Technology360

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