Technology360

Presence of Mind

From Piet Hein, More Grooks, Borgens Forlag, København & MIT Press, Cambridge, 1968:

You'll conquer the present
     suspiciously fast
if you smell of the future
     -- and stink of the past

--Dennis

Does radio need to worry about IP-delivered audio?

Back in September, Radio World published a column titled “The Problem Isn’t Demand, It’s Bandwidth” by veteran broadcast engineer, Frank McCoy.  The title was a bit of a non sequitur, because of course if there was no demand, bandwidth wouldn’t be a problem. 

McCoy notes that:

… There are dire predictions that radio's best days have come and gone. Who can blame the pundit who sees only a simple consumer choice between listening to what some radio program director predicts that I (and 20,000 other people) want to hear, and choosing for myself exactly what I want when I want it? …

He asks,

… Should we all be concerned that the days of the 1,000-foot tower are gone and that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection is a possible new competitor? Will radio as we know it become just another feature of cell phones? Will in-car Internet give commuters millions of station choices?  ¶  The answer is no. …

He arrives at this “comforting” conclusion by comparing the bandwidth required by IP audio streams in a real-world situation vs. available bandwidth, finding that IP audio just won’t scale up enough to be a threat to radio broadcasters.

The exercise is interesting, but it would be a mistake for us to draw much comfort in it – at least if your goal is to stop worrying about other platforms.

Here’s why.

[1]  Distribution technology isn’t a static thing.  For example, one of the commenters to his article points to a new broadcast-friendly technology called Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services (MBMS) now being rolled out in certain cellular telephone networks.  Other multicasting* efforts are also in development or available.

*NB: IP multicasting has a different meaning than does broadcast multicasting.  Rather, it is a way to achieve one-to-many bandwidth scaling without having to have to “home run” each stream back to the original server.  In other words, IP multicasting is roughly comparable to what we mean by broadcasting.

[2]  Other technology components aren’t static, either.  Better compression and error correction algorithms are being developed all the time which enable more and better services in less spectrum.  And, for music stations, there is already the profound effect already felt from digital music players like the iPod, which in turn benefit from improvements in mass storage.  Moore’s Law posits a doubling of data capacity every 18 months.  One might ask, why take up valuable spectrum to repeatedly retransmit bits that can be more easily stored in a listener’s purse or shirt pocket?  Or, as Pandora, Slacker and other streamers-that-learn have done, why not, if you’re going to retransmit bits, at least customize the radio experience on the fly?  Smart radio operators in the future will learn how to stitch value into, and thereby extract value from, these customizable streams.

[3]  IP streamers and broadcasters aren’t the only games in town.  Digital TV broadcasters are about to get into the act with the ATSC-M/H standard in this country as DVB-H and 1seg have done so elsewhere.  While billed as mobile video services, they also do mobile audio much more efficiently than the IP streaming most stations use now, so look for some of that traffic to migrate to the television spectrum.

[4]  Ever since the brainy actress, Hedy Lamarr, co-invented frequency-hopping radio in 1941, our notions of spectrum as protected real estate have been under challenge.  Some feel that spectrum as we know it is an obsolete concept – that smart receivers and smart transmitters can much more efficiently utilize the spectrum than can the geographically-allocated transmitters and dumb receivers that we now use (a huge amount of existing spectrum is un- or under-used due to the need to protect cheaply-made receivers).  I posted back in June about efforts to raise a public debate about this from the New America Foundation, which had just published four papers on the topic.  I doubt that either the economics of the consumer electronic industry or the requirement for the FCC to maintain a detailed and accurate database of transmitters in use will favor this idea any time soon, but these conditions, too, are not static and will likely become more favorable to more spectrum-efficient technologies in the future.

[5]  Lastly, we broadcasters shouldn’t think of this as a complete migration of broadcast listening to mobile IP platforms insofar as its economic consequences.  To be consequential to us, these services have to only skim the cream off our listening to harm the thinning margins that most stations are experiencing.  So these new services don’t have to capture the full broadcast load of listener attention to do damage to legacy broadcasters.

Some 50 years back, radio faced another challenge as television decimated its previous programming model.  Needle-drop radio replaced it and a new business model was born.  We need to be at least as agile in adjusting broadcast service and business models as technology has shown in its ability to evolve over time.  As the old joke’s punch line goes, one doesn’t have to run faster than the bear, just faster than you.

As always, opinions expressed here are my own.  --Dennis

True/Slant, a different approach to online journalism

In last Thursday's (Apr. 6) Wall Street Journal, tech columnist Walt Mossberg reviewed the "alpha" release of True/Slant.  He writes:

... True/Slant is run by a former news executive at America Online who worked at a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal. It covers a wide range of topics, such as politics, culture, sports, business, health, science and food.  ¶  It is launching with 65 journalists, or “knowledge experts,” assigned to specific topics. Each of these contributors gets a page to house their journalism and, it is hoped, an active social network of followers who will regularly discuss the articles they read there. Each page also will feature headlines of stories elsewhere on the Web selected by the contributors. These “headline grabs” link back to the originating outside site.  ...

It's an ad-based business model, but approaches it in a new way that's worth watching.

Link:  D|All Things Digital.  --Dennis

Consumers crave individualism and personalization

Allison Muller, CRM manager for Accenture, has some interesting observations on how new technologies are making it easier for retailers to individualize and personalize for consumers.  She writes:

... Phenomenon like YouTube and MySpace give young consumers a stage for voicing their opinions and showing off their social lives and it's influencing how they shop. Some companies are reacting by offering customers avenues for personal expression, like personalizing a Heinz Ketchup bottle or Kleenex box with personal slogans and pictures.  ¶  More sustainable ideas include MyTwinn.com that produces dolls that are exact replicas of real girls, allowing them to celebrate their identity through their toys. And, for an extra charge, you can get specific freckles or birthmarks painted on the dolls. ...

Link: Accenture.  --Dennis

Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Watchdogs

Our new SVP & GM Digital Media at NPR, Kinsey Wilson, sent around the following email to a few of us this morning.  With permission and  thanks, I'm sharing it with you.  --Dennis

As you dig into the morning papers, I'd call to your attention an interesting article in the NY Times today that describes how small, independent, not-for-profit local news web sites are springing up around the country -- further evidence of the growing number of players that hope to lay claim to the local news franchise as papers come under increased financial pressure.

This line in particular caught my attention: "[F]financially, VoiceofSan Diego and its peers mimic public broadcasting, not newspapers. They are nonprofit corporations supported by foundations, wealthy donors, audience contributions and a little advertising."

If they succeed, they could gradually compete for the audience, allegiance and charitable giving that traditionally has sustained public radio. The audience for terrestrial public radio isn't likely to go away anytime soon. But as younger audiences form their media habits and older audiences look for serious local news sources to replace the papers they once relied upon -- something that's happening right now -- sites like these will gain in influence and popularity among our target audience and could eventually pose a threat to the member station franchise.

Local public radio stations are ideally positioned to form alliances with sites like these. The member stations have reach; they have an audience already pre-disposed to quality journalism; and if they want to use it to this end, the ability to drive traffic to these (or co-branded?) endeavors. They also have established relationships with funders, which these sites presumably are just starting to put together. The startup-ups, meanwhile, have the capacity to innovate in ways most stations do not.

In other words, member stations could potentially bring audience and money to the table to help keep these efforts alive; and in the process further develop their reputation and capacity as a source of serious local news. (And NPR, through its API, could provide wider visibility and lift for these efforts).

If half a dozen of the more progressive member stations around the country aligned with the best of these sites on a trial basis, they might create a model that other start-ups and stations could emulate.

In addition to the sites mentioned in Richard Pérez-Peña 's piece, also check out the newly launched Spot.US, which solicits story pitches from individual journalists in the Bay area and asks readers to donate money to support story ideas they think are worthy of further effort. It launched Monday.

NPR's digital distribution strategy

N.B.   Many readers know that I'm the Interim CEO at National Public Radio, but this personal blog (now closing out its fifth year) has only a couple of times been used to talk about related things going on at NPR or at my previous workplace.  However, since what we're trying to build is so closely related to what I've learned over those five years and earlier, all of which I've shared here, I thought it made sense to share this "private" email to NPR station managers here.

If you're at a public television station or in a non-profit, education or government organization, please read on because this initiative could very well be for you also.  So now, I'll quote from this morning's email with only very minor changes.  --Dennis

_______________________________

Dear station colleagues,

 

Happy Monday!  With apologies for the length of this, I’m hoping to stitch together several developments at NPR in the context of what they mean for the future of your station.  It will pay special attention to connecting a number of developments into a coherent digital strategy.  I am excited about these because I think they can be important building blocks in lifting all of public radio.

 

The 90 stations that founded NPR did so because they wanted to serve the public in a way that could only be achieved through collaboration.  This collaboration has encouraged impartial distribution of both branded programming (NPR, PRI, APM) and independent productions - in the intervening 38 years through PRSS and, more recently, PRX. Distributed hours have grown tremendously over the past four decades.  As we seek to strengthen our relationships in content creation and fundraising, we must make a strong commitment to reinventing distribution for a new age, or we will fail to reach the audiences we seek to serve.

 

Radio will remain strong long after I’m a full-time grandpa, but the rapid adoption of new digital platforms means we must effectively utilize these platforms or ultimately witness the erosion of our audience and economic model.  More importantly, the new digital platforms give greatly expanded opportunities to deliver broader public service, to be more significant in our communities and nation.

 

Toward this end, there are now several initiatives on our plate at NPR.  I'll write primarily about a cluster of digital distribution projects from which we will draw to create something we're calling the "Community-Building Initiative," but I also want to mention a news-related one that will benefit from the same initiative.

 

• A “News Network of the Future” (NNoF) is envisioned to provide structure and scale for collaboration in the support      and production of news for all platforms, building on ideas which have already brought promising results to a few stations (e.g., N³, the Northwest News Network);
• Three related projects in the category of what I’ll call “distributed distribution” —expanding our ability to reach our listeners better, and expanding and engaging our audience:
  • The open Application Provider Interface (API),
  • The acquisition of Public Interactive (PI), and       
  • The Community-Building Initiative (CBI), which I’ll discuss below.

 

There have been several digital distribution efforts in public media in recent years.  Leaving out many, I’d like to tip a hat to a few that have made extraordinary contributions.  Independent producer Stephen Hill showed us that the web can be an important means to serve the audience, and that they will financially support such efforts.  Entrepreneur/philanthropist Mike Homer developed Open Media Network, a functioning content delivery network for public media, with the help of Stephen, KQED’s Tim Olson, myself and several others, and gifted it to public broadcasting.  PI (above) under the direction of Debra May Hughes has been public media’s innovative application service provider for years.  Jake Shapiro’s team built Public Radio Exchange (PRX) under the sponsorship of the Station Resource Group, creating a way to cultivate, discover and distribute new talent, voices and ideas and to innovate with models that connect listeners to a broader world.  Mark Fuerst’s Integrated Media Association has led beyond-the-transmitter thinking for years. NPR’s Dana Davis Rehm has championed both the News Network of the Future and the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) of 2006 in which Jake, Tim and others played critical roles.  Lastly, the WGBH Forum Network and Twin Cities Public Television’s Minnesota Channel are important inspirations to the CBI.

 

Bottom line – there has been a ton of work by dozens of people over nearly a decade during which, independently, Web strategies and content distribution over the Internet have matured.  We have learned a lot in this time, we have successful exemplars, and it’s past time to put those to work in ways that strengthen public radio. 

 

This and what follows provides some context for the announcements you’ve heard about the open API and the PI acquisition and why it’s important for the future of your station.

 

The open Application Programming Interface (API) is an awful name for a very powerful functionality that permits accessing NPR and, soon, station and other content and placing it with modest but important restrictions on non-NPR web sites.  These might be your station’s web site, or it might be a non-profit organization with which your station has a relationship, or it might be a blog that your sister maintains.  If you look down the left column of [this] blog, you can see an example that took me ten minutes to install.  Why do this?  Because open, distributed access to public radio content will result in much greater usage than if we require everyone to come to our portals.  It’s expanding the reach of public radio beyond the radio or our own websites.  This is being fairly recognized as one the most progressive and powerful web initiatives in American media.  Open APIs are common on the web but are very rare among major media companies.

 

Public Interactive (PI) has been around for a long time and has a great reputation for providing Web services to the public broadcasting community.  We’re pleased to have reached an accord with Public Radio International to bring it into the NPR family.  Its mission is entirely consistent with our goal of increasing NPR’s commitment to station services, as was our acquisition of National Public Media(NPM) last fall.  PI has a great suite of products and its core competencies are consistent with our open API and other “distributed distribution” efforts to grow the quality and relevance of station websites.

 

Combining these, we are developing the Community-Building Initiative to expose public media content to broader audiences, strengthen public stations as a key community anchor, help national and local community service organizations be more effective, and, through all that, enhance and diversify the public media economy. Like NNoF, the CBI is a “child” of NPR’s New Realities effort.  An example follows and this weekend I doodled a simplified drawing [see link] for those among you who are visually oriented.

 

To seed this effort, we are working to establish several model national partnerships with non-profit organizations which have affiliates in your communities.  There is a complex array of ways new partnerships of this kind could work, so to help in understanding one of them, here’s a fictional example:

 

Let’s say that you’re a public radio manager who wants to gain exposure for what your station does and build community public service alliances, adding local value.  You have recently been approached by a local conservation organization that has a best-practices initiative relating to salmon recovery for which it would like build awareness.  It is also interested in building a community dialog using modern social media tools.  Traditionally, you might have put them in touch with your news director, who has done stories on salmon recovery in the past and perhaps might be interested in another one.  She handles the story in the journalistically critical arm’s length way and it is heard by 10-15% of your weekly cume on the air and then it (maybe) goes into a podcast or is archived on your web site.

 

But the CBI expands possibilities.  Let’s say that the organization also has some video content that it commissioned, perhaps from your local PTV station.  With proper guidelines, branding and labeling, it can be part of a larger collection that you can distribute.  So this video piece, the ten radio stories you’ve already produced archived on this subject, some NPR stories on the subject (Google gives 574 hits for “salmon” on npr.org), a couple of related stories from PRX, and links to related blogs in your community are curated by your web producer into a widget (a piece of portable code that can fetch content from other web sites) carrying your branding, the template for which has been provided to you by Public Interactive.  That template also includes social media features to build communities of interest, plus opt-in sponsorship messages arranged by NPM.  The widget then goes on the partner’s web site, on those of many of your other partners, on your own pages, on relevant blogs, etc.  Others will use the API tools to extract some of these pieces and republish them still more places.  Web searches build still more users, not just for the distributed content but for your main web site.  In the context of how search works (see PageRank), these multiple linking relationships make it more likely for your content to emerge higher in search results.  This strategy builds a much larger audience by bringing content to people rather than requiring them to come to your website.

 

Perhaps the station undertakes similar partnerships with 25 or 50 or 100 other community organizations. Some of these are local affiliates of national service organizations with which NPR will have initiated relationships that stations can opt into.  Others are those you develop yourself.  You can see that the placement opportunities for content grow tremendously.  So do new partnerships that increase your station’s impact in the community, not to mention new funding opportunities from new sources.

 

Public broadcasters have learned over nearly 40 years that distribution success depends on brand impartiality.  Recent digital distribution work has taught that we’re better off starting with a service   model and related economics, instead of with technology, and that we need a to place our content many places on the web, not just on our own web sites.  To be sure, there are important issues, especially with the need to maintain a wall between partner-generated content and station journalism efforts, but there are numerous successful examples to follow.  The CBI plan is to incorporate all of these assumptions in a way that just might transform the value equation for public broadcasting stations in their communities.   

 

These are exciting and challenging times for all of us in public radio.  I continue to be encouraged by what I see and hear from stations around the country, and what is happening here at NPR.  These latest developments should give us some important new tools to address our common future in a way that can transform both the impact and economics of public media.  Please share your thoughts about these issues with me by posting a comment below. 

 

Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO, NPR

NPR API: The GillmorGang interview

Steve Gillmor interviewed NPR digital media directors Zach Brand, Daniel Jacobson and me July 17th on NPR's release of its Application Programming Interface for his GillmorGang podcast.  Although it's a little technical, it should give you a good overview of what it's doing.  It's now been posted.  Link: GillmorGang.

The End of Customer Service

The March 24th issue of Time has a feature, "10 Ideas That Are Changing The World," one of which is "The End of Customer Service" by Barbara Kiviat.  This is presented as an inexorable and vaguely positive thing, but I don't know.

A trip (two, actually) to a Maryland Ikea store this past week to buy some furniture for my new apartment sure brought this home.  Ikea has features nice design, inexpensive prices, and great Swedish meatballs with lingonberries for $5.  Well, maybe I should reverse the order of those attributes.  They make it easy for a decorating doofus to match things. 

I swear that every time I go to an Ikea store, which is only about annually, I see fewer employees.  The ones that are left are always very helpful, but sometimes you have to look a bit to find one.  This time, all the check-out lines were self-service.  A single employee worked all the lanes to assist people like me who couldn't find the barcodes and to keep us from scanning both Box 1 and Box 2 when they're part of the same item or you'll pay twice.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few years from now, you'll walk into Ikea and see only customers.  There will be a couple of guards on the way out, Costco style, to check your receipts against your cart, and maybe some people behind the scenes converting dollars into kronor.  Go to the cafeteria and hold your plate under an opening and your dozen meatballs will drop out.  Rotate the plate quickly and you'll get a splat of lingonberries and a blob of mashed potatoes (or is it the other way around?).  Can't find something?  Go to a kiosk and talk with a helpful operator named Bruce or Christine from Bangladesh (unless you're in an Ikea in Germany, in which case they're named Helmut and Helga).  I'd rather they automate their self-service furniture pick up so I don't have to go for the Advil when I get home.

Bringing this back to media a minute... It's probably not too far off the mark to say that self-service is one of the defining characteristics of new media vs. old media.  The legacy media are full service media.  We think about what programs you want and when you want them so you won't have to.  Just turn on your radio and television and sit back.  New media are self-service.  Search for this podcast or that video or that streaming link.  Decide both what you want to consume and whether it's MP3 or Real or Windows Media or QuickTime.  Which of the several players I have do I want to use?  Want to use one of the new IP radios?  Then sometimes be prepared to manually enter the URL of your favorite audio service.  You get the picture.

So we who want to succeed with distributing programming over emerging platform choices need to design those services to make them simulate the full-service environment as much as possible.  --Dennis

The importance of leadership with vision

Consultant Paul Jacobs writes:

... We're often asked why, in the face of declining overall listening to radio, Public Radio continues to thrive?  It's simple - everything about Public Radio programming is long-term.  And they cherish their audience relationships.  They're patient, they nurture their programs, they research their listeners' needs.  ¶  Their conventions and meetings are more frequent, better attended, and more considerate of the values and qualities that contribute to product development, brand building, and audience relationships.  While admittedly they don't suffer under the pressures of Wall Street or profit goals, they are in fact businesses that need to pay bills (with a lot less government support than people think).  The bottom line is that Public Radio succeeds because they think long-term.  ¶  And while Public RadioPublic Radio's core values doesn't have "celebrity" program directors you've heard of, most have been in their local communities for a long time and understand how to connect with the locals.  Additionally, are brilliant, concise, and imbedded in the minds of every person responsible for the creation of programming.  They are the guiding force behind their emotional attachment with their listeners. ...

Link:  JacoBLOG.  --Dennis

Key To Recession Survival: Master Consumer Media Habits

Diane Mermigas writes:

... According to the North American Technologies [Technographics®] Benchmark Survey published by Forrester Research, all adult consumers still devote more than twice as many hours in a typical week watching television as using the Internet.  Gen Yers 18-27 are moving toward parody [parity] in spending as many hours online as watching TV.  But they also spend nearly as much time watching DVDs–a hybrid activity on TVs, PCs and video-game consoles.  It suggests what other surveys also reflect: Young consumers move fluidly from one media-related activity to another (whether interactive or passive) because a screen is a screen is a screen.  ¶  However, as interactivity becomes more pervasive and all of television goes digital in a year, more Boomer consumers will follow suit.  So the increasing interactive attention and spending of consumers ages 42 to 62 is key.  These 78 million Boomers (the single largest demographic segment) already make a healthy showing in an array of interactive activities–from managing and printing personal photos to conducting finance and security checks.  The focus should be on how to increase maturing consumers’ routine use of interactive devises for potentially profitable social networking–e-commerce, entertainment and communications –not a comparison to younger early adopter habits. ...

Link:  MediaPost.  Link and corrections added.  --Dennis