Technology360

NY Times: Is PBS Still Necessary?

Charles McGrath writes:

For the eighth straight year the Bush administration has ritually proposed taking a hefty whack out of the federal subsidy for public broadcasting. ...  ¶  Every year, though, it gets a little harder to muster the necessary outrage, and now and then a heretical thought presents itself: What if the glory days of public television — the days of “Monty Python,” “Upstairs Downstairs,” “The French Chef” — are past recapturing? Lately the audience for public TV has been shrinking even faster than the audience for the commercial networks. The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or roughly what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets. ...

... Considering how much it costs to create new topnotch programming, the best solution to public television’s woes is the one that will probably never happen: more money, not less. ...

Link: New York Times. 

In comparison to public TV, McGrath makes favorable comments about public radio (I'm affiliated with both).  In fact, public television invests less of its economy in national programming than does public radio, though it's relatively small in both cases.  Viewer-sensitive revenue (memberships and the noncommercial advertising we call underwriting) makes up less of public TV's economy (about 40%) than does listener-sensitive revenue in public radio (about 60%).  So one could make an interesting argument -- not one I'll develop here beyond stating the hypothesis -- that public radio stations are closer to their listeners than public television stations are to their viewers. 

Update 19 February 2008:
Also see the comments appended to this NYT article.  --Dennis

Toward an Embarrassment of Niches

This clever title from Skip Pizzi, who writes:

... One recent study, conducted and reported by a respected music industry publication, The Lefsetz Letter, compared the overall music sales — both physical and digital — of the calendar year 2000 (the peak sales year to date for the industry) with sales in 2007, and found that the 2007 figures were down about a third (–36%) from the 2000 sales.  ¶  Then Lefsetz compared the individual sales of each of the top 10 selling records for those two years with one other (i.e., sales of the #1 record of 2000 compared to the #1 record of 2007, #2 with #2, and so on), which you would expect to approximately reflect the same one-third drop — but they did not.  ¶  Instead, the records that occupied each of the top 10 slots for 2007 were off from over 50 percent to nearly 70 percent compared to the sales for the records in those same positions for 2000.  ¶  This substantially disproportionate drop for the bestsellers of 2007 indicates that music sales are clearly trending toward greater diversity and choice. ...

... Consumption patterns are shifting, and these may significantly affect radio formatics, particularly for music.  ¶  Here are the high-level bullet points that influence any course corrections that terrestrial radio might consider:

• As blockbuster sales decline and niches grow in importance, music promotion will move away from traditional radio formats and seek more specialized outlets.
  
• As big names sell fewer records but continue to receive most terrestrial radio airplay, music labels will seek increased compensation to make up for sales losses through new royalty payments from broadcasters.
  
• Metadata matters, particularly for less well-known artists.
  
• One-to-many is giving way to many-to-many, and unilateral purveyors of taste (e.g., radio programming gurus) are giving way to “communities.” These virtual communities are defined along multiple axes, one of which is geographical. Terrestrial radio’s limited coverage can be turned to a strength for such localized communities.
  
• A potentially controversial point, but worth considering (at least academically): In terms of maximizing competitive agility, terrestrial radio ownership limits may be inverted. ...

Link: Radio World.  Thanks to Kerry Swanson for the tip.  --Dennis

TV Stations Seek Shows to Put Online

Brian Stelter visited the National Ass'n of Television Program Executives (pronounced "GNAT-pee") conference in Las Vegas and writes:

... As broadcast growth flattens, local stations are increasingly looking to their Web sites for new sources of revenue. Some stations are creating original programming for the Web, but it is far easier for them to purchase the online rights to syndicated shows. This week, for instance, 200 television station Web sites introduced “Big Shot Live,” a national online talent competition promoted through “Entertainment Tonight.” Some stations, under an agreement with Warner Brothers, are now showing the syndicated sitcom “Two and a Half Men” on their Web sites.  ¶  If ventures like these are successful, local affiliates may wind up playing the same role online that they do on television, in which they buy up what is essentially used programming from producers. As Oprah Winfrey and Alex Trebek can attest, syndication is a backbone of local broadcasting: affiliates purchase the local rights to specific shows and sell ads alongside the content. ...

Link:  New York Times.  --Dennis

Mapping Public Media: Inside and Out

The Center for Social Media at American University is out with a new downloadable report with this title by Jessica Clark.  Here's the executive summary:

The landscape of public media is shifting to accommodate an evolving, always-on digital media landscape shaped significantly by users as well as media-makers. Such a shift demands a remapping of the public media field, a project addressed by the Center for Social Media’s Future of Public Media project. This new territory, which comprises online, film, print and user-generated elements, demands new and interdisciplinary research approaches. This paper examines efforts to examine three public media projects—defined as projects that engage publics for the purpose of informing them and moving them to action—through two contrasting analytical approaches. Case studies by Center for Social Media researchers, with interviews and elements of market and online research, present an “inside” look at the projects under examination, while network and issue mapping tools designed by the Amsterdam-based Govcom.org provide a more distant “outside” assessment of the impact and reach of these projects.  ¶  Comparison of the case studies of the three projects — independent documentary film The War Tapes, PBS documentary and outreach project A Lion in the House, and international blogging site Global Voices—revealed commonalities among these projects, and more generally among contemporary media projects attempting to survive and thrive in the volatile online environment. Emerging public media projects are mission-driven, designed to engage multiple publics, enriched by strategic partnerships and forging new pathways and routines. They also share a number of challenges with both commercial and independent media-makers: spanning multiple platforms, navigating evolving roles for editors and producers, planning for multiple moments of connection and outreach with audiences, staying abreast of ever-shifting technologies and tactics, and grappling with questions of content ownership.  ¶  While the case studies provided a wealth of data—from media-makers’ personal anecdotes to audience statistics to accounts of complex outreach partnerships—the online analysis and mapping tools developed by Govcom.org provided a more quantitative analysis of the online reach of these media projects. The research team, led by University of Amsterdam’s Richard Rogers, has developed a method that “scrapes” data from Google and other online sources, analyzes that data to reveal networks of sites related to particular issues or projects, and then, after content analysis by researchers, displays the data as a series of network maps using a program called ReseauLu. The evolution and use of these tools is discussed below.  ¶  A very different picture of the publics served by the three media projects under examination emerged when the case study accounts were contrasted to the Govcom.org visualizations. This paper examines the differences in approach and results, conflicting accounts of how publics might be understood and quantified, and further directions for research that examines public media.

Link:  Center for Social Media.

Learning from CES and the music industry

Mark Ramsey has two must-read posts.  Here's one on what we should be learning from this year's CES, including:

... The fundamental problem in our industry is, frankly, that we have so little content unique to us and so little content bigger than us.  ¶  If you're all about the music then you're about nothing unique at all. And it has taken the obliteration of radio's monopoly over listeners' ears for this to be made apparent.  ¶  Get this straight: It doesn't matter that you have a tower. It doesn't matter how many HD sub-channels you have. We have been borrowing the attention of millions of listeners all this time and now we must earn it. ...

Link:  hear2.0.

And this is from one about music industry trends:

... the transitional nature of all - ALL - recorded technology that distributes music to consumers. That is, one technology shrinks as another expands, ad infinitum. Radio, too, is a technology, a very well established and popular one. The erosion we're currently seeing in radio usage - especially among the young - is not a hiccup. It is part of a long-term trend we are only beginning to experience. The more we face competitive alternatives which substitute for radio's core benefits, the more this trend will accelerate. ...

Link:  hear2.0. 

Update 10 January 2008:
Mark's writing about lessons for radio.  Marketing guru/writer Seth Godin has also posted about lessons from the music business, but targets all purveyors of digital distribution with his advice, starting with this gem:

The first rule is so important, it’s rule 0:

0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now.
Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late.  Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.

Link:  Seth Godin's Blog.  Thanks to Paul Maloney for the tip in Kurt Hanson's Radio and Internet Newsletter.  --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

Myth, Media and Meta podcast

As I noted in the previous post below, audio files and presentation decks from the 2007 Iowa DTV Symposium have now been posted online.  This includes my own presentation from Oct. 2nd (and intimidating it was to be presenting the same afternoon as John C. Dvorak and Mark Schubin) titled Myth, Media and Meta: Three Information Epochs and What They Mean for Broadcasting.  Here is the agenda description:

Humans have always created information faster than we create humans. And, consequently, humans are in a constant struggle to extract value from the "noise" of too much information in their environment. The title refers to epochs that are characterized by the techniques we've used. "Myth" being story-telling, poetry, music, etc. "Media" dates from Gutenberg and encompasses traditional broadcasting. "Meta" is the digital age, characterized by use of metadata, compression, "pull" distribution, and distribution systems that can learn user preferences. Broadcasters use all these techniques and social systems may enable them to be successful in "many-to-many" distribution in the future.

Links:  MP3, PPT or for Flash version of the deck click here and scroll down in the Content Track to 4:30 on Tuesday.  Also, I've placed both the MP3 and PPT links permanently in the Files section to the left.

For a written version, see these four posts from early June.  Reboot Redux: Myth, Media and Meta; Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.   --Dennis

Innovation at the Met

The Metropolitan Opera, of all organizations, has been doing a very innovative thing by transmitting its performances in HDTV to movie theaters around the country as well as other innovations.  Non-profit fundraising guru Bob Stein writes:

... [CEO Peter Gelb] has taken opera to the streets--free large-screen broadcasts in Times Square (opening night of Madame Butterfly), introduced $20 rush orchestra tickets and broadcast live performances to movie screens around the world. He's brought directors from the theater world to stage operas, and he even recruited design celeb Isaac Mizrahi to create the costumes for Orfeo ed Euridice.  ¶  What has resulted is a revitalized Met. According to Bloomberg.com,

Sales during the 2006-07 season rose 7.1 percent to 810,225, said Gelb, who succeeded Joseph Volpe in August. In all, the Met sold 83.9 percent of tickets offered for its 3,800- seat opera house at Manhattan's Lincoln Center compared with 76.8 percent last season.

Link:  Major Giving.

The legendary Mark Schubin gave a talk about the Met's Live HD opera-to-theater broadcasts at October's Iowa DTV Symposium.  The talk (The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD: global cinemacasts, robotic cameras, and more) is available both as a PowerPoint (click here and scroll down to the Content Track's Tuesday at 2:30 session) and as an MP3 file.

Just went to the Met web site and see that one of their theaters is about a 75-mile drive from me, so I'm going to buy a ticket and check it out.  --Dennis

Report: How Digital Platforms Change Negotiations between Public Media and Independent Producers

I missed it when released in late spring, but the Center for Social Media at American University released a new report by Pat Aufderheide titled, The New Deal: How Digital Platforms Change Negotiations between Public Media and Independent Producers.  Says the press release:

... The study discovered that television programmers are asking for and obtaining rights for digital distribution, without having concrete plans for distribution on new platforms. The study recommends that producers clarify their expectations and that public television programmers clarify their plans for use of video content. The study concludes that this is an excellent time for documentarians and public media executives to work together on demonstration projects online. ...

Updated 10 November 2007:

Link:  Center for Social Media (pdf).  Important reading for public television types.  Lessons for others as well.

Thanks to Jake Shapiro who, in the comments below, provided a link to an updated version (6/07) of this report.  Link:  Center for Social Media. --Dennis

Why the Internet is good for classical music

Critic Alex Ross has a great article on the salutary impact of the Web on classical music in this week's New Yorker called The Well-Tempered Web.  He provides this in evidence:

... Perhaps the most constructive digitization of classical music is taking place on a Web site called Keeping Score, which is hosted by the San Francisco Symphony. Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco’s music director, has set a new standard for educational programming with a series of behind-the-music radio and television broadcasts. To accompany the TV shows, which delve into canonical works such as Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” Tilson Thomas and the orchestra have set up high-tech pages where listeners can follow the score bar by bar, stop to listen to the conductor’s explanations of the particulars, and see musicians demonstrate how Stravinsky reinvented their instruments. Not since the fifties, when Leonard Bernstein walked across a gigantic blown-up score of Beethoven’s Fifth on the TV show “Omnibus,” has there been such a vividly intelligent introduction to some of the fundamentals of classical music. Tilson Thomas is Bernstein’s most faithful and hopeful follower, and with these programs he is performing radical acts of demystification. ...

But also cautions:

... Those who see the dawning of a new golden age should bear in mind the “Snakes on a Plane” rule: things invariably appear more important on the Internet than they are in the real world. Classical music has experienced waves of technological euphoria in the past: the Edison cylinder, radio, the LP, and the CD were all hailed as redeeming godsends for a kind of music that has always struggled to find its place in American culture. At the end of such bouts of giddiness, classical music somehow always winds up back where it started, in a state of perpetual fret. ...

Link:  The New Yorker.  Ross's blog is, The Rest Is Noise.

This is a must-read piece for music-oriented pubcasters, especially with regard to how the Net enables mini-communities to thrive.  There are lessons to be learned here for web strategies.  --Dennis