stephen hill : spatial relations

Apple buys lala.com; also, reinvents digital media

This was cool enough to get me blogging again. Bob Lefsetz on the Lala sale here, FYI.
My take on some of the implications:

LALA

I've been using lala.com for almost a year, and incredibly impressed with the sophistication of the service and the slick operation of the website. In the absence of a U.S. version of Spotify, Lala had the most advanced music streaming site, with, believe it or not, more functionality than the current iTunes desktop app.

Now imagine subscribing to the iTunes store (in addition to buying downloads) and being able to stream anything they offer wherever you are, in addition to having access to your entire existing iTunes collection on any browser or compatible mobile platform.

Apple could become your primary media vendor for music, video, movies, podcasts, and oh yeah...apps, games, multimedia periodicals (eBooks?) — one-stop shopping for all but the most rarified niches and foreign media.

The point about Spotify being more advanced I believe is because they use a P2P distribution engine plus conventional unicast streaming. In addition to its own data centers, Apple currently uses a conventional large CDN (Akamai) for some of its file, image and stream serving.

REINVENTING DIGITAL MEDIA: iTUNES LP & iTUNES EXTRAS

This doesn't sound like a big deal yet, give it a few years and a couple of Steve Jobs product launches and you might be hearing about it. Without much publicity, Apple just released two new digital multimedia interactive 'container' formats with support for UI features and navigation: iTunes LP — for digital music albums — can include any mix of text, music, video, images, interviews, links, etc.

• iTunes LP— for digital music albums — can include any mix of text, music, video, images, interviews, links, etc.
• iTunes EXTRAS — for digital movie/film/video "albums" — can include any number of value-added features: director's comments, additional scenes, review text, expanded credits, stills, etc.

Both of them will run in a Webkit compatible browser like Safari or Google Chrome, and supporting mobile devices like iPhone, Nokia/Symbian, Google/Android, and Palm Pre. 

iTunes (the app) is in fact a Webkit browser, so the kind of sophisticated graphics and functionality you have with the iTunes app gives you some example of what you can do with these new formats.

Webkit was open-sourced by Apple in 2005.
See the Wikipedia article on Webkit for the history.
Wikipedia page on iTunes LP
Developer Review of iTunes LP

I just met an Apple in-house developer who worked on these products and was told that (at least to start) Apple will be the final assembly point for iTunes LP and Extras releases; they are building an online input platform for content creators to upload the components, which will then be assembled, reviewed by Apple to insure compliance to format standards, copyright, and perhaps? some moral standards to exclude porn, and released via the iTunes Store.

This is sure to cause another Apple übercontrol shitstorm in the blogosphere when it gets around. It will also insure a now typical Apple-quality user experience and product rollout. So you give and you get.

Personally...the world may be going back to singles, but I've been waiting almost 10 years for a practical digital album format. So I'm happy to work with it, especially if it can be streamed on the HOS music service.

:: SH

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

VOX and The New Gravity

As the web insinuates itself into our daily lives, we are participating in an transition that will utterly change our notion of media, along with the media types and institutions they've created over the last 600 years.  VOX, the latest offering from pioneering blog software company Six Apart, makes this process visible and public, but it has been going on for several years.

Modern "media" began with the invention of printing in the 15th century, and was extended to become a mass medium in the 19th century as improvements in transportation created the possibility of communicating with large audiences in short periods of time. The "periodical" was print publishing on a schedule plus mailing as the delivery technology; the blockbuster book was publishing plus modern marketing, backed by warehouses, trucks, and an organized distribution system.

When radio was commercialized in the 1920s, audio communication became instant and regional, defined by the range of the transmitter. As radio stations joined into networks, national communication became possible, both via "bicycled" recordings and real-time interconnections.

Television arrived in the 1950's when the radio networks were mature, and extended the network/local affiliate model, eventually replacing radio's former dominance over mass entertainment. The drive for bandwidth was on; VHF begat UHF and channels multiplied. Cable solved both the fringe reception problem and the bandwidth problem because broadcasting used very limited electromagnetic spectrum and could only support a small number of simultaneous signals.

Cable allowed new channels to bloom, but was itself limited to tens, then a few hundred channels. However it did begin a process of "leveling" other media types, when cable services began to carry local radio stations and background music services during the 1980s along with television channels.

The arrival of the Internet marks a quantum leap in both bandwidth and the leveling process. Here is a medium with effectively unlimited aggregate bandwidth, thus the well known ability to support all kinds of niche audience subject matter: The Long Tail.

A dozen years into the Internet era, The only limitations left are the speed of broadband connections, and the ability to hit users in motion with wireless services. Both are the subject of intensive development and will be eliminated in time.

More important, the Internet levels ALL previous types of media: text, pictures, graphics, animation, audio of all kinds, and now video.  So great has been our focus on the old organizing centers of media that print, audio and video still remain largely separate online — a result of differing skill sets, craft traditions, unions, rights regimes and audience habits.

Nevertheless, we now have an emerging paradigm which still lacks an elegant one-word name. The closest would be "web multimedia."  This paradigm is now emerging on blogs. At 50 million and counting, blogs are the first web mass medium that allows individual creators to engage audiences online with a common multimedia format.

The original blogging "platforms" were built around print, but have rapidly expanded to include other media types. First images, then audio and video can now be embedded in blog posts. The latest blogging platforms like the recently launched VOX by Six Apart, will only accelerate this transition.

VOX integrates writing, photos, audio, videos, and books, with social networks of individuals and groups, plus the ability to split access into public and private. VOX encourages individuals to quote, include and juxtapose media they find online. By including simple tools to do this, it radically levels all component media types and reflects the diverse media experiences we enjoy online. As a creature of the network, it effortlessly integrates media from Amazon, YouTube, flickr, iStockphoto, photobucket, and iFilm — for openers.

So too, a new class of omnitalented multimedia creators are emerging. Equally at home with writing, photography, audio, video, web design and publishing, they embody the native competencies of the new order, which uses the entire web as a platform.

Print reverts to writing; radio to audio; television and film to video. Web multimedia is the New Gravity, pulling old media types into its orbit. What will be the Citizen Kane of this medium?

:: SH

Seize the Day

I wrote the following in response to the request from the Station Resource Group (SRG) below. It synthesizes several years of thinking and discussion about these topics with other members of the Public Service Publisher group, especially Dennis Haarsager. All these issues and more are sure to be discussed at the upcoming IMA Conference in Boston Feb. 20-24.

Comments are welcome and encouraged.

Thanks :: SH

On Feb 12, 2007, at 12:44 PM, Terry Clifford wrote:

Later this week, about fourteen executives from public radio programming
and distribution organizations and major content-producing stations will
gather to discuss the feasibility of a shared digital distribution
infrastructure. 

The concept has been around for some time, and the subject has been a
hot topic for about a year or so.

We would appreciate getting your most recent thinking on this.  Nothing
long - the equivalent of a few paragraphs.  It doesn't need to be a
comprehensive piece - just the most recent bullet points that come to
the forefront for you.  Especially given the long-term efforts all of
you have made to contribute to this subject.

We're also just asking for comments that reflect your own personal
thinking. 

Thanks in advance.

Terry Clifford
Station Resource Group
6935 Laurel Avenue #202
Takoma Park, MD 20912
301.270.2617
301.270.2618 (fax)

Colleagues:

Thank you for inviting my comments on this issue. I'm very gratified to see serious meetings like this one happening at last. It means we are past the denial stage and ready to plan for change.

A shared infrastructure for digital distribution of public radio programming is a necessary technical component of what needs to be done, but fails to frame the problem broadly enough. Distribution is the easy part. Business and policy issues are more difficult, and more critical to success.

What we need is a comprehensive online service platform that joins together producers (independent, station and network-based), stations, national program distributors, a new class of public service web affiliates, and the public -- for the mutual benefit of all participants.

What I'm suggesting is not some nebulous "vision" but a rational, practical, co-operative method of expanding and modernizing the historic mission of public service broadcasting, while fully embracing the new possibilities offered by online delivery.

If the effort you are meeting to plan falls short of this — or worse, is designed only to advance the interests of the current system stakeholders — I believe it will fail, not only to protect the current franchises, but to gain critical mass.

Public broadcasting can no longer trade on spectrum scarcity and its former monopoly on public service programming in the abundance economy of the web: it must create a world class, competitive service offering based on its mission, values and content.

From a business perspective, there is a one-time opportunity to substantially increase the pathetic 9% level of voluntary listener support now considered normal via an integrated national + local subscription offering, along with a much expanded range of free programming. To be successful, it must offer an overwhelming user value proposition.

To achieve this, the core business relationships between the existing stakeholders must evolve and change. The relative percentages of total system income from tax, grant, underwriter, and listener funding must also change.

Developing a powerful new online subscription incentive will strengthen the system at its core relationship: between publc service media providers and the public. It will provide the only realistic source of new income, at levels that are potentially revolutionary. Only 2 million new subscribers could provide over $200 Million yearly — the equivalent of a Kroc gift every year.

It will also enhance the value of investment in the system by institutional funders. With government funding a political crap shoot, we should not depend on it. Enhanced membership incentives allow us to insulate ourselves against losing it completely.

DESIGN A SERVICE

It all comes down to creating practical services.

To paraphrase a computer industry maxim ("Real men ship.") : 
"Real service providers create services."

The place to start is by specifying the levels and types of new services to be offered to the public and to affiliates — services that go far beyond the embarrassing, chaotic mess of balkanized web sites, partial and incompatible services we see today.

In its place should be an integrated platform with an enterprise class infrastructure that supports:

1.    COMPREHENSIVE DIGITAL DELIVERY (streams and downloads) of an expanded array of programming and archival content through station web sites and large national portal sites, including NPR.org, Yahoo, Google, AOL, MSN, et al, a new class of non-commercial public service web affiliates, and eventually, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Comcast who offer content bundling incentives to their customers.

2.    NATIONAL MEMBERSHIP for end users, promoted and sold by stations as well as the national portals. The national membership gives listeners access to an expanded content offering, archives and special services. Income would be shared by participants via an equitable system of revenue splits, commissions, royalties and fees, to incentivise all participants. The challenge of harmonizing local and national memberships must be met on both technical and policy levels.

3.    TIERED SERVICE OFFERINGS: including free on-air and online, selective paid access, and subscription/national membership.

4.    USER ACCOUNTS: the system must scale to support tens of millions of active users as well as tens of thousands of suppliers, affiliates, underwriters and copyright owners, and support comprehensive personal profiles and preferences. The days of a 91% anonymous audience are over: a public radio membership should signify common values and willing engagement with a trusted service of incontestable value.

5.    EASY CUSTOMIZATION to allow stations of all sizes to expand their traditional editorial and local service roles without having to achieve full web development competencies. The same system would allow web-only affiliates to create custom service offerings:  essentially, a much expanded syndication system for public service audio content.

6.    INTEGRATED NATIONAL UNDERWRITING opportunities across the entire system, with a central sales office and links to online advertising networks like Google where appropriate. Many of the smaller advertisers that Google enables are a natural fit on a public service platform. National underwriting income would be shared.

7.    UNIFIED PROMOTION AND MARKETING: an integrated service platform is a vehicle that can lift all boats, but to do this the system must agree on common elements of branding, language and service offerings for the benefit of all supply-side participants.

The unique value propositions underlying this offering are the public service mission, programming quality standards, and the goodwill and support the system has earned in the last 60 years. If we do not effectively leverage these values, Yahoo, Google, Real Networks, Apple, Microsoft and others will create far broader digital distribution services on their own terms, and public service producers seeking national and international audiences — including NPR — ultimately will have no choice but to join them.

In the wise words of Mike Homer of Open Media Network: "there is no reason why public broadcasting should give up a significant portion of its income from users to any other service provider." Amazingly, Mike has already financed the development of a significant portion of the necessary technical infrastructure to deliver these services with OMN, and has offered it to the system for free. If we don't take him up on the offer, OMN will become another competitor.

WHAT IF WE DON'T?

If we don't agree to work together to seize this opportunity with meaningful cooperative action, some of the broad consequences are already predictable:

• a slow decline in system revenues as new competitors arrive that will force consolidation of the weaker stations into regional networks at the expense of true local service

• loss of hundreds of millions in potential new income per year at the expense of system independence from political and corporate influence

• relegation to 'content vendor' status in the digital media ecology of the near future.

This is the turning point. We seize the day...or we suffer the consequences.

:: Stephen Hill

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