Technology360

Preserving Digital Public Television

The Library of Congress has funded a project, Preserving Digital Public Television, to design an archive for the long-term preservation of digitally-produced public television programming.  The project has just launched a web site, ptvdigitalarchive.org, to share information about this important project.  Congratulations for a very nice effort, but puhleez, friends, add an RSS feed so some of us will have an order of magnitude or two better chance to catch what's new.  --Dennis

The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media

About a month ago, I posted an exerpt and link to Terry Heaton's terrific essay of this name.  If it went scrolling by without reading then (for shame), you have a second chance.  It's been republished in the December issue of The Digital Journalist.  Check it out.  --Dennis

Interview with OMN founder Mike Homer

AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins continues his interview (part 3 of 4) with Open Media Network founder Mike Homer, this part labeled "What About Social Networking?".   On 10/30, I posted part 1, "Reinventing Public Broadcasting," and updated it on 11/11 with part 2, "Why Open Media Network?".  Presumably part 4, "What Open Web Really Means," will be coming in a couple of weeks.  --Dennis

Audience Participation

Back in 1996, at the dawn (or at least early morning) of the browser age, UK television producer John Wyver published an essay in an apparently now-defunct publication, Abacus, that looks visionary in light of web/media 2.0 developments and the trend toward democratization of production and distribution.  Someone out there linked to this recently and I ran across it yesterday but, unfortunately, have lost who that was.  But it's good reading.  --Dennis

Wyver writes:  "... We used these new media to bolster our old medium of television. But we knew their potential far exceeded the uses to which we were putting them. Five years from now, the roles will be reversed. Some (although not all) parts of the broadcasting world will naturally migrate onto the Web. Here, television broadcasting will become an adjunct to Web-based interaction, rather than vice versa, and the broadcasting industry will be rapidly evolving towards a future very different from that which today's media giants now envisage. ...¶... What if television supported the Web? What if Web sites were the organising force for television shows rather than an adjunct? This vision has much to recommend it. It opens a new range of creative opportunities for programme makers. It offers a broader range of revenue sources than either the BBC's licence fee or ITV's advertising. It offers real viewer participation. On some subjects, the Web could gather broader, deeper content more cheaply and quickly than trad-itional television production companies could. Here's how television - new television - could work five years from now. ...¶... The key to creating community, however, is a complete rethinking of the role of the producer. No longer will producers have more or less the final say about content and organisation and no longer will they be more beholden to commissioning editors than to the viewers. The independent production team will still contribute its own televisual segments - some inspired by information on the Web site - and it will edit the broadcast show. However, in this new world, the most important job of the production team becomes structuring, indexing and enhancing the Web site, and one of the most time-consuming tasks will be "weeding" the site, stripping out superfluous, superseded and out-of-date material. ..."  Abacus via Internet Archive.

Interview with Clifford Lynch

Matt Pasiewicz has an interesting wide-ranging audio (MP3) interview with Clifford Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information.  I've heard Cliff speak three or four times and he was very generous with his time and advice at the meeting nearly a year ago which resulted in the formation of the Public Service Publisher initiative which I chair.  A very thoughtful person -- good listening for the education, library and public media communities.  Link:  EDUCAUSE.  --Dennis

The Remarkable Opportunities of Unbundled Media

Terry Heaton has another terrific essay: "... Television newscasts and programs, CDs, the morning paper, cable TV tiers, magazines, books, movies — virtually every form of mass media comes already bundled. It's as much a part of our consumer society as keeping up with the Joneses. The bundle includes everything that makes up the whole, from the content to the ads. This is how we do things. "Drive people to the bundle" is the mantra of mass marketing, which then uses its part of the bundle to rifle unwanted messages this way and that.  ¶  But bundled media has a serious drawback, one that cannot be wished away. It takes time to consume anything prebundled, and time is a precious and valued commodity in today's world. We're working more, and we have less time to ourselves.  ¶  And so, driven by the very real demand of less time, we've begun the process of tasting that which is unbundled. We unbundle television shows by skipping the commercials with our DVRs. We unbundle CDs by downloading the songs we want. We unbundle the national media by subscribing to specific RSS feeds. The signs of a burgeoning unbundled media world are everywhere. ...¶... The business opportunities for unbundled media are truly remarkable, but in order for local media companies to take advantage of them, they must begin viewing themselves as more than one-dimensional deliverers of bundled media. For broadcasters, that means finding the courage to say to ourselves that our transmitter isn't our top business anymore. It's but one of many, and our internal systems and even our organizational charts should reflect that. Only then will we be able to truly reinvent ourselves for the future. ..."  Link:  Donata Communications.  A complete list of essays and links are available on his weblog page.

Added 11/4:
Heaton also links to a related article in MediaDailyNews:  "Tasting the edges" of unbundled media and adds another post, "Unbundled video downloads: an exploding market."  --Dennis

Digital asset management – a report on current trends

Update 11/7/2005.   The presentations for this conference, Managing Digital Assets: Strategic Issues for Research Libraries, are now available online.  Link:  Association of Research Libraries.

Al Cornish of Washington State University (home of my day job) has a nice post reporting on a higher education DAM workshop he attended last week in Washington, DC.  Link: 

Library Technology Issues. --Dennis

Interview with Open Media Network founder Mike Homer

Update 11/11/05:
Part two of this interview with Mike Homer, Why Open Media Network?, has now been posted.  Part one is linked below.  Link:  AlwaysOn.

AlwaysOn's Tony Perkins has an interview with Mike Homer about Open Media Network.  This is the first of four posts and I'll link subsequent ones here.  Mike is its founder and also chairman of Kontiki.  I'm chairing the Public Service Publisher initiative which is partnering with OMN.  --Dennis

Archiving television

J. D. Lasica has posted a 7-minute video interview with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle "about the obstacles and opportunities in archiving our television heritage."  Link:  New Media Musings.  --Dennis

The digital home: Science fiction?

"... Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, telecoms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with consumers may be the biggest question facing these industries today. That is because the “digital home”, a concept and category hugely hyped in executive circles but still rarely heard in discussions among consumers, represents their greatest hope for revenue growth. Demand from corporate buyers of technology has barely recovered from the dotcom bust and is widely expected to be unimpressive for years. By contrast, the homes of consumers appear to technology vendors as a barely tamed analogue wilderness. Darcy Travlos, an analyst at CreditSights, a research firm, estimates the market opportunity of the digital home at $250 billion in America alone and $1 trillion worldwide in three to seven years. ... ... All this points to a huge problem with the digital-home vision: the lack, among most consumers, of any sense of crisis about the status quo in entertainment. “We don't think many folks are looking for an electronic nerve centre in their homes,” says Pip Coburn, who runs Coburn Ventures, a technology-consulting and investment firm. After all, popping in a DVD, say, is so easy and works so well. By contrast, getting a digital home up and running promises several lost weekends of fiddling with manuals and settings, and hefty expenses in new gear. According to Mr Coburn's formula for evaluating new technologies, whereby adoption is a function of the users' sense of crisis (ie, motivation to change) outweighing their perceived pain of switching, the digital home ranks as a clear 'loser'. ..."  The Economist.

Added 8 Sep. 2005:  Umair vs The Economist.  Umair Haque writes:  "I have a lot of respect for the Economist guys, but sometimes they really get tech wrong. Case in point, the latest article about the digital home. The argument (it's hard to follow) is essentially that consumers don't value the digital home, but incumbents do, so they'll try it, and it will be a big, costly error.  ¶  I think this is a specious argument. Let's take a bigger picture look at what's happening in this space. ..."  Link:  Bubble Generation weblog.