities to engage with television content. Accordingly, this thesis offers a framework for thinking about viewer engagement as the range of opportunities and activities that become possible when drawing upon an expanded, multi-platform conception of the modern television text. Applying this framework to the innovative and experimental textual extensions developed around ABC’s Lost, the thesis indicates both the challenges and opportunities that emerge as television becomes an engagement medium.  [emphasis added]

Link:  Comparative Media Studies, MIT [pdf].  --Dennis

In-Stat: U.S. households with little or no interest in HDTV on the rise

Broadcast Engineering reports:

The percentage of U.S. households that said they were interested in HDTVs fell this year compared to those who expressed an interest last year, and the number or those reporting to have little or no interest has grown, according to a series of studies from market research firm In-Stat.  ¶  At the same time, worldwide interest in HDTV among consumers is rising, with particularly strong interest in France and South Korea, the research firm said. The reports also showed that consumers are choosing LCD TVs over their plasma display equivalents in good number, which will be responsible for LCD televisions claiming 75 percent of the market by 2011 and the plasma market share dwindling to below 15 percent. ...

--Dennis

Youth Radio: The Power of Collegial Pedagogy

Henry Jenkins has a pair of interesting, if typically long, posts on Youth Radio.  Link:  Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Part One, Part Two.  --Dennis

TV explodes: The chain reaction hits critical mass

Jeff Jarvis writes:

Internet usage is now approaching TV usage — in the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Japan — according to an IBM study to which Om Malik points us. Note also that TV networks’ share of online TV viewing is only about 33 percent, below YouTube and barely ahead of Google and social networks in the U.S. — and the alternatives are only beginning (in the life of internet video, it’s only 1954). ...

Link:  Buzz Machine.  Be sure to read Malik's comments in addition to Jarvis'.  --Dennis