Technology360

Read All About It

Departing Wall Street Journal editor Paul E. Steiger tells it like it is for newspapers these days in a major front page article for this weekend's edition of that paper.  The article is a history of the past 40 years or so of print journalism, but is particularly valuable for its analysis of the decade or so since the Internet started eating print's lunch.  Unfortunately, while public television gets a mention, broadcast journalism's main U.S. practitioner, National Public Radio, doesn't.  Read All About It: How Newspapers Got Into a Fix, and Where they Go From Here.  Link:  Wall Street Journal.  Steiger is leaving to become president and editor-in-chief of ProPublica.  Thanks to NPR Foundation chairman and fellow NPR board of directors member Antoine van Agtmael for the reminder to read my paper.  --Dennis

The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007

Blogger John Bracken, whose day job is at the MacArthur Foundation, sent me and a bunch of others a request to name the most influential media writing of 2007.  In spite of a reminder, I couldn't come up with anything on a par with Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks that I and many others nominated last year.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur was quite influential, largely as a provocation to the new media cognoscenti, and David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous has also been influential for more positive reasons.  Both are in my to-read stack, but I hadn't gotten to either of them so didn't feel comfortable nominating them.

Fortunately, others on John's list weren't as lacking in imagination as I and this year he's put together another great list.  I look forward to exploring the ones I've not yet read.  --Dennis

The Semantic Web

I'm interested in how humans attempt to extract value from the flood of information they create (search for my earlier posts on "Myth, Media and Meta"), devising more and more effective ways of extracting this value.  My candidate for the next big thing in this regard is what's labeled the Semantic Web, which the anonymous authors of Wikipedia describe as:

... an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.^[1] It derives from W3C director Sir Tim Berners-Lee's vision of the Web as a universal medium for data, information, and knowledge exchange. ...

Link:  Wikipedia.

In a 2001 article in Scientific American, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila described it in some detail.  The article, The Semantic Web, is still freely available on its web site.

The December 2007 issue of the same magazine has very good update on this effort, titled The Semantic Web In Action (authors: Lee Feigenbaum, Ivan Herman, Tonya Hongsermeier, Eric Neumann and Susie Stephens).  Unfortunately, the Scientific American web site currently has it available for paid access only and that payment is greater than the cost of the magazine, so look for it on newstands before it disappears.  Highly recommended.

Also see Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall and Tim Berners-Lee, The Semantic Web Revisited, IEEE Intellilgent Systems, May/June 2006 and, for the technically inclined, the World Wide Web Consortium's W3C Semantic Web Activity page.  --Dennis

Bloog: The RSS Mod-Synth

I posted earlier this month about my son's "RoboWheat" robotics project at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he is a senior industrial design major.  Another project is what he calls a bloog, a machine that ingests real-time blog posts and produces synthesized content from them.  I'll let him describe it:

Here is the finished project of what I wrote about here - a machine that scrambles the words and sentences of real-time blog posts, based on the look of a 1960’s Moog synthesizer.  It pulls in any RSS feed (for demonstration I used Technorati to create one that fetches all new net-wide blog posts about ‘music,’ har har). The knobs and sliders scroll through the text and add or subtract words from the screen, creating new ideas from the existing sentences.

Some examples:

Link:  AndrewHaarsager.com.  I note that one of the categories he filed this under is "Useless," but I don't know about that.  It might improve the content of many blog posts.  ;-)  --Dennis

PBCore metadata standard

The PBCore metadata standard is, IMHO, one of the most important and, arguably, the most progressive thing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has ever funded.  It's a necessary tool to enable public media to transition to the digital age -- assuming, of course, that public media's managers can find their way to the digital age. 

Marcia Brooks is directing the project from the Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH in Boston and she's written a great article on it for the December 17th issue Current, the public broadcasting newspaper.  Current seems to delay posting its articles online for some reason, so the the Public Television Digital Archive has posted a copy of Get going in metadata today with this amazing free kit! online [PDF].  Nice job, Marcia, and thanks to Nan Rubin for posting this important overview.

Update 29 December 2007:  I see that the PDF has also been posted at the PBCore web site.

Update, 4 January 2008:
An HTML version is now posted at Current.  --Dennis

Nokia: 25% of Entertainment by 2012 Will be Created and Consumed Within Peer Communities

From a Nokia release:

... Up to a quarter of the entertainment consumed by people in five years time will have been created, edited and shared within their peer circle rather than coming out of traditional media groups. This phenomenon, dubbed 'Circular Entertainment', has been identified by Nokia as a result of a global study into the future of entertainment.  ¶  The study, entitled 'A Glimpse of the Next Episode', carried out by The Future Laboratory, interviewed trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles signposting emerging entertainment trends. Combining views from industry leading figures with Nokia's own research from its 900 million consumers around the world, Nokia has constructed a global picture of what it believes entertainment will look like over the next five years. ...

... Of the 9,000 consumers we surveyed:

    - 23% buy movies in digital format
    - 35% buy music on MP3 files
    - 25% buy music on mobile devices
    - 39% watch TV on the internet
    - 23% watch TV on mobile devices
    - 46% regularly use IM, 37% on a mobile device
    - 29% regularly blog
    - 28% regularly access social networking sites
    - 22% connect using technologies such as Skype
    - 17% take part in Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
    - 17% upload to the internet from a mobile device

Link: PR Newswire via CNN Money.

Thanks for the tip to Terry Heaton who analyzes this in a post called Tracking the Rise of Personal Media.  Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog.  --Dennis

A Broadcaster's Christmas Carol

I've linked to it before, but Terry Heaton has "reprinted" his Christmas 2004 essay, a take-off on the Charles Dickens classic.  A sample:

... Ebenezer was a second generation Broadcaster, having built his empire from a small A.M. radio station his father owned in the 50s. With a penchant for squeezing every last penny from a dollar, Ebenezer Broadcaster had a reputation as a hostile and difficult employer. He boasted that many celebrities had come through his television stations on their way up the ladder, but the truth is he never paid anybody enough money to want to stick around. ...

Link:  Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog. If you're in broadcasting, don't miss it.  --Dennis

TV's Revenue Woes Reach Tipping Point

Diane Mermigas writes:

... Until now, flat-to-rising household TV usage was no real threat to earnings. “However, recent data points on TV viewing and HUT are more disturbing,” [Bear Stearns analyst Spencer] Wang said. In calendar 2007, HUT is down 1.2% from 2006 for the first time–without a change in the Nielsen measurement sample. TV’s core selling demographic (adults ages 18 to 49) has seen HUTs drop 2.5% from a year ago, even when adjusting for the new live, same-day and DVR ratings, that collectively underestimate the erosion. “We find it more than coincidental that declining TV usage is occurring in tandem with broadband Internet penetration reaching mass market levels” of more than half of U.S. homes, he said. ...

Link:  MediaPost.  --Dennis

Implications of the Writers' strike

Diane Mermigas has written three recent columns for MediaPost that are must-read analyses of the impact of the Writers' strike on television's economy:

TV Nets Stuck: Strike Ends With New Metrics, 12 December 2007

Strike Will Transfer Ad Power To Web, TV To Revamp, 18 December 2007

For TV, Crisis Is Catalyst For Change, 21 December 2007

Umair Haque looks at it in terms of how this relates to emerging business models for content:

... While writers and networks have been crippling each other with a simplistic - and totally obsolete - game of mutually assured destruction, Google is slowly but surely reinventing a better way for content to create value: one which doesn't need exactly the rigid contractual lockstep writers and networks are squabbling over.  ¶  See the point? Google is solving exactly the problem that core-focused players are paralyzed by; that's suddenly brought the existing value chain to a crashing, creaking halt. ...

Link:  Bubblegeneration.

Finally, read Paul Bond's article, [Bear Sterns] Report weighs ripple effect of writers strike on Street.  Link:  Hollywood Reporter.  --Dennis

MovieBeam closes. Bad news for Vudu, AppleTV?

Steve O'Hear writes:

... MovieBeam, an early attempt at creating a consumer facing set-top box and accompanying movie service, has closed its doors after fours years in business.  ¶  Originally founded by The Walt Disney Company and later sold to U.S. video rental chain Movie Gallery, MovieBeam was designed to bypass Cable and Satelite providers by beaming movies wireless into the home. The set-top box came with dozens of movies already stored and ready for rental (at $5 a pop), with forty new titles refreshed each month. In total the device could store around a hundred movies at any one time. ...

Link:  last100.

O'Hear thinks this may be bad news for other new entrants in the set-top box market.  I don't doubt that set-top box fatigue (what David Liroff calls the "topple factor") is at work here.  But MovieBeam also faced impending delivery problems.  It was distributing movies over the small amount of ancillary data capacity of analog television stations, including many public television stations.  Those analog transmitters are going away in 13½ months.  While the replacement digital system has much more capacity, it will also, IMHO, come with much greater support costs due to the fragile reception issues inherent in the ATSC digital standard.  I wouldn't be surprised if that figured in MovieBeam's decision also.

But even without the set-top box, video downloading is a problematic business.  After less than a year, Wal-Mart has announced that it's closing its video download store.  Again, Steve O'Hear writes:

... In a bid to get all of the major studios on board, while at the same time not compete negatively with Wal-Mart’s traditional DVD sales, the service was plagued by high pricing and a ridiculously large dose of DRM (one Windows-PC only). It was doomed from the start. ...

Link:  last100.  --Dennis

Pay Me for My Content

Last month, Jaron Lanier wrote an interesting (especially in the context of the current Hollywood writers' strike) op-ed about the economic model of web content:

... Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users. ... ¶  There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone is aggregated.  ¶  How long must creative people wait for the Web’s new wealth to find a path to their doors? A decade is a long enough time that idealism and hope are no longer enough. If there’s one practice technologists ought to embrace, it is the evaluation of empirical results.  ¶  To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way. ...

Link:  New York Times.

This op-ed generated a lot of discussion in the blogosphere, out of which I'd like to point you to this response from Stephen Hill (of public radio's Hearts of Space fame).  He writes:

... I'm not sure what you mean when you say "We could design information systems so that people can pay for content." The tools are already there; what is lacking is the will, which I gather is the area your piece was intended to stimulate, and the entrepreneurial culture that goes along with it among creatives.   ¶  The entrepreneurial class online is dominated by venture capitalists and technologists, and the predilection for free content is based on a barely concealed quest for "scale" which requires elimination of "friction." Ironically, it's mass media in drag with free content as bait. In some cases aggregation makes up for value lacking in the content itself. Thus the natural evolution of advertising as a business model. ...

Link:  Spatial Relations.  --Dennis

IP multicast

For us broadcasters, multicast means transmitting multiple program streams over one RF channel, but in the Internet world, multicast -- or, more precisely, IP multicast -- means something different.  Robert X. Cringely has a very good overview of IP multicast technology in his PBS column and argues that it's the next big thing.  He writes:

... IP Multicast is the not-so-simple carriage of the same digital signal to thousands or millions of people at the same time. This is as opposed to unicast, which can also serve millions of people but requires millions of parallel video streams to do so. ...

So, in unicast, every viewer of your video or listener to your audio requires a separate stream from the source.  Think of it as a multi-stemmed bush or shrub.  In IP multicast, you send one out and it branches remotely.  Think of it as a tree.  Cringely continues:

... Here's a very simple explanation for the way that IP Multicast is supposed to work. Seinfeld episode #60, The Junior Mint (which happens to be the third most popular Seinfeld episode of all time according to some Internet poll) is assigned the Class D multicast address of 224.1.2.3. If you want to watch that episode you click on it in some client application that "subscribes" to that address. When the show is made available on a server anywhere on a part of the net that supports multicast, you will start to receive it. All the routers between here and there look for multicast subscriptions and enable them. If no other customer at your ISP wants to see The Junior Mint, then the video isn't carried on your subnet nor is any of it cached locally. No bandwidth is used. But if one person does want to see The Junior Mint, then it is held to some extent in a local cache and available for all local subscribers. ...

Link:  PBS.  Thanks to Stephen Hill for the tip.  --Dennis

Glad jul!

My blogging has been more sparse this fall than I'd like or that I intend to do in 2008, but I'd like to wish everyone Glad jul (Glad Yule in English with jul and Yule pronounced the same) the ancient greeting for the mid-winter holiday that predates the current group of politically-incorrect greetings that we're reluctant to pass along to a diverse group these days.  In those centuries, there were just two seasons, summer and winter.  Mid-summer is still celebrated in Scandinavia on the summer solstice and jul was at the winter solstice.  It's a few days off the Christmas holiday, but has been adapted to it.  --Dennis

Public Media 08 registration now open

The best conference in public broadcasting ... er, public media ... is the annual Public Media conference put on by the Integrated Media Association.  This year it will be in Los Angeles from February 19-23.  Registration for the conference is now open.  For more information or to register, use this link.

Although IMA was originally designed as the professional association for webheads in public media, and still serves that function well, I think the conference is particularly important for my fellow station CEOs, in fact there will be a separate CEO seminar on the 19th-20th.  If you can go to only one conference this year, make it this one.  None of us know exactly what tomorrow's public media will be like, but I know in which room it's being invented.

Oh, and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, is keynoting this year.

See you there.  --Dennis

Cellecast - Radio on-demand - by phone

Mark Ramsey reports on this development for broadcasters and mobile consumers from Cellecast:

... What if you could bring your content to a mobile phone just by dialing it up? But I'm not just talking about "calling in" to listen to a show, I'm talking about turning your phone into an on-demand device that allows you to start, stop, rewind, and fast-forward some of your favorite shows - just like the TiVo at home. ...

Link:  hear2.0.  The service currently has a limited number of titles, many from podcasts like Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech.  The only public radio title I could find is Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me.  It's late tonight, but I've subscribed (free) and will try to check it out this weekend.  This will be a good time to also see if I can figure out how to connect my phone via Bluetooth to my new Jeep's sound system which supports it.  Cellecast's audio is supported by commercials or you can pay a fee for a commercial-free version.  --Dennis

Sony PlayStation Getting Internet Radio

Internet radio continues to grow much faster than did FM (or maybe even AM -- I'm old, but not that old).  Here's another development.  Dave Zatz reports:

Sony has announced that Japanese PSP owners will be getting an update (3.80) next week that includes Internet radio streaming. Interestingly, the screenshot (below) says “Powered by SHOUTcast”… which is produced by an AOL subsidiary. The software also includes enhanced RSS support for OPML and images. I assume these features will make it to the US in the near future, though we obviously won’t be receiving (or utilizing) the ability to schedule video recordings via digital tuner. ...

Link:  Zatz Not Funny!.  Thanks to Mark Ramsey for the tip.  --Dennis

Farewell to the Great CRT

Television engineering legend Charlie Rhodes has a wonderful history of television displays in an article of this name in TV Technology.  Thanks to Cliff Benham for the tip.  --Dennis

Why Low Def Is the New HD

Daniel Eran Dilger takes a while to get to his point (though along the way you get a very good education about consumer video), but that point is a very interesting one about the video marketplace today.  He writes:

... Apple happens to be positioned to ride the sweet spot of LD/SD content right now, and has the infrastructure and hardware to deliver HD content using the same iTunes ecosystem with Apple TV in the future. Apple has bet on the mainstream 720p HD format as the best balance between high quality content and downloadable file sizes.  ¶  That will enable the company to transition to offering HD programming from iTunes as consumer’s bandwidth availability increases and the demand for HD expands. Until that happens on a large scale, Apple will continues to sell the most content because it has targeted what consumers want–convenient downloads–not what other vendors are all trying to sell: high end, high priced HD. ...

... Estimates suggest that by the end of the year, there will be an installed base of about a million standalone HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disc players, besides the 7-8 million PlayStation 3 consoles that can also play Blu-Ray discs. That makes less than ten million HD players in total, compared to around 40 million video playing iPods, and hundreds of millions of iTunes installations capable of playing back iTunes content directly from a computer or through an Apple TV. ...

Link:  RoughlyDrafted Magazine.  Highly recommended article.  Thanks to Craig Birkmaier for the tip.  --Dennis

Radio has picture perfect future

Spencer Kelly has an article that talks about what radio broadcasters in the UK are doing using their digital capacity to enhance radio broadcasting.  He writes:

... As a station for the UK's fashion conscious, up-to-the-minute, MySpace-ing youth, Radio 1 is already trying to fulfil its audience's visual expectations by providing pictures for the digital TV screen, even filming the concerts they broadcast.  ¶  They and other broadcasters are trying find the right pictures to accompany the sound, anything from comedian Russell Brand's rants to a YouTube camera during his radio show to information like the station logo and track data.  ¶  For commercial broadcasters they now have the opportunity to show adverts on the screen with click-throughs to the advertisers' websites. ...

Link:  BBC News.  --Dennis

RoboWheat

My son Andrew is a senior industrial design major at the Rhode Island School of Design.  He's taking several digital media courses this semester and as a final project he designed a "robotic wheat field" inspired by the real wheat fields that surround the woods where our home is located.  The "wheat" in this case are 28 stiff vertical wires mounted seven at a time on each of four boards on the floor.  As you walk through the "field" and move your arms, animated light streams from the ceiling in the form of projected RSS feeds (the feed he set up for the show was a Technorati search for all posts relating to "sunshine").   The light follows your movement through the field.  The device is currently in its second edition - you can check it out on his site and on YouTube.  Click on the images to the right for larger versions.  More information and pictures here and here.   Very clever, says Dad.  --Dennis

Watching What You See on the Web

You better not pout,
Better not cry,
Better be good,
I'm telling you why:
Santa Claus is coming to town!

He's making a list,
Checking it twice,
Gonna find out who's naughty or nice.
Santa Clause is coming to town!

He knows when you've been sleeping,
He knows when you're awake.
He knows when you've been good or bad,
So be good for goodness sake!

[Chris Isaak: "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"]

Back in February of 2006 I wrote a short essay here called The "new Hoover" and attention metadata about privacy concerns relating to our ability to collect metadata about our Web browsing.  Usually, these metdata enhance our Web experiences as in the case of a site like Amazon which gets smarter about our preferences as we revisit the site.  But this technology has also been used for government snooping.  Again, I'm sure most of us don't mind when that's used against child porn distributors or real terrorists, but on the principle that "if it can be done, it will be done," it doesn't take too great a dose of paranoia to imagine less beneficial uses.

Now comes Bobby White of the Wall Street Journal with a distrubing story about companies (NebuAd, FrontPorch and Phorm are mentioned) that are supplying technology to Internet Service Providers to monitor your surfing and target ads to you based on the metadata it collects.  Since your ISPs already have your name, address, phone number and payment information, it's a small step to associating you with the metadata.  White writes:

... This technique -- called behavioral targeting -- is far more customized than the current method of selling ads online. Today, it's an imperfect process: companies such as Revenue Science Inc. and Tacoda Inc., which was recently bought by Time Warner Inc., contract with Web sites to monitor which consumers visit them, attaching "cookies," or small pieces of tracking data, to visitors' hard drives so they are recognized when they return. The targeting firms feed the data to Web site owners, who use it to charge premium rates for customized ads. But the information is limited, since the tracking companies can't monitor all of the sites an individual visits.  ¶  The newer form of behavioral targeting involves placing gear called "deep-packet inspection boxes" inside an Internet provider's network of pipes and wires. Instead of observing only a select number of Web sites, these boxes can track all of the sites a consumer visits, and deliver far more detailed information to potential advertisers. ...

Link:  Wall Street Journal.

According to the article, NebuAd says it "doesn't track traffic to sites related to sex, health or politics."  Sure.  How does it know you're headed there unless it's tracking some aspect of that?  [See clarification from NebuAd CEO in Comments section below.  It does sound like that company is making a good faith effort to protect privacy, but I feel that the following paragraph is still generally valid.  --Dennis]

All this stuff is subject to subpoena and press scrutiny.  Or, perhaps under the Patriot Act that's not even necessary.  Ask a librarian.  All this is extremely troubling and goes to the core of the value of information exchange to us all.  These ISPs and technology companies want us to trust that they're not abusing this  (the article notes that some ISPs are permitting consumers to opt out).  OK, but we've gone far enough down the road of constitutional erosion in this country that it's not them I'm worried about.  --Dennis

Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape

Denise Caruso writes:

Inexpensive broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.  ¶  And as they shift their focus away from TV to grab us on one of the many other screens in our lives — our computers, cellphones and iPods — the command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network. ...

Link:  New York Times.  --Dennis

YouTube Dominates Internet Video, with 27.3% Share

Steve Donohue reports:

... YouTube controlled 27.6% of the market, followed by MySpace.com parent Fox Interactive Media, which had 387 videos viewed for a 4.2% share.  ¶  They were followed by Yahoo Web sites (381 million, 4.1%); Viacom Digital (304 million, 3.3%); Time Warner Network (198 million; 2.2%); Microsoft sites (194 million; 2.1%); Disney Online (92 million, 1%); ESPN (89 million, 1%); Comcast (52 million, 0.6%); and CBS Corp. (48 million, 0.5%).  ¶  Nearly 136 million Americans, or approximately three in four U.S Internet users, viewed online video in September, comScore said. ...

Link:  Multichannel News.  --Dennis

Radio Gets Social

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo has a nice overview of many of the social-enabled music discovery systems -- personalized web-based radio streams.  She spends most of her time with Last.fm, Jango and Pandora but also does brief takes on several others (but not Slacker, which is intriguing enough for me to order one of their 15-station players this past week).  Link:  MediaShift.  --Dennis

New Media News Digest, 11/17-26/2007

Welcome back, Sondra!  Her work below is quoted in its entirety by permission.  --Dennis

Dear Readers,

Whatever happened to the New Media News Digest?  As many of you know, my daughter Katie Alice was born in late July and, as much as I love keeping up with the latest new media news, I found that eight pounds of howling but beautiful baby had to take precedence for a while.  Thank you to those of you who have offered support, best wishes, and fantastic advice.  Of course, photos are available upon request.

Welcome to the New Media News Digest for the week of November 26th.  For those of you who are new, I comb and curate various new media sources on a weekly basis with an eye towards issues specifically related to new media activities within public broadcasting.  I welcome comments and feedback.  If you have received this from a friend or colleague, please email me to be added to the list of upcoming mailers.  If you would like to unsubscribe, please do the same.

Thanks,

Sondra Russell 

_________________________________________________________

SONDRA’S SUMMARY

> The top story this week is that ABC News has partnered with Facebook to distribute election coverage.  According to the New York Times, ABC News will be the first news organization to partner with Facebook on political coverage.  The partnership will consist mostly of an application that allows users to “follow reporters”, receive news updates, vote on key issues, and declare allegiance to their favorite candidates.  No money changed hands in the deal – both agreed that the elevated exposure benefits each party equally.  While the partnership is getting plenty of hype, some are skeptical that Facebook – a place for social interaction rather than information consumption – is the right place for a broadcaster. 

> The key theme is that online video is either stealing away TV viewers, or it isn’t.  An ongoing debate within the broadcasting community – is Internet-distributed video cutting into broadcast television viewing time, or is it just adding to overall media consumption?  Some evidence --  the New York Times published two pieces last week: “Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers” and “Web Sites Go Fishing in TV’s Advertising Revenue Stream”. Both lack in statistical data but offer a fair amount of anecdotal data that marketers are increasingly pursuing online video strategies.  Also in the category of increased efforts to advertise online, AOL is launching a new type of video “ticker” ad that runs at the bottom of clips as well as, or instead of, pre-roll.  While media conglomerate Gannett had to lay off 45 newsroom staff at USA Today, it reported that its online broadcast revenues were up 30 percent over last year. So, maybe the question of whether online video is cannibalizing TV viewership is too “tastes great/less filling” to be useful.  Maybe the more relevant question is whether online video is stealing away TV advertising dollars.

> The think piece this week is that mobile web use is both “far off and inevitable”.  Mobile applications come up more and more frequently in pubcasting discussions on new ways to reach audiences but  those ideas rarely seem to lead anywhere constructive.  Why?  In the article “Mobile Web: So Close and So Far”, Michael Fitzgerald outlines the reasons mobile web use is still floundering: poor user interface, no viable high-speed cellular data networks, and a lack of cooperation between mobile providers.  Will it get better anytime soon?  Fitzgerald says “yes and no”.  Yes, it will get better.  No, not anytime soon.

New Media News Digest: November 19^th – November 26th, 2007

TELEVISION

Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers
From the New York Times: “As broadband service becomes more available at home, the growing prevalence of video programming on the Internet is catching the attention of consumers not to mention marketers and media companies.”

Web Sites Go Fishing in TV’s Advertising Revenue Stream
From the New York Times: "Video is proliferating on the Internet, and it is no longer limited to short clips of cats flushing toilets, breath mints reacting explosively with carbonated sodas and other user-generated content of the kind that captured the anarchic spirit of the early Web 2.0 days.”

AOL Launches 'Ticker' Ads, New Video Player
From ClickZ: “AOL's video tickers are banners -- either video ads or interactive Flash units -- that appear at the bottom of the new AOL Video Player 10 seconds after the viewer begins watching a clip. If the viewer clicks the ad, the video is paused and the ad is expanded.”

Miro Media Player Released; Billed as Open Joost Competitor
From TechCrunch: “Version 1.0 of the open-source video player Miro was released earlier today. The non-profit company behind Miro has billed its new product not only as a Joost competitor but a purer one at that.”

NBC Acquires “Quarterlife”: Internet Series Will Run First Online
From the New York Times: “NBC has concluded a first-of-its-kind deal to acquire the talked-about new Internet and social network series “Quarterlife” for distribution as an hour-long drama series on the NBC network after it has first played in eight-minute segments on several Web sites.”

INTERNET

ABC News and Facebook in Joint Effort to Bring Viewers Closer to Political Coverage

From the New York Times: “ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.”

Mobile Web: So Close Yet So Far
From the New York Times: “[On the surface] It all looks good, but the wireless communications business smacks of a soap opera, with disaster lurking like your next dropped call.”

Social Network Colonization Continues at Torrid Pace
From ZDNet: "The October 2007 Nielsen Online numbers for October reflect substantial year over year growth for Facebook in the U.S. compared to MySpace, which is no surprise. LinkedIn had significant growth as did Club Penguin and Buzznet.com from their smaller bases.”

Gannett Reports Extensive October Revenue Declines; Online Broadcast Revs Up 30 Percent
From PaidContent: “Having announced plans to cut 45 newsroom jobs at USA Today, Gannett’s (NYSE: GCI) October report revealed across the company. About the only bright spot: online revenues for its broadcasting segment, which were up 30 percent compared to October 2006.”

Researchers Stymied by Wide-Open Video Distribution
From MediaWeek: “As digital-media executives have evangelized the concept of wide-open distribution for online video, most media companies are not yet equipped to provide reliable audience numbers.”

RADIO

Shareholders Back Satellite Radio Deal
From the New York Times: “Shareholders approved a deal yesterday to allow Sirius Satellite Radio to acquire its rival, XM Satellite Radio Holdings, for about $5 billion, but the largest hurdle has yet to be faced: regulatory approval in Washington.”

Audi/Bang & Olufsen Take Internet Radio on the Road
From What Hi-Fi: “An internet radio station in your car, able to tailor its programming to your own musical tastes - that's just one of the features built into the Audi Cross Cabriolet Quattro concept car.”

Radio Listening Down
From Insider Radio: “The radio industry is likely to report a down October, perhaps as much as -6%. That’s according to the number crunching by CL King analyst Jim Boyle. He says “weakness is broad” -- although the top 25 markets still face the biggest challenge.”

Leichtman study: persons aware of DTV transition still in minority

Leichtman Research Group has completed a new report, HDTV 2007: Consumer Awareness, Interest and Ownership, based on a survey of 1,300 U.S. households.  The following findings are from their press release:

• 37% strongly agree that they understand how the digital transition will affect their household
• 35% strongly agree that they care about how the digital transition will affect their household
• LRG estimates that there are about 35 million television sets in households that currently do not subscribe to a multi-channel video provider (and a similar number of over-the-air only television sets in multi-channel video households).  Among the group of non-subscribers to a multi-channel video service – who will be most impacted by the digital transition – overall, 19% are both aware of the digital transition and strongly agree that they understand how the digital transition will affect their household
• 56% of those in households with an annual income of over $75,000 say that they have heard of the digital transition – compared to 36% of those in households with an annual income under $75,000

The 43% of adults it identifies who have heard of the 2/19/2009 transition is up from one-third of adults a year ago.  But one has to wonder how many of these people think that, like the title of Leichtman's report, the digital transition means HDTV rather than how they receive their signals.  --Dennis

The Google Set-Top Box

Erick Schonfeld writes:

Deep in the Googleplex there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google’s reach into your TV. Its work goes way beyond the Google TV ads currently being tested by EchoStar (and targeted with help from Nielsen).  It even goes way beyond the development of a Google set-top box, which has been hinted at in the past.  In fact, Google may very well want to do to the set-top box what it is trying to do to the mobile phone with its Android operating system—create an open-source hardware platform and attract developers to build applications on top of it. At least that is the unconfirmed rumor I’ve heard from two knowledgeable industry sources. ...

Link:  TechCrunch.  --Dennis

Play to Win: TV Nets Test New Compensation Models

Diane Mermigas writes:

The development and trial of new business models that utilize digital interactivity to generate revenues is becoming sport at many media and entertainment companies. And everyone is playing to win. Even as television network and film studio executives wrestle with striking writers over payment for scripted material used in streaming, downloaded and other new media video, they are testing promising compensation models. ...

... Common to new business models is concern about their mechanics, measurement and methods. They include such sticky issues as configuring payments based on advertising revenues, user impressions and fees. Although many media companies contend it is too soon to know what most new media businesses will be worth, more metrics become available every day. Just this week, the media buying agency Starcom estimated that the four broadcast television networks will realize $120 million in ad revenues from their nascent online video ventures in 2007. Their corporate parents, including Walt Disney and News Corp., have acknowledged that each will make more than $1 billion in revenues from a variety of new digital ventures this year. ...

Link:  MediaPost. --Dennis

Facebook facing criticism over usage information

Catherine Holahan writes:

Facebook made modifications to a controversial advertising system that many users considered an invasion of privacy. On Nov. 29, the social network gave users greater control over the tool, known as Beacon, which broadcasts what they do on partner sites to other Facebook users. ...

... The Beacon brouhaha underscores the dilemma faced by social networks and other Internet companies such as Google (GOOG) attempting to generate revenue from the wealth of information they collect about users. Letting advertisers capitalize on such information helps Web companies collect sales and grow. But sharing too much data can result in the kind of backlash encountered by Facebook.  ...

Link:  BusinessWeek.

No one has been more critical than Umair Haque.  Here are five recent posts:

Edge Principles: Love > Indifference.  Link:  Bubblegeneration.

Fixing Facebook.  Link: Bubblegeneration.

Beacon 2.0: How Not to Think Strategically About... Link: Bubblegeneration.

Industry Note: More Evil Than Evil.  Link: Bubblegeneration.

Research Note: Google vs Beacon, Or Why Advantage is in the DNA.  Link: Bubblegeneration.

Brad Stone has an interview with Facebook about all this.  Facebook Executive Discusses Beacon Brouhaha.  Link:  New York Times.

Also see Louise Story and Brad Stone, Facebook Retreats on Online Tracking.  Link: New York Times.

Update 2 December 2007:
Om Malik has the background on this.  See To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon.  Link: GigaOM. --Dennis

Who Needs LPFM? - Why Not Just Expand the FM Band?

Says David Oxenford, who writes:

At last Tuesday's FCC meeting, the Commission adopted a controversial order, over the objection of two Commissioners, that could limit the processing of some applications for improvements by some full power FM stations, and would restrict translator applications, all in the name of encouraging Low Power FM (LPFM) stations to provide outlets for expression by groups that cannot get access to full-power radio stations (see our summary of that action here). In recent weeks, two ideas have received some publicity providing an alternative outlet for these prospective local broadcasters - and both provide a simple solution (one more immediate and ad hoc than that other), but both leading to the same result - why not just extend the FM band by using TV channel 6? ...

Link:  Broadcast Law Blog.  No matter how much sense this makes -- and I think it does -- I don't think it has much of a chance.  But I'm concerned that politics is out-pacing science here and that Congress will never adequately fund the FCC to take on the regulatory mess that LPFM brings along for the ride. 

Also see his, FCC Meeting Adopts Rules Favoring LPFM, Restricting Translator Applications, and Possibly Impeding Full Service FM Station Upgrades.  Link:  Broadcast Law Blog.

 

Updated 2 December 2007:
Joel Rose covers the story for National Public Radio.  --Dennis

TiVo turnaround?

Things seem to be turning around for TiVo.  I have used both a Series 2 TiVo and a DirecTV TiVo though recently replaced the Series 2 TiVo with one of the newer DirecTV proprietary ones when I upgraded DirecTV to its HD service.  The latter is not nearly as easy to use as the TiVo models, so I've been rooting for them. 

The news recently has been pretty good for them.   Broadcasting & Cable reports that its 3rd quarter losses are narrowing and that NBC Universal has signed up for TiVo's StopWatch ratings service.  Ars Technica is reporting more, where Eric Bangeman writes:

It has been a good week for TiVo. The company won a major victory from the US Patent and Trademark Office when a key patent was upheld, signed a deal to bring the TiVo experience to the PC desktop starting some time next year, and announced better-than-expected quarterly earnings. The DVR maker has revealed more details about its future plans, including pricing for TiVo-flavored Comcast service and a two-way cable DVR. ...

Link:  Ars Technica.

Bangeman also reports that TiVo has also made a deal with Nero:

TiVo is poised to break out from the confines of the set-top box and into the PC. The DVR maker and Nero, creators of the popular CD- and DVD-burning software, are partnering to bring TiVo to upcoming versions of Nero. The newly announced agreement means that TiVo's much-loved interface and ease of use will be available to owners of any PC with a TV tuner card or USB dongle. ...

Link:  Ars Technica. 

Updated 2 December 2007:
Andrea Seabrook has a good interview on this with Wired editor Nancy Miller on National Public Radio.  --Dennis

Replacing atoms with bits

In his 1995 book, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte (who is now trying to bring affordable computing to the third world) framed the change then ahead as replacing atoms (e.g., books) with bits (digital information).  There have been a number of digital readers introduced, the latest being Amazon's Kindle.  I read a fair amount of things on my HP PDA.  Amazon's  is coupled with an enormous number of digitized books and other reading matter.  Available readers haven't done well in the consumer marketplace, but the relatively small first run of Kindles sold out quickly.  Steven Levy wrote a lengthy and laudatory article on it for Newsweek:

... Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally—he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist—he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That's shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer's recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy. ...

Link:  Newsweek.  Thanks to Karen Olstad for the link.

Wall Street Journal technology guru Walt Mossberg is less positive.  He has been testing the Kindle, and writes:

.... I’ve been testing the Kindle for about a week, and I love the shopping and downloading experience. But the Kindle device itself is just mediocre. While it has good readability, battery life and storage capacity, both its hardware design and its software user interface are marred by annoying flaws. It is bigger and clunkier to use than the Sony Reader, whose second version has just come out at $300. ...

Link:  All Things Digital. 

Jeff Jarvis has some interesting comments about the economic model in play here.  Link:  BuzzMachine. 

Updated 2 December 2007:
Be sure to check out David Weinberger's thoughtful essay, The future of book nostalgia.  Link:  JOHO.  --Dennis