Technology360

The The Long Reach of TV Spectrum | #pubmedia

Communications attorney, Michael D. Berg, has a very good article accessible to non-lawyers and non-engineers on the implications for television stations of spectrum repacking on TVNewsCheck.  For station CEOs, COOs and board members, this is a good use of your time.

Link:  TVNewsCheck.

--Dennis

New America Foundation paper: #PubMedia Policy, Spectrum Policy and Rethinking Public Interest Obligations

The New America Foundation has released a paper tying spectrum policy with sustaining public media.  No, it’s not yet another proposal to create an endowment for public media from spectrum auction proceeds.   Here is the executive summary:

Executive Summary
In this paper we consider reforms and innovations in spectrum policy that would enable and sustain an expanded public media to better support quality news, journalism, education, arts, and civic information in the 21st century. The Internet has remade the landscape of free expression, access to news and information, and media production. Thus, we are well past the moment when spectrum allocated to broadcasting could be considered as distinct from that allocated to wireless broadband networks. Such networks serve as primary channels for access to news and information, increasingly edging out over-the-air broadcasting as the essential infrastructure for media distribution.

Throughout the history of U.S. policymaking, access to spectrum and the airwaves has been linked to free speech and expression. The public sphere now includes not just one-way broadcast, but two-way broadband and mobile communications platforms. Given this, spectrum allocation has to be considered not only in terms of how it can serve the historic priorities of the nation’s Communications Act—localism, diversity and competition—but also the fact that anyone can produce and distribute media in the digital era. Simultaneously, the demands and structures of commercially driven media are swiftly eroding quality journalism, threatening a core foundation of our democracy. These developments necessitate new thinking on spectrum allocations and the obligations of spectrum licensees. More specifically, they underscore the need to develop policies that support and expand a broader public media to promote localism and a truly diverse marketplace of ideas, information, discourse and content.

Our proposals include:
• Supplementing ill-enforced public interest obligations on commercial broadcasters with spectrum license fees that could support multi-platform public media
• Supplanting one-time spectrum auctions with annual fees to sustain public media
• Requiring spectrum licensees for mobile broadband to adhere to non-discrimination rules for Internet content, applications, and services
• Requiring spectrum licenses for mobile broadband to adhere to universal service requirements

• Increasing the diversity of wireless providers in local communities
• Facilitating community and locally owned wireless broadband infrastructure via unlicensed and opportunistic access to spectrum

Thanks to Michael Marcotte (@michvinmar) for the heads up and related blog post.

--Dennis

Using crowd funding for #pubmedia projects

It was interesting to see that Pebble blew past its $100,000 goal for crowd funding development of its innovative watches from Kickstarter, raising over $10 million.  In checking out Kickstarter and a competitor called Indiegogo, it struck me that these sites, and others like them, might be a good way for public media entities and independent producers to raise funds for their projects -- though Pebble's large return is atypical.

Today, a Canadian friend of public media, Rob Paterson, posted some very useful advice for those who aspire to raise funding this way.  Although written from a general rather than pubmedia perspective, it should be must reading for producers wanting to pursue this. 

Additionally, you should check out Colleen Taylor's helpful post on GigaOM comparing these two major players in this space.

As more traditional sources of funding are harder to tap, these provide a good source of journalistically independing funding.

If you have experience with using crowd sourcing for public media projects, please leave a comment here or send me an email.  --Dennis

FCC TV incentive spectrum auctions (updated) – What does it mean for broadcasters? #pubmedia

Attorney David Oxenford of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP has a good overview of what procedures broadcasters might expect from the FCC in the matter of repacking and auctioning of television broadcast spectrum.  Link: Broadcast Law Blog.  Trackback (posted 20 Feb. 2012).

Updated 22 Feb. 2012:  Attorney Stephen Coran of Rini Coran PC also has a good overview of provisions of this legislation.  It goes in somewhat different directions than the Oxenford post from yesterday.  Link: TelecomMediaTech Law Blog (posted 21 Feb. 2012).

And Attorney Rob Schill of Fletcher, Heald & Hildreth also has a useful analysis of the provisions of this legislation.  Link:  CommLawBlog (posted 18 Feb. 2012).

There has been some talk within the television industry of giving up part of one’s spectrum for remuneration.  It appears that the only way to accomplish that would be to forgo reimbursements for repacking costs or to consolidate operations with another station or stations on a single channel.

Updated 24 Feb. 2012:  The legislation which created this spectrum auction authority is contained in H.R. 3630, the “Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012,” now signed by the president.  Link: Library of Congress [pdf].

Here’s Kim McAvoy’s in-depth report on the legislation.  Link: TVNewsCheck (posted 17 Feb. 2012).

Updated 25 Feb. 2012:  VP Technology for NBC Stations, Doug Lung, takes up some engineering aspects of this in his regular column.  Link:  TVTechnology.

Updated 28 Feb. 2012:  Here is another good legal analysis of provisions in this legislation in the form of Harry Jessell’s interview with attorney John Hane of Pullsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.  Link:  TVNewsCheck.

--Dennis

Be More “PBS”–Be More Local, a strategic framework for #pubmedia

The following essay of mine was published in the public media newspaper, Current, on Jan. 30, 2012.  It’s not yet online so I’m reproducing it here with a small update to call out the role of education.  I currently do work for the Public Television Major Market Group and serve on the American Public Television board, but the opinions expressed here are my own.

--Dennis

______________________

The stations are here so they can understand and illuminate a community’s aspirations and concerns, engage people in the life of their community, and help people reengage and reconnect with one another.

-- Richard C. Harwood and Aaron B. Leavy[i]

The remark above reflects a way of thinking strategically about the institution of public broadcasting at this point in our history. Today, public media boards and executives face such strategic questions as:

What can we do to be a more significant and engaged institution in our community?

What should be our focus, and what does that mean for redeploying resources from current activities?

How can we help nonprofit and government entities be more effective when their missions are in greater demand?

How do we respond to disruptive changes in media usage?

Our web/social/mobile efforts don’t feel effective; can we change that?

How do we reach younger people after childhood?

Do we have the right internal leadership…the right strategic skills on our board?

What is the appropriate staffing mix between content and support specialists?

Can we achieve scale and lower costs through collaborations?

How can we deal with the loss in public funding for capital equipment at a time of more rapid replacement cycles?

What’s the best way to differentiate our station from channels?

What follows won’t answer these questions for your specific situation, but it is intended to give you a strategic framework from which you can derive them.

Most of the opportunities and threats we face today apply to both radio and television, as does much of this framework, but the title, of course, borrows the current PBS slogan. Feel free to substitute your national acronym.

The reality of our business

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us
It wad frae monie a blunder free us / An’ foolish notion

– Robert Burns, “To A Louse,” 1785

We’re not the BBC or CBC with assigned remits; we’re a peculiarly American conglomeration of some 365 independent radio, television and joint licensees. The public tends shape its top-down view of us through NPR and PBS. The stations tend to shape their view from a community-up perspective, being in the same business as NPR and PBS, just on a more geographically-limited scale. Both views are incomplete and limiting.

A more useful way to model the local station is to consider it as having two distinct lines of business, one national and the other local. It’s common for us to view the two as a zero-sum game – the more we spend on national, the less we have for local and vice versa. But the evidence is that it is, or can be, just the opposite — a virtuous circle of mutual benefit.

National programming creates the financial margins in listener- and viewer-sensitive income that combine with grant and public funding and earned income to subsidize local programming. Local stations, in turn, provide significant financial resources to produce, market and distribute national programs.

The margins returned by national programming are substantial. Look at PBS in 2009 for example. Allocating viewer-sensitive revenue by audience, national programming returned $2.14 to stations for each $1 they invested, but other programming and production expenses returned only 12 cents per dollar.[ii]

The virtuous circle is completed if stations build multiple income streams and reduce production expenses in order to “be more local.” Strong local stations can invest in being more national, and the more predictable their revenue for national production will be.

In other words, the more we optimize each line of business, the more significant and sustainable we will be. If stations “be more PBS” (that is to say national — APM, APT, NPR, PRI), they can better “be more local,” too.

Opportunities

Public media are well-established in our communities and Are strongly positioned to serve their communities by bringing people together around their interests and giving them valuable, pertinent content.

Most foundations, many corporations and individuals, and even tax-based entities are looking to support innovation, partnership and positive change.

In public media we have strong, valued brands and competitive national programming generating billions of listener- and viewer-hours annually. Local stations are deeply rooted in the communities they serve, providing a strong foundation for public service hand in glove with other nonprofits with compatible aims.

The decline in journalism for print, radio and television is widely noted. New text-based online journalism efforts have been established in several cities, often with expatriates from city newspapers, and sometimes in collaboration with established public media. Few, if any, have thus far become profitable.

There are more than one million public charities in the U.S. — about 2,800 for each of the 365 public broadcasting entities. [iii] If you think public media providers are fragmented, the public charity space is much more so. And their effectiveness is limited by what John Kania and Mark Kramer of the nonprofit consulting firm, FSG, have termed the “isolated intervention of individual organizations.”[iv]

In 2010, the revenue for these charities totaled $1.4 trillion for these more than one million public charities, and they aggregated $2.5 trillion in total assets. Additionally, state and local governments collect tax revenue of $1.3 trillion collected for public service.[v] Together, these investments in public service were more than 80 times larger than the combined revenues of commercial television stations and the radio industry.[vi]

As natural conveners and media experts, public media seem ideally positioned to make a major difference in the work of the public service sector. But the “isolated impact” principle means we stand little chance of making a difference by ourselves, either; rather, as Kania and Kramer argue, our sector should be building “collective impact.”

As local stations, we have far greater opportunities in being the media arm of the nonprofit world than being the nonprofit arm of the media world.

Challenges

We are dealing with fundamental long-term challenges in media usage and the media economy that are upending the entire media marketplace, including public media. Web implementation for most stations has been too limited and too often devoted to the wrong ends, failing at both its intended purpose (promotion and audience cultivation) and for the greater purpose it could serve (local content delivery). Mobile platforms are coming on fast, but local stations — with a few notable exceptions, mostly in radio — are deer immobile in the headlights.

Over-the-air television largely survived the last disruption of media-technology advance —cable and satellite networks — though with substantially diminished audiences — because the users of the new distribution platforms had approximately the same demographics as those who watched broadcasts.

The ongoing digital disruption, in contrast, actually holds greater opportunity for public media. The digital audiences are significantly younger and consumer media more friendly to their schedules than following those of any broadcaster or cable network. This is an opportunity for growth – if we take the right steps – because they comprise the demographic gap we’ve been underserving.

While most foundations and many potential major-givers are looking to support innovation, partnership and change, they also increasingly apply standards of accountability. Competition for this giving is growing because charities’ needs are growing, because government has less discretionary money to contribute, and because the charities’ fundraising is increasingly sophisticated.

Public media, especially in television, have way too little funding to replace their capital equipment with the shortened life cycles of digital technology and the loss of public subsidies such as the Public Telecommunications Facilities Program. And this will be exacerbated if we attempt to maintain what can be considered, given today’s media trends, an over-investment in capital facilities.

Strategic framework for change

The essence of strategy is deciding what not to do.
--Michael E. Porter[vii]

So we have three profound pulls in the same direction of change, and each is motivation enough for decisive action.

The opportunities we have with the charitable and public sectors should compel us to action even if we didn’t face the challenges of funding and media change. Fortunately, accepting the challenges of community engagement will help address them.

Similarly, the funding challenges alone should compel us to action even if we didn’t face those of media change and nonprofit community service.

And the demands of media change would be sufficient to move us to action even if the other two weren’t in play.

To “be more” in both of public media’s lines of business – national and local —I believe we should follow the advice of Harvard professor Clayton Christensen and colleagues and effectively disaggregate them at the station level: Give them separate strategies and often separate leadership, enabling each to grow without the imperatives of the other. [viii]

Disaggregation at the station level means pursuing these lines of business separately — the national side operating largely through the most cost-effective outsourcing and “newco” collaborations, and the local side rebooted from the ground up to take advantage of journalism, education or community engagement opportunities, with much less need for expensive capital and support staff.

In that framework, the components typically have these characteristics:

National line of business

• Feels comfortable in the traditional role, being the nonprofit arm of the media world
• Attracts relatively broad audiences
• Generates the largest audience and sum of user-sensitive income
• Increases net unrestricted revenue
• Permits greater spending on high return-on-investment programming
• Expenses reduced through outsourcing and collaborations with “newco” services —startup and spinoff companies that handle functions such as master control, program acquisition and scheduling, interstitial production, and individual giving

Local line of business

• Thrives by building engaged communities, usually by joining in collective impact with others in the public service sector
• Serves as the media arm of the nonprofit world, enlarging its role as a civic convener, working strategically to multiply the impact of partner organizations (public television entities have been doing this for education partners since before there was a PBS); and/or
• Focuses particularly on journalism, which fits well the traditional role as the nonprofit arm of media, but also builds community impact
• Has targeted audiences
• Funded by
  • Net revenue from the national line of business
  • Project revenue from foundations, partners, tax-based sources
• Broadens its output and reach by increasing its ratio of producers/journalists to support personnel
• Uses smarter, “smaller-but-broader” facilities for content generation
  • Shares studios among television stations, with perhaps 30 to 60 sites in the country
  • Lowers cost using more digital-friendly production modus operandi (e.g., VJ techniques in television; Knight training in public radio)
  • Utilizes “Create Once Publish Everywhere” mode of production and distribution[ix]
• Adopts “distributed distribution,” using multiple platforms, including partners’ and other community outlets.

There are, of course, many challenges in moving toward this framework.

One of the hardest is lack of strategic governance, or even governance that is directly involved with the station in too many cases. That’s beyond the scope of this essay, but the Station Resource Group has a good overview of this issue[x] and Bill Kling, former CEO of American Public Media, has persuasively described the limitations of universities and other institutional licensees.

Another significant challenge is lack of consensus, both within and among stations, on what they want to achieve and, especially, how they want to do it.

Many stations must significantly change course, something that will engender internal resistance. The shift will be especially significant in television stations with traditional production efforts that do not regularly produce news programming.

As a station manager, I admit, I succumbed to the temptation to “play the cards we’re dealt” — to accept past limitations as our destiny. That’s not strategic.

To “be more” locally, we must produce content that touches more of the community more deeply, that increasingly reaches listeners and viewers on their digital devices, that doesn’t require large capital outlays we can no longer afford or justify based on results, and that opens up new revenue streams.

Being more opens up a a whole new world of opportunity for public media.

---

Endnotes:

[i] Richard C. Harwood & Aaron B. Leavy, Why We’re Here: The Powerful Impact of Public Broadcasters When They Turn Outward, Charles F. Kettering Foundation, 2011.

[ii] Programming from other sources like American Public Television likely provides a return similar to PBS’s but that’s masked in this analysis because they provide a smaller percentage of broadcast hours and because local programming is much more expensive per hour. Under-reporting of capital costs likely means that returns on local programs are even lower. Data are derived from PBS AFR Dataset reported in Booz&Co, “System Health and Sustainability,” 2010 PBS/CPB Round Robins.

[iii] Source: National Center for Charitable Statistics, http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/profileDrillDown.php?state=US&rpt=PC

[iv] John Kania & Mark Kramer, “Collective Impact,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2011, http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/collective_impact

[v] Source: U.S. Census Bureau Quarterly Summary of State & Local Taxes, http://www.census.gov/govs/qtax/

[vi] Source: BIA/Kelsey, Local Media Research and Forecasts, http://www.biakelsey.com/Research-and-Forecasts/

[vii] Michael E. Porter, “What is Strategy?”, Harvard Business Review, Nov.-Dec. 1996.

[viii] Disaggregation is used to describe a tool of change management recommended by Clayton M. Christensen, Matt Marx, and Howard H. Stevenson in “The Tools of Cooperation and Change,” Harvard Business Review, October 2006.

[ix] Daniel Jacobson, “COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere,” Programmable Web, http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/10/13/cope-create-once-publish-everywhere/

[x] http://www.srg.org/governance/overview.html

The Next Decade of Bandwidth, Parts I-V

John Shepler does a five-part look forward on the competition for bandwidth ahead. I’m not necessarily endorsing everything he says and some of my fellow television broadcasters may want to take their amlodipine before reading, but it’s worth your time to read.

Link: Telexplainer, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V.  --Dennis

Eric Schmidt’s MacTaggart lecture: The internet is fundamental to the future of TV | #pubmedia

The prestigious James MacTaggart lecture is a fixture at the annual MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.  I’ve never attended one, but they’re always interesting and I look forward to catching up when they’re posted. This year’s lecture was given by Eric Schmidt, the Google Executive Chairman and, until this year, its CEO.

Here are some excerpts relevant to the focus of this blog:

Around 60% of Netflix rentals are the result of algorithmically generated recommendations.

On trending:

What are the trends to watch? I can sum that up in three words: mobile, local and social. …¶… Reflecting on this, new genres of online content and services are emerging. If content is king, context is its crown – and one of the most important contextual signals is location. If you’re searching for coffee from your mobile,odds are you’re not looking for a Wikipedia entry, but for directions to a nearby café. ¶ Social signals are another powerful driver of behavior. If three of my friends highly rate a TV series, odds are I’d check it out even if reviewers say it’s rubbish. …

On TV viewing:

In fact, I don’t' expect TV viewing will ever switch to be entirely on-demand. There will always be a cultural pull, for some shows, on some occasions, to watch in real-time. Linear viewing remains remarkably robust – in 2010, over 90% of broadcast TV viewing remained ‘live.’

Links: Full text at The Guardian.  Video at The Guardian.  Owen Gibson’s candidates for the ten MacTaggart lectures that have been the most prescient – The Guardian.  --Dennis

Spectrum auctions not in debt ceiling agreement–but look for them to return

Thirty-six years ago, our attention was focused on a toothy great white shark which was terrorizing Amity Island, thanks to the artistry of Steven Spielberg and Peter Benchley.  This summer, the dysfunctional family of 535 elected representatives to Congress are chomping up government expenditures looking for any savings that can’t be labeled a tax increase.

For a bit, Senator Harry Reid had thrown spectrum auctions into the water along with the other chum – advocated by the wireless telephony and consumer electronics industries and worrisome to the television broadcast industry (disclosure: I work for a small sliver of the latter). That was withdrawn in the final agreement.

However, if you might think it’s safe to go back in the water, look for it to come up again in the so-called “super committee” that’s been put together to eliminate some more of the deficit by Christmas.  Marguerite Reardon has a good summary of the situation at CNET.

An accelerated auction without adequate compensation to broadcasters who will have to move their channels in a repacking move could be harmful, and there are important considerations concerning interference and reduced coverage. On the other hand, broadcasters would also have an opportunity to use 4G and later systems for their own content distribution.  So, it’s a mixed bag and it’s important to have enough time to plan and make necessary adjustments if spectrum is to be redeployed from broadcasting to telephony and wireless data.  --Dennis

[NB: Photo by Terry Goss and used under Creative Commons Attribution]

Jon McTaggart speech to #Pubmedia Marketing and Development Conference

Jon McTaggart, who has succeeded Bill Kling as CEO of the American Public Radio Group (American Public Media, Minnesota Public Radio, KPCC, et al.), gave a terrific speech this morning at the Public Media Marketing and Development Conference – a mostly radio group.  Some excerpts that are as good for public television television as for public radio radio:

If what we do is essential, resources will follow.

Questions we're asking at MPR as part of our strategic planning:

• Is our community directly informing the services we provide?
• Is the whole community involved with our station?
• Are we providing something uniquely and distinctly valuable to our community?
• What other organizations have a vested interest in the success of our station?
• What do we do that has the whole community talking?

--Dennis

Building web usage for #pubmedia – challenge for TV and music radio

A couple of weeks ago, I had a good conversation with an old friend and colleague who is an executive at a combined radio and television operation about the dilemma such stations have in knowing which of the new set of web tools being developed by NPR and PBS to adopt in such “joint licensee” situations. It parallels the dilemma such stations have faced for years in how to present their web operations – that is, to combine radio and television on one site, to build separate sites, or to make one combining the two.  The scatter charts below are the result of a little deeper dive into the data then I did for my post last Thursday, Pubmedia web ranks vs. inbound links.

Bottom line: I’m now less inclined to say, “Let them develop separate sites,” than I was on the phone with my friend.

Both charts still look at inbound links (also called backlinks), though I’ve dropped PBS and NPR data to open up the scale a bit and added some stations.  In the legends below, by “PBS,” I mean standalone websites for PBS stations; by “NPR,” I mean standalone websites for NPR stations that carry the NPR newsmagazines; and “Joint” means websites combining pages for both radio and TV.  “Classical” refers to websites for both commercial and non-commercial classical music stations.

The first chart displays the same X and Y axes as the one on Thursday, but the data points have been differentiated for these four categories.  Larger backlink numbers logarithmically improve traffic ranking. In other words, you dramatically improve search traffic by this demonstration of respect for your site’s content. It’s likely that search traffic is greater than what I’d label “relationship traffic,” though of course some percentage of people who find you through search go on to develop relationships with you.

You’ll see that the general pattern for combined joint licensee sites is not a lot different than the one for sites for NPR newsmagazine stations. Sites for TV stations and classical music radio stations trail in inbound links and in traffic rankings.  The median Alexa traffic ranking for the sites in this group is 173,005 (ranging from 4,977 to 625,617). KCRW (#1), WNYC, WBUR, KQED and WBEZ sites are in the top 10,000 – all but joint licensee KQED are radio-only sites.

The second chart below uses the inbound links as the X axis this time, and the Y axis is the number of those backlinks per 1,000 television households (to control for market size). There are a few more data points because the number of inbound links is given for several stations for which no traffic rank is displayed.

Here, the median backlinks per 1,000 TVHH is a modest 0.16. The top performers are joint licensees, KQED.org and KPBS.ORG with 1.05 and 1.16 backlinks per 1,000 TVHH. Non-classical music radio-only site and joint licensee sites each have a median of 0.24. For TV-only sites it’s 0.12, and for classical radio sites it’s 0.04.

You might ask, is it just television that has problems? In joint licensee situations, stations like KPBS and KQED, which offer a lot of linkable content in both media definitely lift the backlinks and traffic linkings rankings of the combined site.  Both lift the other, but television doesn’t provide as much lift as radio does.  I looked at data for the four news-producing commercial TV stations in Washington, DC (ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC) and for the commercial radio all-news powerhouse, WTOP. All five plus NPR all-news station WAMU had a respectable number of backlinks in about the same range (1,317 for CBS to 2,036 for Fox). TV stations with lots of linkable content do well.

You might also ask, is it impossible for a music-only station to perform well with backlinks? Here, I looked at the sites of just a pair of similar stations, KEXP in Seattle and WXPN in Philadelphia (neither are shown in the charts above). Both station have a national reputation and neither station is particularly high power (KEXP is only 560 watts; WXPN 5,000 watts). Having been a "neighbor" of sorts to KEXP during its development, I know that it made an aggressive push in internet delivery and now has 1,239 inbound links vs. 655 for WXPN – that translates to 0.66 per 1,000 TVHH for KEXP and 0.22 for WXPN (both numbers probably understate the true number since neither station probably reaches the full range of the Nielsen TV DMA households). That’s nearly 20% larger than all-news KUOW’s in the same market, five times larger than the site of KPLU (mixed news and jazz format), and seven times larger than site of the main PBS station in the market, KCTS.  So, yes, music-only stations can get lots of “link love” and perform well in search with the right strategies.

So, back to my friend's question: There’s no reason why a majority of your pageviews shouldn’t be coming in through search. For this blog, it’s about 70%. These data suggest that search traffic will be lifted if you combine the sites, since the main URL’s “respect” will drive that. The “relationship traffic,” on the other hand, might be advantaged in some ways by building independent sites. At a minimum, joint licensee sites should do a much better job at making radio visible instead of hidden on a tab behind a bunch of public TV program visuals. Remember, radio lifts TV better than TV lifts radio (that’s true for on-air promotion also) – and both lift the web better than the web lifts them. Judging from what I’ve seen, way too many stations are apparently following the losing strategy of making the web site into a program promotion vehicle. You’re content companies – put that up front, make it as much of a river as you can, and look for strategies to grow your inbound links.

--Dennis