stephen hill : spatial relations

What kind of innovation?

In his Gravity Medium blog John Proffitt posted a chart showing the increasing speed of technical innovation in communications media and used it to tweak public media professionals about the glacial pace of innovation in the system. (That was a good metaphor before global warming...glaciers are moving faster than public media these days.)

The post led to a discussion in the comments between me, John and Rob Paterson, who served as a consultant to public radio in the "New Realities" project — a fruitless attempt to kickstart innovation on the national level.

Innovation is good.  Innovation is necessary.  But as this discussion shows, even among those who agree on the need for innovation, it's easy to become bogged down in differing visions that may prove impractical or unproductive. I'm reproducing the discussion here so it is up a level in the blogosphere, visible and linkable. Most feed readers still don't give you access to comments.

John Proffitt Says:
March 23, 2008 at 6:00 pm

Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA

If it seems like the world moves faster, technologically, with each passing year, you’re not imagining things.

Consider this chart:

Starting from its introduction, the simple telephone took 71 years to arrive in just 50% of American homes. Think about that. An entire generation was born, lived and died waiting for a telephone to arrive in their home, and only half of them got it!

Even electricity took 52 years to reach 50% of homes. Cell phones — that ubiquitous device most of us take for granted — took 14 years, but the MP3 player took less than half that time.

Basic Internet access — the new omnimedia connection — took 10 years to reach 50%, and in the early days it wasn’t even that much to talk about. Today, high-speed Internet access is in well over 50% of homes in the U.S. and average speeds are rising (though not fast enough for me).

There are two lessons here I can see:

1. We cannot be transmitter companies (and indeed, we never were — we just thought we were because it was easier that way). Technology is a tool, not a purpose.
2. The public naturally innovates as better tools arrive for information gathering, sharing and entertainment. We must innovate with them to serve them; innovation must be built into our DNA.

What other lessons can you see in this chart?

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be. –Wayne Gretzky

Tags: dna, innovation, mission, Public Media, technology

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Strategy,  innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

14 Responses to “Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA”

1. Stephen Hill Says:
   March 23, 2008 at 11:35 am

   Couldn’t agree more with your conclusions, but the premise needs this comment: one of the big reasons the “diffusion rate” of new technologies is getting faster is the switch to increasingly efficient and ephemeral technologies.

   To illuminate the difference at its most extreme: establishing telephone and electricity required massive investments in poles, wire, a network of switching stations, generators, and the like. Cost? Billions.

   Diffusion of radio and television also required very large infrastructure investments, and the adoption of consumer hardware that was initially expensive and took 25 years to become cheap, even longer to become portable. Cost? Also billions.

   Mass diffusion of PCs required not only a substantial end user hardware investment that has also taken over 20 years to ameliorate, but ensnares the user in a technology and user interface learning curve that still has not been completely removed as a source of friction, and now occurs along generational faultlines. Cost? Again, billions.

   Establishing MP3 players was achieved via lightweight software downloads to existing desktops over an existing network; after the “MP3 jukebox” player concept was established, portability of the player functionality was achieved by marketing an easy to use consumer electronics device weighing a few ounces at “popular” prices. Cost? Tens to low hundreds of millions.

   So each innovation builds on a technology foundation adopted mastered by previous generations of end users, and each becomes lighter, easier, and cheaper — and therefore faster. Q.E.D.

   The one adoption curve that is not illustrated here is ubiquitous wireless Internet access. That sucker is not behaving according to the rule, because it requires both technology innovations like WiMax, and a new, very expensive infrastructure.

2. John Proffitt Says:
   March 23, 2008 at 1:13 pm

   Agreed. It’s almost Old Testament in its appeal — this begat that, and so on. You can definitely see how the bottom half of the chart set the stage for the top half.

   You could also say the chart shows, especially in the last couple of decades, a move from hardware and physical objects to software and intellectual property or virtual objects. It’s not like the notion of packaged media was revolutionary when the DVD arrived on the scene — that was just a mashup of consumer video tape and the audio CD (or LaserDisc).

   I think the delay in the development/deployment of WiMax (or similar technologies) is driven by several factors, not the least of which is the chicken-and-egg principle (if I can call it that). Sure, there are other difficulties like the physics of radio wave propagation and such. But if I’m sitting at Sprint, trying to decide where to invest, do I noodle around the edges and make more money from my existing customers, or do I make a bold play for an unproven “next gen” technology that will, as you point out, cost billions to develop and deploy? Go safe or go risky? Hmmm. Well, no one every got fired for buying IBM…

   In that respect, I think the truly revolutionary technologies — the disruptive ones, the ones we don’t immediately understand — take either truly revolutionary leadership or a groundswell of market demand to appear. And that’s just plain rare. To me, there’s only 5 revolutionary technologies on that chart, and that’s probably being generous.

   Perhaps that’s one of the things that irritates me most about public media’s intransigence in the face of an innovating media marketplace. It’s not that the technologies themselves are prohibitively expensive, nor are we being asked to invent the wheel without ever having seen anything round. The models are all around us and the technology costs are falling through the floor. The risks of innovation today are low. The risks of avoiding innovation, however, are high and rising.

   Lord help us (in public media) if WiMax or its cousins really do reach a point of virtual ubiquity in the next 5 years.

3. Rob Paterson Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 3:35 am

   Good points - so bottom line we are seeing an acceleration based on layers of supporting infrastructure.

   As well as the infrastructure - we are seeing an acceleration based on user experience. For instance in banking thew idea of banking away from the branch started with ATM’s, then telephone banking, then online. As we all get more used to doing important things online such as banking and shopping - it becomes easier to accept that we do all things online.

   As I type this, one of the great gadget dinosaurs of all time - my wife is watching YouTube videos - she has become entranced by the fact that she can find what she wants when she wants - if pub radio/tv was to make her experience easier - she would jump.

   The preconditions for a “Tip” are here. I think that most of the base is in existence even for behaviour - so now convenience will be the key.

   The Wifi is I think less of an issue than making it easy to find and share good stuff. But if there is another route to mass Wifi, that would help.

   How about this? Most stations are owned by universities that have long distance pipes that connect the trunks. What if each station started an Open Source Wifi/Wimax project - where it was the hub and we all as “listeners/Viewers - added Merakis to cover the community?

   Then the cost would be distributed and hence low. The Pipes would be protected from the Big Guys as we would use the University net instead of Verizon etc?

   Could be a project that would pull the nation together in a new way - a new wave for democracy?

4. John Proffitt Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 12:29 pm

   Hmmm… Universities could potentially play a role, although not every community has a university. But if the development of the Internet is any cue, universities can definitely play a role here. Though started by the Department of Defense, the academic community really built out the Internet and turned it into an important communications medium.

   Today, academics have access to Internet2 and are still innovating, though mostly it’s bandwidth development with a few minor innovations.

   The one thing I hope our innovators remember is the lesson of HD Radio vs. WiFi (or insert your favorite tech references here). HD Radio was developed in secret and the technology is owned by a single company that charges out the wazoo for licensing. WiFi is an industry standard held in trust by the IEEE and developed over time by a consortium of companies that, while competing, agreed that a standard was better than no standard.

   Or how about this idea… What if public media companies developed — wait for it — public media? We have towers and RF experience. Why not participate with our communities to develop two-way wireless communications services in the public interest?

5. Rob Paterson Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 12:45 pm

   I love this idea John

   A few of us thought of this 3 years ago and it has never left me - think of all those towers and repeaters - then think of all your listeners/viewers - surely this is enough real estate to be the foundation of a great project that pulls us all together

6. Rob Paterson Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 12:45 pm

   PS we have the satellite system too - I am no techie but there is a pony here somewhere

7. Stephen Hill Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 3:59 pm

   You gents are smoking way too much public media crack.

   Anybody who has made even a cursory attempt to follow the various efforts to establish municipal Wi-Fi networks over the last five years now recognizes the extreme difficulty in launching new network infrastructure designed for public use — even when based on highly efficient new technologies like WiMax that are designed to be backward-compatible with the established base of Wi-Fi transceivers in existing laptops. Think billions (again)…which Sprint was projected to invest in its national WiMax network.

   Anything that requires new consumer hardware to work (c.f. HD Radio, satellite radio, smart phones, etc.) requires major investments from the consumer electronics giants to have a prayer of overcoming the friction of the adoption curve, and it had better be at mass-market prices and be driven by absolutely compelling new applications that fill basic needs, like email, voice communication, and text messaging. And as the iPhone demonstrates it needs a user interface that’s better than sex. Niche media alone is nowhere near powerful enough to drive adoption of new hardware.

   The one media propagation model that has succeed in the last few years is integrated hardware/ software/ web services, notably by Apple in the case of the iPod/iTunes player/iTunes Media Store, and by Microsoft with the Xbox, where the new hardware is part of the integrated ecosystem. Think hundreds of millions…

   The last time anybody in niche media even partially succeeded at this was AUDIBLE.com who in 1997-99 were first into the spoken word niche with an integrated hardware/software/web service model. They went though many changes but survived and recently sold out to Amazon, who seem to have recognized the power of the integrated model with the Kindle, and for whom the acquisition of Audible was a good fit since Amazon serves niche markets and audiences of all kinds. Now we’re still at hundreds of millions.

   However, even the BBC with their billions of government funding yearly can’t fully apply this model: the BBC Player is a software download that uses existing computer and mobile hardware.

   This is the future for niche media. From the Wikipedia profile of Audible:

   In 2005, Audible launched Audible Air, software that makes it possible to download (copy-controlled) audio books over the air - wirelessly and directly to devices such as a smartphone or PDA. This eliminates the need to download copy-controlled audio books first to the PC or Mac and then transfer it to Palm OS, Windows, and Symbian Mobile devices. Audible Air content updates automatically, chapters download as required and delete themselves after they have been listened to.

   Public Media will do fine if it just leverages the new technologies and IP network infrastructure now in place — something it is clearly NOT doing effectively enough now. Let the RF transmitters age and die with dignity and focus development efforts where they matter. The days when public media could command its own dedicated spectrum are a relic of the bandwidth scarcity era for media, now over. And any scheme that depends on proprietary hardware is DOA.

   :: SH

8. John Proffitt Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 5:02 pm

   Stephen — I was really thinking on a smaller scale. In my market — Anchorage — there was an abortive attempt to do municipal WiFi last year. It died when the commercial vendors that signed a deal backed out at the last minute. They figured out there wasn’t enough money in it.

   I actually don’t think that our existing tower infrastructure, even peppered with WiMax gear, could get the job done in our area or most metro areas. WiMax or its successors is much more likely to piggyback on the cellular system and cellular towers, which are sprinkled across the landscape.

   But on a smaller scale, on the WiFi scale, what if we, a public media company, partnered with our host community government and deployed hotspots across the city and managed that infrastructure in the public interest? I think that’s an idea worth exploring, especially if the capital funds are covered by grants and the operating costs are covered by ad revenue or minimal subscription fees.

   I do NOT think we should develop technologies out of thin air and wait for folks to show up. Others have suggested to me we use the “extra” DTV bandwidth and sell it off for rented distance education services, data services, etc. That’s crazy talk — it requires the development of technologies that are parallel to existing tools and would be used by the tiniest of niche markets.

   And, sorry to say it, but the tremendous offer made by Mike Homer — the Open Media Network — is great as an infrastructure service, but is a bad idea from a player perspective. How many media players do I have to download and use? Who’s going to keep developing and redeveloping the player for new platforms? That was a great gift, but it was a gift that made sense for about 5 minutes in technology terms.

   So I’m with you, Stephen — we gotta be smart about this and not try to invent our own technology ghettoes (a la HD Radio). But at the same time, we also have to dream big. Let’s blend off-the-shelf technology with true public service notions that the commercial space won’t touch.

9. Stephen Hill Says:
   March 24, 2008 at 8:08 pm

   I’m all for thinking big, and a number of us in the PSP working group attempted to do exactly that to conceive some kind of solution that would work for all the current and future stakeholders of an expanded public media system — one that included a broader coalition of non-profit organizations as well as existing broadcasters.

   Net result? We understood the potentials and the problems better, launched a few ideas that stuck (like the ‘Public Media’ handle, for example) but we were not successful in getting any uptake at all from the system power centers, even as a demonstration project. So pardon, me, but now when I hear someone say “dream big,” I have to recognize the nature of the public media incumbents. See Calling the Game.

   So nationally the prognosis is not promising. If you are talking strictly about a local project, sure.
   IF all the local stars aligned, IF the money was there when it needed to be, and IF there were solid unfulfilled needs being fulfilled, it might have chance. How long it would take to design, build, launch and get traction is a large, open question. Public media companies are not in the infrastructure management or (at this point) network development business. When you talk about “managing that infrastructure in the public interest” I see a lot of red flags flying over a giant minefield.

   But if I generously assume you got past those challenges and the project was wildly successful, it would certainly get noticed by other local players in the public media system, and could have some influence on the development of similar projects elsewhere. That’s the best-case scenario.

   On a national/international level, I do not think anything important can or will happen without a common platform to organize the key functions of a better public media system: increased public access via on-demand service, modular downloads, archives, great searchable interfaces, more high-quality public media content, aggregation of traffic in a way that makes appropriate advertising viable, appropriate support for user-generated content and social relationships, subscription (aka membership) support, and critically — an underlying revenue-sharing business model that benefits all the stakeholders — talent, producers, stations, networks, service providers, and most of all…the public.

   What public media professionals are supposed to be good at is program selection and production, and providing a community service around high level shared values. This technology and infrastructure creation stuff is way off the competence map, and unless we miraculously get good at it real fast, it just makes more sense to focus on improving content and expanding service, and providing a first class user relationship. That means using existing and emerging standards and making full use of the online platforms already available.

   I had a conversation with Mike Homer two years ago where he observed as a business matter, Public Media was not obliged to share its users with the operators of a larger platform, like Yahoo, AOL, GooTube, or any other. We could, he said, operate our own platform online, just as we originally did in traditional broadcasting. While theoretically that is still the case, I’m pretty sure the moment of opportunity is, if not past, receding from view at an increasing rate.

   Sorry if I sound cynical about this stuff, but as you can see, there are reasons for it.

10. John Proffitt Says:
    March 24, 2008 at 10:42 pm

    Stephen — No need to apologize! Any cynicism you share is hard-earned through efforts to work within the system. I was disappointed to see nothing really come of the PSP idea myself. The PSP was presented at the first IMA I attended and I was genuinely excited — it sounded to me like there were some real thinkers in the system and after a bit of wrangling we’d be on our way. Oh, well.

    As for infrastructure stuff, I was definitely thinking on a purely local scale. And it comes from the notion that we already operate some infrastructure in the form of broadcast TV and radio towers/transmitters. Some of us also have repeaters and translators. So we already operate complex infrastructure in the public interest. Yes, a WiFi project would extend our reach into a new medium with a totally different model, but I think that would be good for us. The nature of being a media company today cannot be constrained by a single tower site and a single frequency setup in a one-way fashion — our engineering capacity needs to morph just as the media technologies do.

    Money? Well, that’s another matter. But you wouldn’t start such a project if you didn’t know whether you could finish it. And considering the dollars that always seem to be available for capital projects in nonprofit land, I’d be surprised if the seed money couldn’t be gathered if the value proposition is sufficient.

    In any case, based on your comments and what I’ve seen at IMA and in talking with others in the industry, I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that successfully fulfilling our missions as local media companies (the stations, not the networks) will require localized strategy and action. Waiting for some CPB marching orders to come down from on high, telling us exactly what to do and how to do it is nonsense. Conversely, national success (for PBS, NPR) will have to be achieved at the national level with national scale — not while waiting for the stations to green-light only the projects that aren’t “threatening” to the status quo of locals.

    Success for the “system,” it seems to me, will only come when national and local entities agree to disentangle themselves and develop new strategies based on the new economic world we find ourselves in. There’s too much history and too many conflicting purposes for us to all go forward together in harmony.

    Well, now *I* sound cynical! But I don’t really feel that way. I still believe we have opportunity here. Do we have the right leadership to pull it off? Ask me again in six months. By then, I’ll at least know about my own company.

11. Stephen Hill Says:
    March 25, 2008 at 12:34 am

    Ideally, there should be both — a viable national strategy and successful local initiatives tailored to the specific community and its needs.

    Certainly the opportunities are many, and I hope you figure out the one(s) that’ll work for your community.

    :: SH

12. Rob Paterson Says:
    March 25, 2008 at 2:15 am

    Sorry so late back in but the time difference and my farmer’s hours!

    I am in a way with both of you. Stephen - the platform is the key and the more open the better or the more accepted - go where the people are.

    iTunes, YouTube etc I think are essentials.

    But I also think there is an opportunity to act locally to spread Wifi - now how this has been attempted to date as a single provider with a revenue based business model but as a network of users who mesh their coverage for all with the station as the cheer leader.

    Rather than plan a lot for the whole system - too much inertia - why not act locally as a start?

    I think that trying to get all to move is impossible.

13. Stephen Hill Says:
    March 25, 2008 at 11:45 am

    That’s a fine vision, Rob, but I don’t see how it can work technically.

    The current 802.11x standard for Wi-Fi has a deliberately limited range. Once you get outside of Manhattan densities (i.e., everywhere else), even if you could propagate the new hardware needed to create a real “mesh network,” the coverage map would have more holes than swiss cheese.

    The kind of network effect based on coordinating distributed service users you are talking about is essentially a description of the P2P networks.

    They are asynchronous and global and based on software using existing hardware, which overcomes most of the structural problems. But even these networks have difficulty dealing with infrequently used content and real-time delivery, and require shoring up by conventional unicast content delivery mechanisms to be reliable. They work best for mass media where there are plenty of peered users.

    The vision of local users banding together to acomplish something could also be done via specialized social networks using the existing IP infrastructure. That’s what social media toolsets like NING are designed to accomplish.

    Sorry, but I have to conclude that trying to use FM transmitters, with or without Wi-Fi, for purposes like these is as misguided as HD Radio. We have a flexible (pseudo) mesh network called the Internet. We are nowhere near using it to its potential for public media.

    :: SH

14. Rob Paterson Says:
    March 25, 2008 at 4:24 pm

    I am just an ignorant historian Stephen - you are very patient with me - I bow to your knowledge - but the ignorant part of me hopes for better.

Pack light and bring your values with you

Continuing the conversation with John Profitt at Gravity Medium re The IMA Impasse:

If you were going to start a locally-focused public media company today — without the overhead of gear, people or ideas from the old public broadcasting world — what would that look like? Is that one person and a web service? Is that a community site organized by one person but handled by volunteers? Or are geographically-centric community services passe, and we should instead focus on topical verticals, like the HoS model?

John,

The way you pose this question is revealing. Correct me if I'm assuming too much, but saying you want to  'start'  a  'locally-focused'  'public media company' implies you want to stay in Anchorage, and that some part of you is an entrepreneur as well as a public service media professional.

Perhaps it's because of your local radio background, but to use a photographic metaphor, you seem to be zooming in and focusing your attention on a geographically limited area as the target of a web service. Turn the camera around and open up the lens to wide angle, and consider the media, services, communications networks and technical infrastructure environment that surrounds your geographic  area. Even though you may want to create a locally focused service, this is the underlying digital ecosystem that defines the set of possibilities and limitations you have to operate within.

One thing that struck me from the very beginning when I started to go to Internet music conferences in 1999, was that absolutely everyone was talking about business models that could "scale." This almost always meant free services.

Success was defined by an innovation that could be virally transmitted and grow to large numbers of users in "Internet time." This ability to scale rapidly would fuel and enable advertising-based business models. These prejudices are no less true today in the era of social networking, as several commentators have pointed out recently in articles like Kevin Kelly's "Better Than Free."

The problem is that mass usage paradigms do not translate into viable business models for niche services.

All of public broadcasting with the exception of the big NPR news shows and a few others is a niche in the media world. Geographically defined, locally focused services are also another niche in Internet logic.

A locally-focused service like Craig's List, for example, can only scale via duplication and syndication to multiple geo-niches. So if you find a solution to a local need, it may have application on a larger, more extended scale.

The other end of the geographical scale is to use the tools and resources of the digital ecosystem to build a what you call a "topical vertical" as we have done with Hearts of Space. This approach provides the same service to users world-wide. Theoretically this is the best way to build out a "global niche."

[In fact, HoS now has customers on every continent, though they are still few in number because we do not have a corresponding history and broadcast presence on those continents, and we still charge a subscription fee for full use of our service. We are too small to be viable with advertising.]

The question you pose of whether to pursue a local vs. topical service is one to be decided by personal preference of the service creators, along with a realistic assessment of resources and funding potentials, not any yardstick for measuring either absolute value or opportunity cost.

The one point I would make (the same one I was trying to make to the public media establishment at the previous IMA conferences) — is that imagining and building larger scale aggregated services for public service audio and video programming (and related multi-media and text content) presents literally a "once in a lifetime" opportunity to secure and expand the potential public service and the financial base of the entire public media network.

To see this opportunity languish, be ignored or not even recognized, is to me a shocking failure of this generation of public media professionals. When compared to the generation that created PBS and NPR, the network of local affiliates, the distribution infrastructure, programs and policies that built the existing system during the decades from the early 1960s to the 1990s — it is a very sad performance indeed.

The brilliance, the courage, the insight and the sheer ambition of the creators of the Internet and the services that have grown and flourished there — the ones like Wikipedia that we admire and cite for inspiration and guidance at public media conferences — is nowhere to be found these days in public media. This despite seven years of effort by the IMA, and dozens of articulate spokespersons for systemwide cooperation to seize the opportunities presented by the Internet to broaden, deepen and secure the core mission of public media.

So in my opinion, you won't find the answer to your question by tinkering with local vs. topical service model distinctions. The answers are discovered over time by those who plunge into digital media and web application development, understand deeply the nature of networks and the potentials of programming languages, communication protocols and IP technologies — and then reconcile them with an insightful understanding of public needs and the public good, by creating innovative new applications and services.

If you read the origin stories of successful web sites, applications and services, you will find that the creators and designers of these innovations were almost always "skilled mavericks." They understand the nature of networks, the wisdom of crowds, the longing of individuals for better, more efficient, more enjoyable online experiences. They are dissatisfied with the status quo. They find a need and design and build a solution using the tools available.

From what I know about you, you are adequately steeped in the values of public broadcasting, and reasonably up to date on the state of Internet technologies and culture. So my advice is not to worry about what you are going to do for public media in Anchorage or elsewhere, but to jump into the new game and onto the field in play. That field is online. It's a magic place where new things are possible and even welcomed. Imagine that!  Compare.

Pack light. Just bring your public media values with you, and the answers will present themselves.

Calling the game

This post was originally written as a comment to John Proffitt's review of the recent Integrated Media Association (IMA) conference at Gravity Medium. John was brave enough to pose some hard questions, and I am disillusioned and cranky enough to try to respond to them.

John writes:

In my (current) view, IMA appears to be at an impasse. We seem to have reached a point where integrated media advocacy has given out, where recommendations and demonstrations fail to move our organizations to meaningful action.

To date, IMA has been effective at putting the online services question on the table within public broadcasting and has done so eloquently and repeatedly. But for all the work completed, no significant sea change has yet arrived. Meanwhile, the house of public TV is on fire, we’re losing audience to a fracturing media world across the board and new players (like Wikipedia and others) have stolen “our” web traffic and possibly our raison d’etre.

I comment:

After six or seven years of trying to push the river, I’ve regretfully come to believe that the forces that control the legacy public media system — both public television and public radio — are simply too entrenched, too defensive, too scared, and too innovation-phobic to respond meaningfully to the challenges of the digital era.

It’s a pious, slow-moving culture that has always been satisfied with less. Unluckily, we live in a time of disruptive forces that demand clear, courageous and timely action on the part of all media organizations.

Sure, there will be some forward looking moves made and some low-hanging fruit picked (like the Podcasting initiative) — especially by the leading stations — but the ball has been  ignored or dropped at the network and system level time after time, even after the extent of the digital challenge became clear. There is little evidence that sufficient positive forces are now acting within the system to change this. Negative forces are not enough.

Cassandra-like warnings from me and others at various pre-IMA study groups and IMA conferences have proven to be slightly slow to arrive, but it is no longer in doubt that public radio will face a longer, slower, perhaps more painful version of the erosion and fragmentation of usership that has already disenfranchised public television, with the inevitable downward spiral of support from listeners, underwriters and funders.

It looks like the system will get hollowed out from within by slowly cutting staff, production and services. In another ten years it could resemble a ghost network populated by aging ‘tentpole’ programs and whatever else has already built a national audience and remains a viable part of daily news & information service, with the surviving stations being little more than network retransmitters with various flavors of local toppings. Wait, that's now...

The few stations that remain viable centers of program production and innovation have the best shot to adapt, but it should be worrisome that some trend spotters now see users wanting to support their chosen program brands directly, making all intermediates vulnerable unless they add value or own the program brands outright. This is Your Disintermediation at work.

At the network level, it seems that NPR, PRI and APM and their television equivalents are focused on reproducing the same balance of power in digital distribution and underwriting that obtained in the pre-digital era. I wish them luck as they divide an ever-shrinking pie.

In the endgame, they will be forced to act to protect their own franchises, so you can expect an era of increasingly hardball system politics as these aggregators and national network brands try to detach themselves from the drag that the stations exert on their own ability to respond to digital media opportunities. As a result, the large group of small and medium sized stations and state networks will be left to twist in the gathering winds on their own, while the major stations and the smallest community stations will adapt by degrees to the new realities of the digital network era.

John is quite right to point out that all the major initiatives promoted by the IMA to setup meaningful public media system collaborations, create significant new services, and see them funded at a level that gives them a snowball’s chance of surviving in a globally flaming mediascape — have utterly failed to get traction. At best, a few basic technical projects like metadata standardization have been started, while the challenge is to re-invent basic business and service models and reorganize the system from top to bottom.

The call to expand the IMA to include the larger public media sector may be a path forward for IMA, but it is even more difficult and uncertain. It's like trying to save a marriage by having a child — the core members can't pull themselves together effectively, so the solution is to involve outsiders and expand the scope of the organization, which makes it an order of magnitude more difficult to accomplish.

Face it folks : it ain’t gonna happen.

The IMA isn’t going to accomplish anything significant because it is fundamentally powerless. The moment of opportunity has passed — it needed to happen in 2004-2005. The IMA turned into an excellent conference but despite worthy efforts failed to provoke anything truly important within the system.

After attending the IMA every year since its inception, this year I opted out and instead attended a Music Technology conference here in San Francisco.

The music industry’s problems are legion and the subject of daily international press. You would expect a conference like this to be as depressing as IMA sounds per John’s report, but in fact it was the reverse. The rooms were humming with smart, engaged, activists of all ages working to move the digital music experience forward.

[Note that this is all happening in the context of a music copyright regime that has for years refused or blatantly overpriced the licenses needed for digital services to offer the innovations necessary to wean the public off physical media. That’s one structural problem that public media does not have when it originates its own programming.]

It is not my wish to further depress my many good friends and colleagues who continue to work in public broadcasting, but I believe it is time to take this discussion to its sadly obvious conclusion:

If you care about the values of public media, get out of public broadcasting and work on achieving them elsewhere.

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

Calling the Question

Yesterday I spent about an hour pulling together and reading all the blogs written by public radio people or about public broadcasting into one folder on my Bloglines account. As a result, I've acquired an overview of the state of the things as seen through the writings of Dennis Haarsager, Rob Paterson, Todd Mundt, Mark Fuerst, Current, Jake Shapiro, Andy Carvin, John Sutton, Sue Schardt and yours truly.

By definition, most of these bloggers are the activists in the system. Each have their own perspective, prejudices and goals. In aggregate you could say they represent the progressive edge of the system feeling its way into the future. In stark contrast, the power brokers within the legacy system don't blog and keep their communications private and proprietary — which tells you something about the difference between the old and new cultures. Those who are colonizing the net operate more with the ethos of the net: open communication and transparency.

In trying to get a feeling for the state of the transition between broadcast media and digital media in the public service area, you need to look not only at what the progressives are saying — you need to look at what the establishment is actually doing...or not doing. Add it up, and you get the impression of a ship inching forward in the dark.

The most significant statement emerging from the activity of the last few years is Dennis Haarsager's "Public media content online: calling the question."  In this epic post Dennis reviews a dozen different efforts to respond to the digital distribution challenge since 2000. Bottom line? We're still nowhere, at least nowhere significant, despite six years of talk. Below I'll condense the main points of Dennis's post, both to get an overview and to comment.

What's the question?

In his post Dennis says that one result of all the talk is that there is at last! a shared feeling of urgency, based on the aggregate disruption from Internet radio, satellite radio and downward trends in listenership, fundraising, and production money within public broadcasting. He also reminds us that public media content distribution is happening without us, and lists seven significant new initiatives already operating in public mediaspace, including C-Span.org, Conversations Network, Democracy player, OurMedia, the Internet Archive and Open Media Network.

Dennis then takes on some of the models that are being pursued. Of these the most pervasive has been the idea of some kind of integrated content delivery network for public media, or CDN. This is the model that NPR, PRI and APM (read: the public radio establishment) have been pursuing with their Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) project.

He also levels some pointed criticisms at a number of rationales that are common to many of these efforts: the tendency of proposers to position them as "servant to their legacy services," the corresponding focus on unilateral services for radio or television, rather than "collaborative" services that include all media types and sources from across the public media spectrum; and finally, the promise of new revenue as one of the driving reasons for creating new media services.

Developing these points under the heading Building a CDN only to super-serve our audiences risks failure, Dennis effectively criticizes the various plans offered to date by pointing out that the web is a new medium with its own rules, and a single medium CDN (one organized around radio or television content, stations or networks) does not respect how people use the web (they use search, recommendations, referrals, heuristics, and syndication/aggregation to find media by subject, not by type.) These truths are apparent to everyone who uses the web intensively, but still seem a bit shocking when stated this baldly in the face of persistent efforts to ignore them.

Dennis then heads for the moral high ground under the headline We should hold mission high among the benefits of doing a public media CDN. Who could disagree? In fact, I thought this was more or less a common feature of all proposals to date, but it seems to be a matter of emphasis.

He goes on to comment that the revenues generated by a presumptive public media CDN would be unequally distributed among the players in the public media system we know today, pointing out a criticism I have also made of the DDC proposal — that it can only produce substantial financial benefits for the currently popular, large audience national program brands, and not for the small producers or stations. In fact under the DDC revenue estimates from their proposed centralized underwriting system, even these shows would not realize anywhere near enough new income from online underwriting to replace losses from the legacy system if it starts to decline or crash.

The heart of the economics issue is this paragraph:

Success will require that most players in the system believe they are benefiting from a CDN, not just the content owners at the fat end of the power curve.  Most local stations and small independent producers know they aren't going to make enough new money online to shore up their declining legacy revenue.  But even though the direct revenue from new media sources is compelling and benchmarks exist, relatively few players will share in the benefits in a compelling way -- at least if you just look at payments to producers.  The potential of revenue from retailer roles for stations is untested, without benchmarks (arguably, income from NPR productions or from PBS distribution might benefit stations more democratically), and likely less than stations achieve by retailing national programming to members and underwriters.  The distribution of direct revenue is likely to vary in significant ways from the distribution of needs, so I think we need to look beyond direct revenue to other benefits.

What are the other benefits? The ball finally lands on the concept of local service and the relationship between stations and their communities:

So if there is a misdistribution of salable on-demand content versus financial need, one thing that's not maldistributed is the connection that exists between stations and their communities.  Every station, especially in radio, operates as the Godzilla of community service, dwarfing the delivery of contact hours with our true competitors -- other non-profits, governmental and educational institutions in our communities.  In public radio, not quite half of our revenue comes from other than listener-sensitive sources — sources that give us money because of our social or educational mission.  We've focused for years — rightly — on monetizing our listener-sensitive and viewer-sensitive revenue, but the archival value of new media distribution is, I think, a very powerful tool for improving (and in some cases just keeping) revenue from tax-based and foundation sources. It's here that the distribution of benefits becomes more equitable.

This is worth pondering, because understanding what Dennis is saying not only requires an understanding of the income structure of the current public radio/television system, but also requires a crystal ball for the future.

What is the mission of public broadcasting?

We should probably have a conference just to clarify that in the wake of the Internet, but for now and in a few words, public service, expressed in programming plus the attendant public-facing activities of the local and national institutions.

If the Internet is ultimately going to level all media types by subsuming them into a common platform as web multimedia (see VOX and The New Gravity), then Dennis is arguing that it will also level all types of public service media, essentially putting media organizations in direct competition with other NPOs for the attention of the public. In fact this is already happening, as all the major NPOs are now producing blogs, podcasts, video feeds and web content to promote and deliver on their own missions.

[For example, one of my favorites from here in San Francisco, the Long Now Foundation. They produce and record public lectures of very high quality material, then put them online as seminars. They're building an archive that reflects their educational mission.They've even started a membership program, just like public broadcasting.]

Dennis's second point — that just under half public broadcasting's current aggregate income does not come from listeners, but from taxes and foundation grants tied to our social or educational mission — leads him to see the potential of new media from a perspective that no one has previously expressed: as a means to ensure not only the continuity, but the potential for expansion of revenue from tax-based and foundation sources.

This comes down to what seems to me a false set of choices: either offer new media for free and monetize it via advertising/underwriting (the DDC "solution") or, use it as a lever to obtain tax, foundation and institutional funding. I think both kinds of support can and will co-exist, and that the real potential for monetizing new media services — by which I mean integrated, aggregated platforms that support subscription relationships directly with the audience — has still not been fully appreciated.

I keep coming back to this point not because I'm just that pig-headed, but because  1) integrated service platforms offer substantial benefits for the public, and  2) even the most casual estimates of the income potential of subscription services place them in a completely different category than the kind of wish fulfillment that passes for vision in public media.

The most brilliant example of this I've ever seen is Wick Rowland's fascinating piece in the Feb. 12, 2007 issue of CURRENT "Shadows in the Corridors: A Capitol Hill Day dialogue."

In a kind of literary tour de force (at least for CURRENT) Rowland puts the truth about public broadcasting's position in the political food chain in the mouth of a "senior committee staffer" who delivers the message in terms so stark that even the most dewy-eyed optimist for more tax-based support has to wonder if it could ever happen in 21st century U.S. of A.

I've never met the author (he's the president of Colorado Public Television) but his words have the distinctive tang of reality. Despite the odds, he seems to be hopeful that under the Democrats, a major reform of tax-based support for public media and what he calls the "policy nexus" — "the entire inter-linked regime of national media and culture policy — of communications law, federal regulation and money" — could be accomplished.

It's a terrific insight, and his article functions as a high level call to arms for the lobbyists who tend "the nexus." (Obviously the sequel to The Matrix...) I ardently wish them well, but you know? I wouldn't want to bet on it, especially when there are alternatives that can produce far more revenue without anyone — much less fickle species like legislators and bureaucrats — having to get in line.

I've tried to develop this theme since the beginning of this blog, so I won't reiterate any of it here, except to say that really, WE NEED TO DO ALL THESE THINGS AT ONCE if we hope to materially change the position public media occupies in American, and now, international life.

If we don't, we will have to be satisfied to continue to exist in a kind of low/mid income twilight zone: loved by many, ridiculed or hated by others, "independently poor" or the neutered pet of regulatory, government and foundation decision makers.

And just think: if the conservative Republicans were still on their game, the future of the tax and regulatory picture would be completely different, and we might be talking instead about how to deal with the defunding of public broadcasting.

Rx for the future

Dennis concludes his post with a call he has issued before to "just do it" (meaning the CDN) but this time he qualifies it in several important ways:

1.    for the CDN, take a loose confederation approach; don't try to get everyone to agree on everything beforehand

2.    use OMN as the distribution engine or pull one together from existing open source parts

3.    make it a broad coalition across television, radio, other public interest/public service media, and podcasters

4.    pray for a 1969 moment all over again

5.   for stations, keep the core value of local service uppermost

It's a good vision and good advice, but I'm cynical enough about the consistent failure of this generation of public broadcasting executives to even understand, must less respond intelligently to the revolutions happening around them to ask the next question:

WHO, EXACTLY, IS GOING TO RUN THIS REVOLUTION??

Dennis calls for "a few hundred stations and producers participating under multiple brands — their own, a collective one, and the brands of their public service partners."  Well, fine, but EXACTLY HOW IS THAT GOING TO HAPPEN?? It sounds like a recipe for barely controlled chaos, and in my opinion we have quite enough of that already, thanks.

Call it radical decentralization — it sounds better. Would this serve the public better, or be even more confusing than now? Would it result in a net increase in stability for stations, in sustainable income for producers, in convenience and quality for users?

 

Somebody needs to articulate the scenarios for this. Looks like that'll be the subject of my next post.

:: 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

The DDC Decloaks

This week the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) decloaked after six months silence and released a carefully written proposal, not only for a new distribution system for digital public media, but for a new business model for the public media network of the future. The full proposal is available as a .pdf file at the DDC Wiki here or the IMA site here and is worth reading carefully if you want to understand the full scope of these ideas.

It's a serious piece of work by well-intentioned professionals with some of the best new media experience in the system, so I'm unhappy to report that it is deeply prejudiced in several of its core assumptions.

Most significant issues: the DDC was charged with developing a new business model for public media, but if the DDC business recommendations are followed, they will cost the system billions in potential income over the next ten years alone, as well as a net loss of independence from corporate and political influence. Those are the most serious problems; there are others on operational and policy levels.

First, there are two prejudices that influence everything else, both based on ideologies that require serious reconsideration before they are applied to any reform:

One is a prejudice toward free, "open syndication" of web content (i.e. podcasting and open streams) with the goal of maximizing usage, which drives the decision to base service revenue overwhelmingly on advertising, with minor additional revenues from content licensing and ancillary sales commissions. I argue that we need an intelligent mix of free, ad-supported, and subscription services supported by an integrated service platform.

Two (ironically) is a prejudice against direct engagement with the public. For a system that trades on the name "public" broadcasting, the DDC framers seem to consider a direct relationship with the public as a liability to be avoided if a machine can't do the job. I argue that this is actually the single most significant relationship in the system, a powerful asset that should be nurtured and developed as a means of stabilizing and maximizing system income long-term.

These two prejudices have resulted in a flawed model, with features that are necessary but not sufficient — and led the DDC to avoid or ignore several of the hardest business issues in conceiving a centralized service platform.

Problems:

The DDC proposal turns public broadcasting into commercial broadcasting by applying the commercial broadcast advertising model to public service content. This would ultimately mean the end of "non-commercial" media, in favor of centralized ad and underwriting sales + barter exchange of programming for local advertising slots.

Call me old-fashioned, but there should be one damn place to go in the mediasphere where one can escape the pervasive influence of advertising. That's idealistic, but on a business level I believe that this scheme would devalue the association with public service media by pricing it at market ad rates. I argue that public media can be monetized at significantly higher levels overall by combining free, ad supported, and subscription services.

The revenue potential of the DDC proposed ad-based system is only a fraction of achievable subscription revenue, and will cost the system billions in lost income.  Only 700,000 subscribers at $10/month would surpass DDC revenue estimates of $80M/year from advertising in a mature service. Does anyone doubt that a system with 30 MILLION current listeners and a history of support for voluntary subscriptions can do much, much better than this in the long run by offering a powerful new online subscription incentive?  2 million subscribers would produce $240 million/year in income. It's the difference between tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

It doesn't even make enough to support the participants. Income distribution is proposed as proportional to measured traffic via streams and downloads, but DDC's own projections indicate expected income is not even enough to provide truly significant support to the major program brands, much less the smaller content providers or what they call "presenters" (aggregators) like stations.

The DDC system assumes a high level of web competence at the edges of the network. This may be true for a new class of online program and service aggregators, but is certainly not true for the existing base of public stations, who actually need a turnkey solution with simple customization options in the short term, and lots of hand holding and support in the longer term to develop truly effective web operations.

Editorial operations to vet content and ensure consistent quality are underestimated and unfunded. The proposal makes a fashionable nod toward user-generated content and admits that "editorial guidelines, content reviews and policies are required to ensure high quality," but there is no mention of the actual cost and staff impact of this in the operations estimate. I argue that this is actually a significant cost center for any content network and would become a serious problem if there is not adequate revenue to support it.

Conclusions:

As presently conceived, the DDC proposal would make the system more dependent on advertisers and external funders, rather than strengthening the direct connection to the end user. It would result in a net loss of financial autonomy, immunity from political manipulation, and income for the system.

Though I believe unintentional, the DDC proposal would result in a further centralization of power and money in the major program producers and distributors in the current system.  Some of this is inevitable, but a truly equitable system would help level the field and incentivize all participants, not worsen the inequalities.

A digital system for public media needs to support BOTH open, free distribution and subscription models, by making effective distinctions between underwritten, ad-supported, and value-added services to incentivize subscriptions. By choosing to ignore this, the DDC proposal condemns the system to dependent status in the digital economy, when it could be advancing and solidifying its position.

Subscription income is the blood plasma of public media. It maintains and supports the life of the host. Expanded web services provide a perfect vehicle for current and future users to ratify their relationship with the system's mission and actual service delivered.

:: Stephen Hill

NOW can we talk about business?

The title is a riff on a Hillary Clinton's famous remark about health care. Like reforming our medical delivery system, the effort to reform public broadcasting's content delivery systems is fraught with big issues, entrenched stakeholders, and lack of action.

I have a bit of history about the business question. Within public radio circles I pass for an entrepreneur because I have co-created several businesses to augment our barely break-even income from syndication of our national program. And ever since I started thinking about the impact of the Internet on niche radio formats, stations, programs and producers, it's been clear to me that it was ultimately going to change the way we did business — with each other and with the community.

Since the demise of the PRC, the once a year omnibus Public Radio Conference, the Integrated Media Association (IMA) conference has emerged as the best place to discuss these issues. At the 2006 conference in Seattle I was on a panel and was surprised to find the moderator steering the discussion away from what I considered the burning questions. At the time, I described the avoidance of the business discussion as a "third rail" that everybody seemed afraid to touch. I even recalled Camus' remark that "there is only one truly serious philosophical question and that is suicide." To my mind, there was only one truly serious issue on the table and that was related to business models and business relationships within the system. Everything else was details. True to form, the discussion was tabled. Now another year has passed, and as far as I know, it's still not being seriously considered. Man, that third rail must be really scary.

Recently I raised the question again in email with two of my colleagues from the Public Service Publisher (PSP) group, Dennis Haarsager of Northwest Public Radio, and Tim Olson of KQED in San Francisco. Here's an edited version of that discussion, which started with Dennis bringing the group up to date on the developments announced at the CES show involving Open Media Network (OMN), the Kontiki peer-to-peer distribution technology, and VeriSign, which bought Kontiki last year. Since nobody is more aware of new technologies that affect broadcasting AND has more goodwill and contacts within the existing system, I asked Dennis for more:

STEPHEN HILL: Thanks for the update, Dennis. Indeed, exciting stuff. Makes you wonder (in the light of Rob Paterson's recent post about HBO) if anybody in public broadcasting besides you, Rob and a handful of others are paying any real attention.

In that regard may I ask for further updates?

1.   What's happening with the DDC (Digital Distribution Consortium) project and all the high-level backroom activity aiming to build a new distribution architecture? I haven't heard a thing about it since a meeting in San Francisco I attended last summer.

2.   When will there be any real, substantive discussion of the the business changes that are needed to support all of this pie-in-the-Internet-sky visioning? I'm referring (as I'm wont to do) to revenue sharing, subscription and syndication models.

3.   Any chance of these issues being raised at the IMA?

DENNIS HAARSAGER: My understanding is that Tim's group [ed: the DDC] did have such discussions that that the group felt optimistic about what their analysis showed.  Ditto the work that Mike H. commissioned on the video side.  But there hasn't been a larger discussion of which I'm aware.  There's a Thursday session at IMA called "Hybrid Business Models" with Doug Kaye, but it would appear that's the closest IMA gets to it.  The Thursday dinners look to be for various BoF sessions, so maybe we could start one on the subject - though of course that's not necessarily the "real, substantive discussion" you correctly are calling out.

TIM OLSEN:  There isn't a DDC presentation at iMA that I'm aware of.  There may have been thing moving without my knowledge, but a couple notes.. Business plan is written, for radio side at least seems to come down to a few key items.

- will NPR be the "DDC ASP" or other?
- NPR is moving ahead with phase II of podcasting, including producer sales availability
- MPR is rumored to be putting in many more podcasts into NPR podcasting, which signals potential ground for more MPR/NPR deals.  In my opinion, MPR and NPR deal is the make or break it one.  Others would follow if those two worked it out.
- If folks want someone besides NPR to be the DDC, then there needs to be a push for that.  The trouble is PRX, and PI, the two that could push for such, are busy with their "day jobs".

I'd be interested in pushing the discussion again.  Just been busy.

STEPHEN:  Here's what worries me in a nutshell: the DDC is only half the battle, and the easier half at that. MPR, PI, and PRI may quite rationally have decided that building, staffing and operating an IP distribution infrastructure is beyond their job classifications. If so fine; anything that gets these organizations to cooperate on building the machinery needed to support future services is progress, and I will be the first to applaud them for it.

However...without confronting the larger issue of the business relationship(s) between producers, production organizations, stations, networks and the national portals to public service content — I just don't see the DDC effort delivering the kind of comprehensive changes that will be needed to secure (let alone improve) the overall status of public broadcasting in the new mediascape. This kind of thinking, I believe, is exactly what Rob Paterson was trying to engender in his work with the system leaders in the New Realities workshops.

It's not that whatever they build won't get used by stations — I'm sure it will, to one degree or another. The problem is not in the back-end machinery, but in the public-facing side of things. What's the equivalent of HBO On Demand for public service content? Is it something different for every station? Or something that has a core repertoire of programming that's shared by the entire system, and is the very thing that differentiates it from a growing list of other public service programming providers? Or is is going to be happening on other portals and services?

The advantage of doing something comprehensive and highly publicized comes down to position in the new mediascape and the money from underwriting, grants and membership dollars that relates directly to that position. I just hate to see such a golden opportunity to improve the overall status of public broadcasting go by while we're talking about next generation deck chairs — sorry, distribution infrastructure.

It's overdue to be talking about service offerings: how to configure them, promote them, monetize them, and do the revenue-sharing and syndication deals of the future. It's frustrating to see a great opportunity wasted on even the best-intentioned but insufficient efforts.

TIM: so you are arguing for a aggregated portal page of all public media content, with all the bells and whistles (promotion, community rating/ranking, independent presenatations,  and for business ads, paid subscriptions... etc)?

NPR is making a play for this on music with NPRMusic.org.

You would advocate the same for news?

STEPHEN:  The PSP group discussed all the different possibilities for how a broader on-demand content offering might work. If you recall, there was no single model that emerged from those visionings as being clearly better.

Mark Fuerst seemed to prefer a central portal and argued for doing it, either at NPR.org or a newly created site; my original 'pitch' was for a distributed system (closer to what DDC seems to be talking about being the back end for) where the individual stations could easily add web content and services to their sites and use their broadcast signals as way to promote their web offerings for their own benefit as well as the brand and identity of the whole system.

And it seemed clear that there would a significant number of new aggregation points in the future at the other major Internet portals and services (like OMN) where public broadcasting content would be offered. In the end, the PSP group took a "both/and" position as far as how the system would be configured: both at station sites and portals. That's where it was left before the DDC effort.

One of the problems in dealing with a federated system like public broadcasting is that even if you could design a perfect solution, you could never get the states/stations to agree to implement it universally -- at least under normal circumstances. Only a major external threat or a clearly declining trend in market share and revenue might have the power to change that, but I wouldn't put money on how it would play out. Worst case -- the "death spiral" scenario of declining market share, advertising, and product quality now facing the newspaper industry would happen even more slowly and excruciatingly in public broadcasting.

My real 'pitch' is that there is a substantial amount of accumulated goodwill, both in brand and business terms, now shared by individual stations, programs, and the public radio system as a whole. (Public Television is another story.) There is an opportunity to build on this goodwill, combine it with a much more extensive and flexible service offering, and create a new national membership level for public radio that complements and enhances local memberships. Think of it as a paid upgrade. Public broadcasting is ideally positioned to do this because its users already are invested in its mission as well as its current service.

The question for the networks is how to aggregate a competitive digital service offering; the question for the stations is how to be part of an up-to-date public media service, whether delivered via station sites, portals, wireless b/b, preloaded iPlayers or brain implants.

The business discussion I'm pushing for is the one that would be required to support all of that -- defining classes and levels of membership, what the associated content offering(s) would be, how the system handles national and local underwriting and ancillary revenue streams -- and then the really contentious bit: how the manage the revenue splits, shares, commissions and royalties and fees to incentivise all the participants.

If NPR is doing some part of this for NPRMusic.org, it's a good example of continuing to focus on narrow opportunities, rather than imagining and implementing a broad, comprehensive solution.

The thing that bothers me most is what Paul Marzalek said in his blog a year ago: there will only be one chance to pull off anything like this and then the opportunity will be lost forever, and the system and its component entities will pay the price for years to come.

Something like what I'm talking about will be created, because it's simply the most user-friendly and efficient way to deliver a broad array of digital services. OMN should be enough evidence. At least they are a friendly potential competitor — so far. The question is whether public radio will take the opportunity and use it to better its position and secure its financial future, or whether it is content to be just another syndicator, pushing its programming to other aggregators for a royalty and/or scratching for donations. That scenario would not be a disaster, but it would be sad loss of position and potential.

OK, I'm stirring the pot here. I'd just like to know if there is any desire to seize this opportunity, have a constructive discussion, and do something about it. If not, fine. I'll gladly give this a rest and tend my own garden.

Comments are open, please post or write on your own blog and link back.

:: SH

HD Radio: too little, too late

Mark Ramsey must be a really nice guy. While he's critical of various aspects of the HD Radio situation, he has tried hard to make his criticisms constructive and not alienate radio colleagues who are working on it. His latest effort over at Hear 2.0 is a list of things that are wrong with the $200 million HD marketing and promotion campaign. I think he is missing the core issue. I posted this along with the comments:



The problem lies not in the details of the marketing campaign, but in the deficiency of the value proposition for listeners.

Satellite has succeeded (sort of) not because they spent $200M on promotion (they did) or executed the rollout perfectly (they didn't) but because the service itself offered listeners a better value proposition: a cable system sized banquet of radio channels (including dozens of neglected music formats), little or no advertising, 100% coverage of areas that were underserved by terrestrial radio, and a truly national service.

So the cost of the new hardware and the subscription was compensated by a strong, unambiguous value proposition: more content, desired content, uninterrupted content, national coverage. It all adds up to being worth the $12.95 a month for many millions of people.

What about online radio? Now you have tens of thousands of channels: a mind-boggling array of niche and specialty content in addition to deep choice of mainstream formats. In many cases, you have fewer or zero commercials. You have on-demand access and deep archives. You have asynchronous subscription delivery, aka podcasting. And you have ubiquitous wired access, with wide-area wireless Internet rolling out starting last year on the 3G cellular nets. And now the hardware cost is rolled into your smart cell phone, which is being upgraded every 2-3 years on average anyway.

One more benefit that's not user-centric but should get the attention of broadcasters: online provides a more flexible, more powerful platform for delivering advertising. Ask Google.

Face it, folks...when you add it up, HD Radio as a platform will never be competitive with satellite or Internet radio on a value for value basis for the end user.

All you can hope is that AM and FM will decline slowly enough that radio stations and producers can adapt to new media delivery methods while they continue to operate their old franchises. HD radio is not a new method: it's good old single channel point to multipoint local broadcasting in digital drag. It can barely provide time-shifting of favorite shows, much less the other listener/viewer value enhancements that are driving the Internet media explosion.

HD will fail to get a meaningful level of uptake, and it will waste more time and money in the process. Incumbents are stubborn that way. Broadcasters who access the situation correctly already have better places to put their development energy. I'm really sorry for the folks at iBiquity. They've worked long and hard, but the bar has been raised beyond the ability of conventional broadcasting to compensate.

HD radio is just too little and too late.