stephen hill : spatial relations

Jaron Lanier: Pay Me for My Content

Just before Thanksgiving, Jaron Lanier published an op-ed piece in the NY Times titled "Pay Me for My Content." Part mea culpa, part advocacy, Jaron is tired of waiting for the Internet revolution to provide a living for artists and other content creators. The Hollywood writer's strike may have occasioned it, but the piece reveals a deeper level of frustration and idealism that would not be satisfied by an incrementally better royalty deal with the studios or record labels.

Jaron is a friend with whom I have shared both musical and social time. We've argued and discussed some of these issues before, so I wrote him this:

Re your recent NYTimes Op-Ed:

As you know, we've been getting paid — and paying creators — for our online content since 2001. Practical mechanisms to secure payment were available even then. We used a simple, relatively insecure, but effective one created by the "adult" industry for the first version of our service from 2001 to 2005.

By 2005, things were getting more sophisticated. We built a 2nd generation site around a service whose slogan at the time was "resources for media monetization," since changed to "powering new media." As you may also know, there are now a number of companies in this field who provide various services to authenticate, authorize and charge users for content. Most of them use the much-reviled Microsoft DRM, but there are others who secure and charge for streams and use non-DRM methods to secure downloads.

Thus 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.

In your piece you did not mention the inhibiting effect of existing copyright regimes in the creation of new business models that might benefit creators. It is now obvious that many of the entrenched media interests have shot themselves in the head in their effort to maintain their old business models, pricing and market share. They never seem to learn from history.

For example, we still cannot legally sell downloads of our programs due to copyright and licensing restrictions on music, despite the fact that we are ready, willing and able to pay creators and publishers directly if necessary for these sales. They are more interested in maintaining control than effectively monetizing their existing catalogs.

Despite all this, there are numerous examples of niche media publishers and service providers online who are succeeding to one degree or another in supporting their enterprises with paid content instead of advertising, or some combination of both. Hearts of Space is one of them.

As a class I liken them to niche magazines and periodicals of the 20th century. Optimally, if they get the cost of production and delivery vs. benefit for the reader/user equation right, they can sustain themselves for a long time. No one gets rich. In the end it's a "satisfaction" economy.

I agree with you that advertising as the exclusive revenue model is not only culturally depressing — the bigger problem is that there are many niche artists, publishers and service providers who due to their size or the nature of their content, could simply never make an advertising model sustainable. They can, and do, get some incremental income from wide angle opt-in services like Google Ads, but this is just beer money. When you say "earn a living online" I assume you are looking for a sustainable income model for creatives.

In the early days of Jim Griffin and John Parres's Pho List discussion group, these questions were debated interminably without any clear resolution. As a niche content provider, I took the same side you do, which is sometimes called enabling "a (musician's) middle class." The only difference is that I would extend it to all creatives, as well as niche publishers and other value-added packagers, editors and resellers (like HOS).

I believe if you look more carefully you'll conclude that the real impediments are not technical, but (with some exceptions) because most creatives are not comfortable becoming entrepreneurs. Even among my colleagues in Public Broadcasting, the entrepreneur gene is very thin on the ground and major opportunities to charge "appropriately" for their high quality content have been left on the table.

For various reasons, these creative people lack the technical skills, the culture, and the internal motivation to build new businesses without clear models and established services to build upon. They like the limited responsibility that comes with a job or the pure artist paradigm; and from what I can see, many of them enjoy their victim status rather too much to give it up.

I think Mark Andreessen is onto something in his post on Rebuilding Hollywood in Silicon Valley's Image when he says that online favors the independent actor-writer-director-entrepreneur (backed by independent capital) over the old studio system:

The creators of the content are the owners of the company. The writers, actors, directors -- they are the owners. They have a direct, equity-based economic stake in the company's success. They get paid like owners, and they act like owners.

So to paraphrase Jaron's conclusion, we need to step up as well as grow up if we want to make a living online.

The CRB Rate Increases: Get Over It

Royalty rates for online music have always been a complicated issue for me. I can see the side of the rights holders and performing artists just as well as that of the "casters," both terrestrial and web.

I have a foot in both camps: in addition to being an online music service provider/webcaster and thus paying digital transmission royalties since 2001, I had 17 years experience in the record business as a producer and co-owner of an independent label that released almost 150 albums. In that capacity I signed a lot of royalty checks. I like paying royalties. It makes me feel like an honest member of the arts ecosystem, a proper "cultural citizen."

The recent CRB decision to ramp up the rates for digital transmissions have caused another outcry from the webcasting and broadcasting communities, including NPR and satellite radio. It's understandable that everyone in the broadcast business wants to operate with the lowest possible costs, but copyright has always been about finding the proper balance between competing interests. 

The bigger picture is that we began webcasting in the 1990's with a distorted, biased music royalty system that favored music publishers and had been subject only to politically driven reforms and very limited competition since the 1920s. So the system that is now painfully being born for royalties on digital transmissions started from unfair and had nowhere to go but up. The more you know about  the history of the music business, the more certain you will be of this. Nevertheless, the current system still has a long way to go before we see a truly rational scheme for music royalties.

New York attorney Bennett Lincoff has been dissecting this issue brilliantly for years. To my knowledge he was the first to call for a "unitary" scheme for music right in 2002; he won't be the last, since it's the only way to really make it work. Even U.S. Registrar of Copyrights Marybeth Peters called for similar (but more limited) reforms in 2005.  I'm signatory to a new effort calling for this kind of solution that includes many of the progressive voices on the Pho conference email list including Jim Griffin, Gerd Leonhard and others. What we have here, Pogo, is a policy gap.

Bennett Lincoff's most recent paper describes a new system that is astonishingly simple on the licensing side but still fairly complicated on the payment side. Yes, it's just a proposal, yes, it would be highly controversial, and no, it is nowhere near being adopted; but it would be a MONUMENTAL improvement over the current system, which was created for the physical product era and makes less sense every day in the wake of a worldwide digital media network.

The proposal demonstrates that if you free yourself from historical precedent and address the problem directly, fair and feasible solutions can be designed. Bennett lays this all out with admirable clarity in lucid, but not overly lawyerly prose; you will find studying it very rewarding if you really want to understand the stakes of the problem and the solution.

As flawed as the existing DMCA legislation is, it at least recognizes and begins to repair two structural deficiencies in the old music royalty system that operate to the advantage of incumbent radio and TV broadcasters  — lack of payment to owners of the sound recording, and lack of payment to featured recording artists as performers.

Most people do not know that (after costs) the royalties SoundExchange collects on digital transmissions are divided 50% to the owner of the sound recording, 45% to the featured recording artists/performers, and 5% to the musicians unions. None of it goes to the music publishers, songwriters and composers, who are paid via a separate system collected by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC in the U.S.

This is a long overdue correction that directly benefits performers, independent musicians and labels, and for that reason alone I support it. Europe has been way ahead of the U.S. on this; rights collectives like GEMA in Germany have collected and disbursed payments to all rights holders in a combined system for years. 

If you want to understand the rights holder's side of the issue I recommend the interview BRIAN ZISK of the Future of Music Coalition did with JOHN SIMSON of SoundExchange in Royalty Week. (.pdf)   Simson is a very clear, very practical guy as you will see from what he says. One thing he mentions that is sure to be even more controversial is that SoundExchange and the RIAA intend to fight to change the law as it applies to legacy broadcasters so that ultimately...the rates are uniform.

This means that terrestrial broadcasters would no longer have the 'carve-out' they've enjoyed since the 1920's, where they pay only the music publishers, songwriters and composers for use of recorded music. With the radio industry already under pressure from changing advertising models, you can bet the screams about this will be much louder, and the lobbying from the NAB should be nothing short of tactical nukes.

Anybody with even a passing understanding of the history of music royalties knew that the initial rates and policies for digital transmissions under the DMCA were just to get started and would not last. Effectively, webcasters have been paying below minimum wage for the use of music.

There's no doubt that the artificially low rates did support a great deal of innovation online, and today listeners enjoy tens of thousands of free webcast services as a result. But the low rates have come at the expense of the creative community, and allowed both radio stations and web-only services to put off the hard work of creating "real" business models to support their services. This is exactly the same issue I've been nagging my public broadcasting colleagues about in earlier posts here and here.

Even so, the CRB-proposed rates are supposed to ratchet up gradually and there should be enough time for serious webcasters to phase in the changes they need to make. Of course, they will do everything they can to fight and delay the actual application of the CRB decision, which is what is happening right now.

Are the proposed rates fair? Perhaps they are — in the long run. No doubt they would be disruptive to the status quo, so they may need to be implemented more gradually, or we may need additional policies that help existing webcasters through the transition to a more equitable rate.

As far as Hearts of Space is concerned, we are a "new subscription service," not a "non-interactive webcaster," and are subject to a slightly different set of rates and policies. Nevertheless, we ran the numbers as percentage increases immediately in the wake of the CRB announcement and found that we could probably absorb a doubling of the current rate before we'd have to raise our prices. After that, they would go up incrementally — but not enough to dissuade anyone who really wanted access to our material. The "user value decision" to pay for content is more complex than just the price.

My point is that if you have rational business model to start with, paying more — even multiples more — for your basic source material is not a major problem. After that, increased rates are likely to be reflected in higher end user prices. To me this is inevitable and desirable, since it means that significant new income streams will go to the musicians and small labels on whom Hearts of Space largely depends. By "significant" I mean capable of sustaining continued activity by those artists and labels. A SoundExchange check that won't buy a pizza dinner for two is not going to cut it.

What about the "innovation" argument? Clearly, today's low rates and liberal policies have supported this. If you look across the range of webcasting services online today, you'll find an array of free and paid services supported by hosting providers ranging from ordinary ISPs to specialty webcast providers like Live365.com, MySpace and YouTube. You'll find innovations in community features, recommendation engines, and customization options.  Would these features exist if royalties were higher?  I think they would have taken longer to become commonplace, but would still have been developed because they serve real needs for end users.

The majority of these webcast services raise subsistence-level income from placement of text ads by Google or banner ads from various advertising networks. A few of the more established and popular services like SomaFM also raise money via the public broadcasting model of direct appeals for user donations. And public broadcasters have extended their existing business model and fundraising techniques to the web as well.

These two business models are better than nothing, but with usage now spread out across tens of thousands of webcasters, it's obvious that only the most popular ones at the steep head of the Long Tail will be able to raise enough money to survive this way. Ultimately webcasters will have to consider other ways of monetizing their services.

This is the sticking point and the heart of the challenge: to add enough value to a free service to build substantial traffic and thus appeal to advertisers, OR, to charge users access fees they consider fair and are willing to pay.

The sooner webcasters absorb this realization and start working to achieve it, the sooner reasonable amounts of money will start flowing to the musicians, labels, and other rights holders who deserve it. At worst, it will force the more marginal web players to get serious...or get out.

I realize that sounds hard, but if you're a musician or a niche label trying to make a living, it's a very real issue. And as the old product-based music business morphs into a licensing-based business over the next several years, it will increasingly be the case for everyone who makes recordings.

:: SH

A response to Stephen

Stephen ??'s comments on my post are substantial and I take them seriously. This may be too late to advance the discussion, but for the record I'll try to clarify any misinterpretations he may have about my position and argue a few of his assertions.

His broad assumption that "those who resist new technology, and the new options it provides are always motivated by self interest" is hard to disagree with. My point was that public broadcasters are not really resisting new technology, had been relatively progressive about adopting streaming, and are moving into podcasting at a rate limited only by staff, budget and rights limitations -- while trying to digest the realization that most of the old structural output limitations under which they have operated since their inception have been demolished by the net.

Conspiracies

Stephen testifies to first hand knowledge of some kind of high level conspiracy by commercial media companies to erect defenses against Internet broadcasting, and he speculates that the same is true by "those who control public broadcasting." I'm here to tell you from my own direct experience over the last 6 or 7 years, that this was absolutely not the case.

If anything, the power players in public broadcasting-- PBS, NPR and the major syndicators PRI (Public Radio International) and APM (American Public Media) did not oppose, but were simply relatively slow to adopt new technologies. Again, due to staff, budget and rights limitations, but also to not having a habit of being highly pro-active about adopting new technologies, since the last tech revolution in public broadcasting was in the 1980s. Public radio did take a early lead in satellite distribution and HD radio, but these initiatives are very few and far between.

The core of the problem is that it took over 25 years to build out the current "root and branch" distribution system for public radio and television, largely with public money. There is little of that money on the horizon today and the CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) the government agency charged with this task, has been politicized and largely neutered by the Republican administration in a deliberate, politically motivated violation of its charter. Major CPB support for new technologies has been endlessly discussed but has not been forthcoming except in minor cases.

The members of the IMA and the PSP group I described, in addition to individual webmasters and a few progressive stations like KCRW, were the ones agitating to move faster and actually doing things, in Christiansen's terms a "disruption from within."

The underlying reason for this is the difference between the purely financial orientation of commercial broadcasters and the service orientation of public broadcasters. New distribution technologies allow them to better achieve their mission of public service. It's another discussion, but in my view the biggest failure of public broadcasters so far has been to imagine and implement a business model that would benefit from the use of these new technologies.

More Conspiracies

Stephen's second major point is more serious. He implicates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and extension of patent law in a "self-evident" push to shore up the incumbent big media players and slow the rate of change that the Internet is bringing and to exert gating control over the ultimate IP-based media distribution system. With this I can agree in part. The point of the DMCA was to protect the existing music industry business model and wring the maximum profits out of its intellectual property. Slowing down the net was a secondary motive at best. Even the most conservative media executives realize that basic technology improvements cannot be stopped. As Stephen says, this is about getting the maximum money out of those copyrights and positioning the rights holders favorably for the new digital world.

I know for a fact that public broadcast institutions had nothing to do with the lobbying efforts that produced these laws. NPR did lobby against low power FM, which it saw as a direct threat to its distribution network. Again, the reasons for this are due to the fundamentally different missions of public service vs. commercial broadcasters.

His next point is that the "pressure to change the Media World" by the Net and the arrival of Long Tail commerce via Amazon somehow added to the conspiracy of the "media moguls" to somehow disempower the potential of the net. I can't find the reference he makes to big bricks and mortar brands in my post. I made and meant no such implication.

The Long Tail phenomenon is clearly a creature of the net, because providing it requires the combination of live database, search and recommendation technologies needed to overcome the capacity limitations and carrying costs of placing physical goods in retail stores, while incrementally advancing the problem of user orientation to unprecedented choice.

The question ownership of gateways -- whether achieved by formats, platforms, DRM, or network supplied set-top boxes -- I see as an issue that in the absence of the liberal values and regulatory regime that created public broadcasting in the first place -- the market will wind up deciding by default.

If Big Media succeeds in packaging and pricing attactive bundles of valued programming and offers them to the public with easy to use interfaces, in my (reluctant) view they will have earned their market dominance fair and square. It may not be optimal and it won't satisfy every conceivable need, but would be a net advance over the current system.

In any case, the real public [Libertarian] issue is whether the politics attending the transition will foreclose on alternative media, formats, production and online distribution. So far, it's hard to argue that this has been the case. In general there is far more media being produced and distributed than ever before. Failure to provide timely alternatives, DRM and copyright restrictions have provoked the growth of the underground networks, and the rise of "podsafe" music and podcasting represent the creation of a separate and parallel music and broadcasting business based on the new technologies. There is absolutely nothing "the moguls" can do to stop this.

It seems to me that the EFF the ACLU and the technology community have been reasonably, if not completely, effective in opposing the most egregious losses to individual freedom and established consumer behavior, either by raising enough voices to get the big media servants in congress to back off, or by simply inventing and releasing new distribution technologies into the wild and letting them propagate virally. I guess we can take some perverse pleasure in the fact that a few smart programmers can still come up with a new distribution protocol that scares the smirk off the faces of the incumbents. (The question of whether the Supreme Court was correct in drawing a line at intent in the Grokster decision is another discussion.)

RSS and podcasting are legal examples of this; BitTorrent and the long list of preceding P2P protocols (leaving aside their role in abuse of copyright) make me think that fears of Total Control by "the Moguls" are overblown. I agree that preventing further losses, regaining lost ground and remaining vigilant are all necessary going forward.

Quality again

Stephen criticizes my call to maintain quality standards by saying that if this strategy works, it will be co-opted by "the Moguls" and used to further extend their hegemony. Um, that's ridiculous.

Again, it smacks of conspiracy thinking, while in fact the organized lobbies for the media industry -- the RIAA, the MPAA, the NCTA and the NAB, all have well known public policy positions which frequently conflict with each other. Though they do not operate as unit, they are often at odds with the technology community and its lobbyists, which makes it look like the work of a cartel when it's really a series of separate value collisions. In general I don't like the effects of media industry lobbying any more than Stephen does, but that's our current system. If you agree, contribute to the EFF and the ACLU and vote for more enlightened congresspersons, write letters, etc.

Second, Stephen seems to misunderstand my most basic point: quality is a Platonic ideal, a non-quantifiable virtue that cuts across all activities, politics and media. Theoretically quality will out; but that does not guarantee public support. And in fact in the U.S. we had to create an alternative, partly government-supported system for distribution and broadcasting of quality public service media with high levels of intellectual, artistic and cultural content. And let's not forget that the current public broadcasting system had to fight for many years, and is still fighting, to retain even the small amount of tax support it receives.

This indicts our culture, which is skewed toward commercial competition -- not our distribution system or its underlying technologies.

Stephen is obviously worried about the big media moguls, but recall that Steve Gillmor's outreach was from the technology community to the small public service part of the incumbent media, not the giant commercial sector, who would have ignored him completely. Trust me, Steve does not like to be ignored.

My experience with the non-commercial system has shown its moguls to be less than nefarious. Mostly they are conservative and slow on the draw because of the multiple pressures from stations, funders and the public under which they are obliged to operate.

All of which leads me to conclude that below all the speculations about technology, adoption curves and professionalism more or less -- lies a thorny wall of cultural barriers.

:: Stephen Hill

A response of sorts

[This appeared as a comment on ZDNet to my guest post "Do Public Broadcasters Get It?" on Steve Gillmor's blog.]

A response of sorts

First of all, well done Steve G. for posting an alternative view.

As far as Stephen’s comments are concerned – I'll be doing my best to stick to the main question, but no promises.

First, let me say that I have no direct broadcasting industry experience other than supporting broadcasters and news organizations as a supplier, and as a technical consultant with a remit to advise on future technology and support services for nearly 15 years. So this is an outsider-looking-in perspective.

All broadcasting, and all media, are operating on old business models. As Stephen linked to Clay Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma (via Doug Kaye's Weblog), let’s start there. This is, after all, about what current innovation will do, what it might change and, to a large extent, public broadcasting is caught up in a bigger wave.

In my experience (always a dangerous qualification to quote) when it comes to innovation there are two types of people:
- Those who resist it;
- Those who embrace it, and carry it forward.

Those who resist new technology, and the new options it provides, are always motivated by self-interest – a complex set of drivers indeed, and many such interests are not obvious. Modern media magnates are nothing if not informed… They have, therefore, been building defenses against new technology – and plotting the downfall of ’audience stealing’ (as they see it) public broadcasting for at least a decade. Even though they could not have foreseen podcasting and Google, they could (and did, this part is an eye-witness report) foresee that the Net and PCs were going to remove the barriers of entry to their business. If you think these plans are simple, benign, and transparent, then you have a lot to learn about the high-voltage power-broking that such people indulge in – on a daily basis. To believe that those who control public broadcasting do not enjoy similar purpose would be naive in the extreme. Lord Birt, in the speech Stephen cites, recalled the early BBC monopoly in Britain in glowing, even sentimental, terms…

Stephen berates Steve G. for (as Stephen put it) “ [a] …Gillmor Daily show called ‘Broadband on the Run,’ where Steve ambushed Doc Searls … into a rambling, off-the-cuff discussion of radio, podcasting and music copyrights — a very complicated subject.”

Sorry Stephen, but I’m with Steve G. on this point. The All-Media-Change wave is both implicitly and explicitly rooted in the socio-political soil. In my book, by the way, socio-political includes economic. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Big Media interest in the new idea of patenting software and business processes are specifically designed by media moguls to (at least) slow down the Net and either:
- Preserve my media power and profits until I retire; or
- At least give us a breathing space until we can work out how to leverage best advantage from the change.
I regard these things to be self-evident.

So my advice here is: To redefine public service broadcasting to best advantage in the Net age don’t over-simplify. The whole broadcasting system, the whole media system, needs a root and branch review. By allowing the media moguls to talk the ’We can’t eat the whole Elephant’ talk you also allow them to fragment and compartmentalize the arguments – a.k.a. divide and rule.

As far as public broadcasting and the democratization of media through cheap tools and the Net is concerned, this is a part of the pressure to change the Media World. The Moguls have not been side-stepped by this feature of the Net – they saw this coming. But the pressure is still on because it is taking them much longer than expected to come up with Net gateways (e.g. the set-top boxes of the kind Lord Birt talked about in the link Stephen provided) that re-apply lost power to obfuscate choice through filters (family-friendly, work-friendly, library control, charging schemes, etc.), skewed search (for commercial returns), and promotion (wow, cross-media conglomerates might actually be made to work!). Or, to put that another way, to regain their power to set the political agenda – even to increase that power…

The Moguls saw this coming because of the success of Amazon. Stephen implies that he regards Amazon as a kind of anomaly – after all, he points out, most of the big names in on-line retail were big first in bricks and mortar. The Moguls learned from this the value of brands, to be sure, but they also saw that Amazon made all those big retail brands pull their socks up pretty sharp-ish.

They also saw the Long Tail in action at Amazon. This term; Long Tail, is fairly new but, actually, the concept has been around on the Net for a very long time. I still tend to think of it as the Super-Catalogue. No matter that you are the only person in the last ten years to order a Bryan Adams CD for $5 (hey, it’s a classic, its worth at least that, no?). If we’ve got one in stock, it’s yours, and maintaining that page on my Net catalogue for ten years cost me 50 cents (okay I’m exaggerating).

Stephen breaks down this angle in terms of quality. Public Broadcasters, he maintains, have a role in the future as the defenders of quality for public broadcasting. My advice on this aspect of the (heated?) Gang discussion is: Be careful what you wish for…

The Moguls are chameleons, if they see an argument working for public broadcasting – they will borrow it. Defense of quality broadcasting plays into their hands – in the US they will own all the gateways. How will they pay for those gateways? There are more currencies than simple greenbacks – particularly where politics is involved.

Which brings me to Stephen’s comment: “I realized that my colleagues and I value deeply the traditions of quality in media, which have produced not only high performance standards, but are founded on a copyright and IP regime that many in the tech community find incomprehensible, onerous and restrictive.”

I found this comment extremely (yes really) disingenuous, given Stephen’s obvious knowledge of the leading edge of media re-invention (RSS, Podcasting, Nanocasting, the INA, and so forth).

Before I really let rip (sorry, but this subject gets right under my skin) I must acknowledge Stephen’s additional comment: “[I am] …not a defender of everything about existing copyright laws — in fact I believe they are badly in need of a substantial overhaul for the network era…”

Oh-kay… But why deny the link then? The link between new technology and new regulatory regimes is surely hard-wired? I have to say I am with Steve G. on this point too. If I had been in his shoes I would also have refused to countenance a separate discussion on copyright. As I mentioned above, dividing the subject into bite-sized pieces is not in the best interests of ensuring a role for public broadcasting in the Net era, or for open public access to the future Net. Take it from me, Steve G. is doing you a whopping big favour Stephen.

If there is a role for Public Broadcasting in the future what does it look like? Stephen does not satisfactorily describe a vision – though he frequently asserts that it has a future based on quality of output.

There are two things wrong with Stephen’s description:
- Assumptions; and
- Hidebound belief in the public ethic.
When I look at these factors I see someone digging in their heels. Stephen appears to be denying that the technology changes the overall picture… He is, in fact, in tune with the Moguls.

The assumptions he makes are quite broad.

The listening/viewing/reading/participating audience in Stephen’s World is static:
"At the end of the day, the big difference between not-for-profit podcasting and commercial Nanocasting (i.e. commercialized long tail Internet audio programming) will be quality and professionalism."

So too are the technology, and the content makers:
“ …we all realize there is a new audience eager to be served who may care a lot less about these values, but it doesn't change the fact that the bulk of the educated audience does, and will continue to do so.”

The incumbents see no change:
“ …especially when skilled incumbents with resources, like NPR, KCRW, KQED, WNYC and WGBH — are showing that they are agile enough to colonize the new distribution paradigms…”

But to really hear Stephen going out on a limb, hear him talk about why public broadcasters have an edge in New Media:
“This is the downside of reducing barriers to entry. Once they get going, the pros can do it easier, faster, and generally better than all but the most organized and talented amateurs. They have greater experience and resources when it comes to creating quality programming.”

Resources, as we have already seen, are getting cheaper, easier to use, easier to access, and are approaching ubiquity – already. As for experience; give me a break! I am a big defender of experience – I trade on mine daily to put bread on my table. Even so, I have to be on my metal – others are learning what I know every day.

Having said all that, I’m ready to listen to more substantial arguments for public broadcasting. Unfortunately I have yet to hear any. My main concern today is that a slow transition gives the Moguls the opportunity to (ab?)use Nanocasting to undermine public service broadcasting to the point where their political voices are devalued – even discounted – in the push for a new regime that democratizes media production, distribution, and consumption. Nature abhors a vacuum – in step the Moguls with a sop: We’ll provide a public service channel through our gateways… (okay, they probably won’t be that obvious but, I’m making a point here). When I see people like Stephen falling into this trap, I know I have to step into the breach – and I see the same response in Steve G’s. actions.

The tech community has to take up the baton now.

So do I agree with Stephen on anything? Yes. “…the mass of educated listeners and viewers will be lagging considerably behind the most creative and motivated early adopters of the online and tech community in joining this party.” Dead right. It will take half a generation for New Media to really upset the apple cart (fifteen years, twenty years – pick a number…) because, at the end of the day, it requires that the great unwashed get the big picture (pun intended).

Said cart is already leaning at an obviously awkward angle – today’s IP regime “that many in the tech community find incomprehensible, onerous and restrictive” is doing what it was designed to do and is throwing obstacles into New Tech’s path (and Stephen wonders why the tech community find this onerous…?).

In the end, I believe, New Tech will have the last laugh. If we work on it now, the people will see – they will follow. They will swear too.

In the meantime – Do Public Broadcasters Get It? If Stephen is their advocate – no.

Posted by: Stephen Posted on: 10/28/05

Do Public Broadcasters Get It?

During the doldrums of mid-August Steve Gillmor dropped a semi-cryptic post on his ZDNet blog to the effect that he'd been working with a group of people from public broadcasting as part of something called the Public Service Publisher Initiative (PSP) and had received a private email from one them that had prompted him to drop out of the group.

I'm the guy who wrote that email. I've been in public radio since the early 1970s and have produced a nationally syndicated ambient music program called Hearts of Space since 1983. From 1984 to 2001 we also operated an independent record label. I take a more than passing interest in new technologies that help me reach my audience and have been a new media activist in the public radio system since the early days of streaming. We currently run a paid streaming service based on our program archive and are developing a comprehensive Internet music service around our niche repertoire.

Steve went on to suggest that the issues raised in our private exchange be taken into the open so they can be hashed out between broadcasters and producers from the incumbent public service media and members of the tech and podcasting community. I readily agreed, and after some unrelated delays we further discussed the situation in a conference call in early September between Steve, me, Dennis Haarsager of Northwest Public Radio and TV, and Rich Winefield and Tim Olson of San Francisco public station KQED. After more unrelated delays, here it is.

What's the beef?

The original issue that provoked this beef is not that important. I criticized a Gillmor Daily podcast Steve did with Doc Searls ("Broadband on the Run"); he reacted. Why should you care? Because of the larger issues behind it, which I hope this will illuminate.

To slightly oversimplify the fairly intense discussion that followed, there were two issues. One had to do with quality, in particular the importance of production quality of podcasts compared to professionally produced media; the other with larger questions of the relationship between citizen-produced Internet media and professional, especially non-commercial, public service media. Steve was so frustrated by what he was hearing from me that he unleashed the ultimate early-adopter missile: You guys just don't get it.

Respectfully to everyone involved, I think we get it just fine. I believe what we are really seeing is an understandable collision between values, which I try to explain here. You may disagree, in which case I hope you'll let me know. I'm doing my part to make it a public conversation.

Back Story

The events that led to Steve joining the PSP group and ultimately quitting it began at a conference in San Francisco in January 2005 produced by an organization called the IMA or Integrated Media Association. If netizens have never heard of it, that's because it was created by and functions entirely within the public radio and television community. It has an open website at http://www.integratedmedia.org.

IMA was chartered to represent the technically and conceptually progressive Internet wing of U.S. public media, and it played an important role in the gestation of the PSP Initiative. But from the moment the core of the activist PSP group hooked up with Steve at the IMA Conference, things started to develop in ways we had not forseen.

One the primary functions of the IMA is to build a case for a broad improvement in public radio/TV web services, while the PSP group was focused solely on Internet program distribution. IMA had to move more slowly than we felt necessary, and ultimately the PSP Group chose to operate on its own, outside of the IMA. (The stations in the PSP remain IMA members.) After a few months we discovered and quickly formed a working alliance with Mike Homer and his colleagues at the Open Media Network, who were over a year ahead of us in developing an online public media distribution service based on the Kontiki P2P engine.

I don't think you can fully appreciate the difference between the brutal techno-Darwinism-on-crystal-meth reality of the Internet space and the slow, polite, idealistic, chronically underfunded world of U.S. public broadcasting unless you've worked in both environments — the difference is just too great. If you work in IT, the fact that you may support a local public broadcaster and listen to All Things Considered or Morning Edition or will just confuse you.

Steve apparently put in some time at non-commercial WBAI-FM in New York in the 1970s, and I think that Doc Searls and Doug Kaye each have some experience in commercial broadcasting. All of them have abundant published perspectives on the issues of broadcasting and podcasting. From my vantage point, these are effectively two different worlds, with a potential wormhole connecting them along technical and idealistic/value lines that intersect somewhere in the middle of the Long Tail. Understanding that is what the rest of this piece is about.

Steve was far more aware of this potential connection than any of us from public broadcasting when we met. RSS had barely made a beachhead among public broadcasters and only a handful of the most technically astute public broadcast webmasters were aware of podcasting, even fewer of its disruptive potential.

Steve administered aggressive doses of "tough love" in the first few months of meeting with us and forced everyone to get up to speed on the big changes implicated by RSS, podcasting and citizen media, tagging, search, Web 2.0 applications and other trends from the leading edge of Internet evolution. At the time (early 2005) there were only a few scattered experiments with podcasting from the larger public stations, despite the fact that they were sitting on sizeable unused archives of legally downloadable material and ongoing series.

This was slightly surprising because public broadcasters had been much quicker to adopt streaming than commercial broadcasters. And public broadcasters had built their business on the niche content, small audiences and donation business models that mark the first generation of podcasting. A startup called Public Interactive was created in 1999 by a group of the largest public radio stations and one of the national program distributors to provide Internet services to station web sites. Part of their service was hosting continuous streams as extensions of station air signals. By 2005, all but the smallest public stations were streaming their air channel, and the larger ones were offering some on-demand content on their web sites.

Streaming was seen by public broadcasters as radio by other means, a way to fill in gaps in local coverage, reach ex-patriate listeners, and perhaps get a few out-of-town subscriptions. Static, non-interactive streams were like radio without the limitations of transmitters, while on-demand streaming offered a whole new level of service. And all of it was completely outside the regulatory domain of the FCC, which was almost too much freedom to handle for people who'd been looking over their shoulders every day for 50 years.

Time + Quality = Service

The core of the long tail theory is that the Internet finally makes serving niche audiences efficient and economically viable, especially when aggregated. I take it as axiomatic that all niche audiences have been chronically underserved in the past, and will be better served in the future by both participatory and professional digital sources online.

But these niche audiences do not exist in a vacuum. The same people are also members of mass and medium size audiences. Consciously or not, their reference standard for radio and television content has been created by years of exposure to high production value commercial media and high quality non-commercial broadcast media in series like Nova, Frontline and All Things Considered, as well as Ken Burns specials and other documentaries. With their BBC DNA, these programs define a working standard.

Steve Gillmor has argued that "truth," relevance, and perhaps creativity are the key values in podcasting, and that technical production quality doesn't matter in long tail media. I disagree.

It's an arguable point for users in the heady days of realizing you are finally being programmed to, but in the medium to long run I don't believe that even niche audiences will sit still for extended doses of amateurish, inconsistent, self-indugent programming, no matter how vertically compelling the subject matter. For niche programs to attract new audiences and hold them over time, they will have to bear at least reasonable comparison to the production standards of mainstream media.

This is particularly true for audio, which cannot easily be scanned and almost always takes 1:1 hard time to consume. (There's a new feature on the iPod that allows you to listen to Audiobooks at faster than normal speed, so perhaps 2:1 time compression for speech will be normal someday.) Unfortunately for entry level podcasters and notwithstanding the existence of amazing cheap tools for the job, working with audio and learning how to create a consistently listenable program takes several years to master.

This is just my opinion. For a more objective comparison, consider independent music, where the technical enabling revolution in home studios and cheap publishing on cassette, CD and now online — has been going on for about 35 years. Today, production quality standards of indie music approach those of major label releases except for the most elaborate mainstream material. Once the 'shock of service' wears off for niche listeners, I believe it will apply to podcasters as well.

That doesn't mean that there isn't room for all kinds of innovative programming and more improvised, casual, creative, offbeat approaches to niche and public service content. Or that talk programmers, interviewers and documentarians can't develop more individual styles and voices.

But I think it implies that in the medium and long run, listeners will expect a dependable level of quality and consistency of video, sound, performance, information and entertainment value in their niche media. And if grassroots podcasting and webcasting are going to be monetized via subscription, PPV or advertising models as Podshow and others are proposing — then listeners, viewers and advertisers will all want a return on their time and money investments.

An organization called the INA or International Nanocasting Alliance, has been formed around precisely these issues, to draw a line between the casual/hobbyist and professional levels of long tail media. I think they have a point.

Business models

In the U.S., public service media pioneered the model of user supported broadcasting. It's still around, providing an average of over 40% of the funding of public radio and television. This model is now being rolled over to long tail web sites, blogs and vertical services via tip jars, PayPal donations and other attempts to secure voluntary support from users. Doug Kaye has instituted this method on IT Conversations, along with the use of volunteer producers (another public radio tradition) to edit and prepare the small waterfall of material he's releasing each week. It's often compared to the open source software development system, but there are also significant differences.

Public radio and television have over 50 years experience with this model. It was born of necessity at KPFA in Berkeley in the 1950s, and was ahead of its time in recognizing the kind of direct producer/audience interaction and shared sense of purpose that the Internet now delivers in spades.

But it also has serious disadvantages: even after 40 years of increasingly organized, skillful appeals for voluntary support, only about 10% of the audience actually pays. How podcasters expect a model that has barely worked in the context of full time professional broadcasting by licensed local monopolies to work for even smaller audiences is beyond me. Only a small fraction of programs and services will ever be able to sustain themselves this way. And if they do, most of them will pay a significant price by having to operate on a subsistence economy.

I also reject the idea that incumbent public broadcasters are doomed by their overhead and infrastructure. I think Doug Kaye's post about On the Media and WGBH in Blogarithms misunderstands both the issue and the context.

It's not about big staffs and deluxe studios; WGBH and the major incumbent producers are exceptions. They all have multiple sources of funding that have been developed over many years. Their production facilities are largely paid for. They can, and are, adapting rapidly to new technologies. They can leverage their infrastructure and produce shows that meet their traditional standards of quality for sound, writing, production and on-air talent, while simultaneously spinning off new shows that take advantage of new distribution and promotion opportunities. As has been said of the (far more conservative) Catholic church — don't underestimate their ability to adapt.

But for the typical public radio station, voluntary support fails to provide a sustaining level of funding for their minimal staffs and physical plants, which results in a constant need for additional grant support, increasing amounts of soft advertising in the form of "expanded underwriting" spots (the commercializing of non-commerical broadcasting), and at its worst — the descending spiral of pandering to audiences exemplified by the endless lifestyle fundraising specials that have sucked much of the integrity and quality out of public television along with the dollars of its aging audience — a pathetic subversion of the original mission.

Values

Where the public service media incumbents and the leading edge of the podosphere can meet is on the level of values: truth, integrity, transparency, accuracy, relevance, compassion…add yours.

I'm probably not the best person to articulate these values and standards on behalf of the public service media incumbents — but I will defend them. For various reasons, my 30 years in the public radio system have been spent mostly as a maverick and outsider. When I couldn't make a decent living in public radio as a syndicator, I started related businesses, a strategy that worked financially but further distanced me from the conservative public service purists who still dominate the network.

To get a fuller sense of the value system that underlies the incumbent public service media system, the best place to look is the BBC, which is largely responsible for defining them. BBC researcher Alan Blumlein invented stereo in the 1930's. In addition to audio technology, the company also established all the major genres and standards for program content.

A fascinating history and summation of the BBC experience was given in August 2005 by JOHN BIRT, former Director General of the BBC, in a speech at the Edinburgh International Conference. His account is all the more cogent and timely because he is fully aware of the changes that will be wrought by digital distribution and the net, which he mentions at the end. (Fair warning — it's long.)

http://www.mgeitf.co.uk/MGEITF/pressoffice/news.asp?view=4&id=268&style=mgeitf&year=2005

More about the beef

My beef with Steve Gillmor was due to a collision between the values of conceptual quality, intellectual rigor and craft that form the foundation and working standard of the incumbent public media system, and the values of grassroots empowerment, free toolsets, open distribution, personal expression and improvisation that characterize the blog and podcasting world.

More specifically, I was objecting to the Gillmor Daily show called "Broadband on the Run," where Steve ambushed Doc Searls in transit to a conference and dragged him into a rambling, off-the-cuff discussion of radio, podcasting and music copyrights — a very complicated subject.

After 22 years of radio syndication and 17 years operating an indie record label, I know a lot more about this stuff than I'd like, and I found the discussion scattered, inaccurate in many places, misleading and unbalanced. 80 minutes of underwater Skype + cell phone audio didn't help my mood either. And Steve's willful demonstration of copyright infringment by playing a Beatles track in the background on this show struck me as adolescent, proved nothing important, and changed nothing about the challenges we face as far as I'm concerned.

I should be clear that I'm a deep admirer of Steve's insights into the tech space and Doc's work since Cluetrain. I normally agree with Doc's point of view on almost every issue. He is one of the wisest and best informed commentators in this area, and he obviously knows what he's talking about. I am also a huge fan of the Gillmor Gang podcasts, most of which are reference quality as a source of leading edge information content about technology, media and the Internet.

But in the case of this particular Gillmor Daily show, Steve — who often has an underlying techno-political, rather than journalistic, agenda — was bent on provoking Doc into a polarized argument that I thought mostly misleading. Doc, disappointingly to me, was playing the role of the oppressed Libertarian, beset by draconian copyright regimes that prevent free use and reuse of existing music and video. No attempt whatsoever was made to explain any of the reasons why these practices came to exist and are being so vigorously defended by the incumbents. Nor was there any attempt to discuss how these issues might be reconciled going forward. I'd put up with it in a bar after a conference, but not on a program that purports to be informative about media and technology.

So, I complained — "viscerally" (Steve's word) — but I did it privately because I know that for all his bluster and occasionally slanderous public persona, Steve is very sensitive to criticism of his own work. I later apologized to Steve for the tone of the note, but not about my strong feelings for the subject or my criticism of the program itself.

Examining those feelings, I realized that my colleagues and I value deeply the traditions of quality in media, which have produced not only high performance standards, but are founded on a copyright and IP regime that many in the tech community find incomprehensible, onerous and restrictive.

I am certainly not a defender of everything about existing copyright laws — in fact I believe they are badly in need of a substantial overhaul for the network era — but it still pains me to hear otherwise intelligent technology advocates openly gloating over the loss of control over copyright that has been created by new distribution technologies, or inversely, whining about the restrictions to which they are subject. It's particularly annoying when those doing the talking are not making a living from their creative output, but from tangential or unrelated jobs. They talk, but few (Cory Doctorow is a conspicuous exception) have actually walked the walk.

I consider the relationships between broadcasting, publishing, copyright and business models to be the single most important set of issues facing everyone who is serious about developing more open digital media. Chris Nolan was absolutely right in a recent Gillmor Gang show ("Municipal Gang") to pull Steve up short and call for separate program to discuss the copyright issue when it came up in the context of a discussion of telecom carrier politics.

I'm not an expert on this area, but I did participate in a vigorous online discussion of all these issues for several years on the "Pho" email list — an exhaustive, intelligent, mostly civilized conversation between copyright activists, academics, music business executives and lawyers, working musicians, and technologists. I suggested to Steve that there were at least a dozen people on Pho, particularly cofounder Jim Griffin, who would be more than qualified to do this discussion the right way, and I would be happy to make the necessary introductions. Steve chose not to pursue it and that's where the matter stands. I'd still like to hear that copyright show on Gillmor Gang.

Conclusions

"At the end of the day, the big difference between not-for-profit podcasting and commercial Nanocasting (i.e. commercialized long tail Internet audio programming) will be quality and professionalism." — INA (International Nanocasting Alliance)

I believe that time will bear out this statement. It's about meeting a standard of quality which a group of smart and dedicated people have developed over the course of the last 75 years, a standard which an educated audience, at least, has come to expect. It's already happening with blogs, where there are almost no production cost issues and editing is easy and fast compared to audio and video.

I also believe, as Steve Gillmor has said on several occasions, that the worlds of incumbent public service media and at least some types of podcasting have much more in common than at variance with each other. But just as pubcasters have a lot to learn from the libertarian values, open standards, transparency and interactive ethics of the best in the online community, so do podcasters and vlogcasters have a lot to learn from us. We have a developed set of standards for media presentation and journalism that are eminently worth preserving and protecting.

As Jeremy Allaire points out about new media activists, "it's important that we don't believe our own bull."

Despite superior distribution technology and the best efforts of evangelists and provocateurs like Steve Gillmor — whose posts often end with some brilliant Rube Goldberg lash-up of what he calls the "burgeoning software-as-a-service architecture in waiting" — it's obvious to me, to other commentators (including members of the Gillmor Gang) and to most public broadcasters, that the mass of educated listeners and viewers will be lagging considerably behind the most creative and motivated early adopters of the online and tech community in joining this party. Of course we all realize there is a new audience eager to be served who may care a lot less about these values, but it doesn't change the fact that the bulk of the educated audience does, and will continue to do so.

So I think that despite the occasionally grandiose claims of Steve, Doug Kaye, the very cogent Ron Bloom of Podshow and other podcasting promoters, I agree with Doc Searls' position in "Broadband on the Run" that this is going to be a case of "and logic," not "or logic" — that new media will not fully displace older media, but take years to dilute its audience to one degree or another — especially when skilled incumbents with resources, like NPR, KCRW, KQED, WNYC and WGBH — are showing that they are agile enough to colonize the new distribution paradigms along with the early settlers.

This is the downside of reducing barriers to entry. Once they get going, the pros can do it easier, faster, and generally better than all but the most organized and talented amateurs. They have greater experience and resources when it comes to creating quality programming – particularly ongoing series. This accounts for the fact that professionally produced shows now account for over 90% of the iTunes top 100 podcast list, and the smutty charms of early podcast stars like Dawn and Drew are now off the list.

Every reasonable commentator predicts that we are heading toward a multi-layered media landscape where everything coexists at a new level of complexity. In my opinion there is too much audience inertia to overcome and too much new behavior to breed for this to happen as quickly as Steve Gillmor seems to think, at least for mainstream audiences. Early adopters are obviously the exception. The oracular Andrew Odlyzko's 10 year diffusion estimates from the inception of new media innovations or distribution technology to dominance are probably still a good bet. And we'll need a hundred more Steve Jobs to make it all slick and easy enough to work for average users.

Even in the today's challenging media environment, conventional public radio broadcasters deliver over 12 BILLION listener hours every year in the U.S. — several orders of magnitude more than podcasters will achieve for years to come. And when the aggregate of Internet delivered programming finally reaches this level of penetration, the incumbent program brands and production expertise of public broadcasters will benefit disproportionally, as will brands and personalities from commercial radio who will have established their franchises online by leveraging their on-air resources to promote their online services during the transition. They can also aggregate the best of the new players into their own services.

2005 will be remembered as the year the lid finally came off media distribution. Personally, I look forward to discovering the unique talents that will emerge from podcasting. I just want to see the standards kept up. Do ya feel me, Brother Gillmor?

:: Stephen Hill

stephen.hill@hos.com

http://www.hos.com