7.12.05

Miami TV Station Streaming Video News on Airplane Shooting

Incredibly, I was able to immediately connect to the CBS affiliate in Miami to see their live broadcast of the major news story at the airport. I say incredibly because I would assume that their server took quite a hit this afternoon. I was even able to switch to fullscreen with no loss of signal. http://wfor.com/

BK
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Revolutions Are Rare, But U.S. Broadcast Industry Is Facing One

I study new media. I enjoy it. I am also quite a new media skeptic. This began with my graduate work at Ohio State under Joe Foley (advisor) and newcomer Steve Acker (just in case they're watching ;-). My dissertation was on the future of new media, and I studied home video as a specific case. I learned a lot and have kept what I have learned with me.

Three of the reasons, obvious when you see them, for overly optimistic forecasts for emerging media: 1) the first stage for voices extolling the virtues of emerging media comes from the engineering world, where enthusiastic engineers and, more importantly, their company's sales team who "grease the pump" by announcing technological breakthroughs (for many, you can relate this to the medical or pharmaceutical fields in which the news media quickly pick up on new treatments years before they pass muster with regulators through, we hope, rigorous testing). 2) I'm not a neuroscientist, but it has been my observation that when a new medium enters the market (and even before it does), it is easy to envision the end state scenario in which the new medium diffuses to a majority of the population of potential adopters. What is often difficult to see are the obstacles that may or will appear in the path of the new medium's introduction, let alone diffusion. 3) There is an industry of market research firms, investment analysts, and even journalists ("man bites dog," "TV will end movie theaters") are among those who beat the steady drum of "here comes potentially revolutionary change." My observation on this aspect of optimistic forecasting is that reports of the status quo are pretty boring, and if you are, for example, a market research firm that needs to sell its research reports for thousands of dollars per copy (in some instances), predicting "no changes in the broadcast industry are seen for the next 5 years" would not generate many sales.

Having said all that, there are times when new media technologies are introduced and actually do diffuse more quickly than expected. Examples are the CD (the rapidity of how quickly CDs replaced LP records in the U.S. is really quite remarkable and, I wonder, unprecedented), large back-yard satellite dishes (basically no one expected individuals to purchase this technology that was adapted by Stanford Professor H. Taylor Howard, for the cable industry), and CB radio originally used by truckers were rapidly adopted by automobile owners (although this ended up as a passing fad). I'd have to check to see how TiVo's growth compares to what was forecast for it.

Compression technology and the dramatic growth of broadband in the U.S. (the latter being another example of a technology that diffused faster than most experts predicted), the entry of telcos into the "cable television" business (think of how landline phones are being replaced by cell and Internet phones and you can see why the telcos want to be in the video business). Video is the literature of our age (Bruce Klopfenstein, 1991) and delivery systems are being introduced that will do for video what broadband has already done for music. Smart broadcasters will embrace the technology; again, the music industry has stopped the bleeding and is now enjoying new revenue streams from Internet music subscribers.

(Sadly, blogger sometimes crashes and that happened to me on this post. I rewrote most of it but will come back soon for a tune-up.)


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6.12.05

Monkey (nb)C, Monkey Do

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This is almost comical. My best friend and I as kids used to laugh at how Burger King and McDonald's added items to their menu following the other's lead. We joked that if someone put a ladder up to clean the McDonald's sign, a ladder would appear up on the Burger King sign, too. Well, we thought it was funny.

So, NBC announced today that they are going to make a handful of shows available on iTunes, the Apple music web site. The price? The same as ABC/Disney: $1.99 a pop. Now NBC's old parent, RCA, introduced its videodisc player with just 100 titles, half of which were public domain (government films) including, as I recall, the Sex Life of the Grasshopper (maybe an urban legend). The SelectaVision failed due to some technical problems but especially because of very limited software (in this case, movies and TV shows). Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it (and that is not a direct quote). This news was all over the web including Reuters from which I gleaned the new information.

I suspect that unless Janet Jackson stunts happen in these shows, they are not bound for success. See my earlier post about the huge difference between $.99 and $1.99. Alfred Hitchcock? I loved that show, but $1.99 an episode? Let me watch a 10-second commercial for toothpaste instead.

iTV Usability

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Well, I certainly hope this article stays online for a while: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200512/accessibility_and_usability_for_interactive_television/.

Terrific iTV Usability Article by

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CNET Reports Playboy's "Bodcasting"

Playboy To Offer (What Else?) "Bodcasting"
CNETnews.com
Quote:
Well, it was probably inevitable. Playboy Enterprises, which has been moving aggressively into the world of digital entertainment, has announced the launch of "bodcasting." The audio programs will be available five times a week at Playboy.com. Among the casts to be offered: "Ask Hef Anything" and "Joke of the Day." There will also be a gaggle of breathy cyber girls offering advice on matters of interest to men. Of course. The downloadable podcasts--er, bodcasts--will be free. End quote.

Retrieved from email newsletter originating from MediaDailyNews received 6 December 2005.

itvt.com is Watching Google iTV

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Tracey Swedlow, "fellow" Buckeye and observer of Qube interative cable TV in the late 1970s, has noted on her web site. Clearly, Google is putting itself in a position (as is Yahoo!) to challenge existing providers of video service, often known as television broadcasters. I've got my catcher's mit ready to catch all those bits and bytes of information relevant to my needs, professional and personal/entertainment.

Right or wrong, I've been telling my students that Google is getting so large, that it may soon face the same kind of "deference" shown to another huge company, Microsoft, by would-be hackers or vandals. I don't know what Google's privacy statements say, but if hackers can crack credit card databases, does anyone really think Google will be immune? Google is amassing a great deal of information voluntarily from its users. As a user, I happen to be a big Google fan and have been since they came on the scene and blew away the other search engines on the web. But there is something to be said here along the lines of "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."

Still, this is a boon for interactive television. Go Google Go!

The Long Tail Blog

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Well, I see I have a like-minded new media author in Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine. He wrote The Long Tail, which first appeared in Wired in October 2004 and will become a book, published by Hyperion, in early 2006.

According to Mr. Anderson:
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. Retrieved http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html on 6 December 2005.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail

5.12.05

Why $.99 Will Bring in More Revenue than $1.99

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My glorious students at the University of Georgia are finishing their final projects, most of them are iTV simulations. Lucky me gets to learn from the students what's hot and off the web-beaten trail. While tooling around today, I stumbled across a webcast by Steve Jobs touting the new video iPod. The audience sounded like Apple enthusiasts, but I noticed in watching the webcast how loud the applause was for downloading a song for $.99 and the complete lack of applause for downloading a music video for $1.99. Once again, reverting to an old submission to the Journal of Anectdotal Evidence, I have believed that the economic gains of lowering the price of pay-per-view movies would have meant far more customers using the service than ever have. We will be able to test that theory as IPTV comes along and may well offer movies for $1.99 or less. There is something about $.99 that makes it sound almost free. If I were selling songs, I'd rather sell 1,000,000 copies of one song at $.99 than 200,000 songs at $1.99. In addition, songs at $.99 probably translate into fewer attempts at piracy than would be the case for the song priced at $1.99. Of course, I would also be willing to watch a 10 second ad, once, in return for a "free" song.

What do you think?

Update from 14 December 2005: I discovered a poll publised in Multichannel News that showed the following:

Will other cable operators and programmers jump on the 99-cent VOD bandwagon?
84% of respondents said yes, 16% said no. Gee, and I didn't even get my crack at telling them to do this.

Understanding Podcasting

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2005 should be remembered as the answer to the dot-bomb crash of around 5 years ago. First there was TiVo and blogging and now there is personalized videos online and podcasting. There is an excellent article on podcasting at http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7184.asp which is Podcasting 101 by Rob Graham, November 08, 2005, accessed 5 December 2005. The author extrapolates to suggest the possibility of individuals choosing their entire electronic media lineup regardless of source. In the past, I'd have considered such a statement to be hyperbole. But today, I think this scenario is highly likely, especially among younger adults who rarely pick up a newspaper or watch broadcast TV network news.

Microsoft and MTV Announced Partnership

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A truly loyal reader of this blog knows I have already written about the inconsequential nature of press releases about company A partnering with company B (this does not apply to company A and company B combining to form joint company C). Well, again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's been almost a year since Microsoft and MTV announced a joint venture. From what I can glean off the web and news sites, this so far has amounted to Microsoft unveiling its new XBox on MTV. Let me know what I've missed, but the MTV-Microsoft partnership appears to be another one for a momentary splash in the media, and, perhaps, little more.

NY Times: Looking for the Proceeds in TV-on-Demand

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Get it while it's free. The NY Times has a good article about the status of video-on-demand today, an excellent snapshot of where we are. Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, appears to agree with me that video-on-demand will eventually be free with the comfortable trade-off American TV viewers already have with advertiser supported television. "In limited markets, CBS, for one, will begin offering reruns in January of hit shows like 'CSI: Crime Scene Investigation' for 99 cents an episode." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/business/media/05media.html?pagewanted=1

Ad Searching With TiVo

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There's a good article about TiVo's involvement with promoting television advertising by Jeremy Lockhorn at http://www.clickz.com/experts/ad/ad_tech/article.php/3567841 (retrieved 5 December 2005). Unfortunately, the author's love affair with TiVo seems to be losing steam, and I wonder how many other users are starting to feel the same way.

In addition to the concerns he expresses from other users, I've noticed that I can't seem to time the FF through commercials just right anymore. Maybe it's my diminishing reaction times, but I used to be able to FF into the first 10 seconds or so of a program after a commercial pod, and TiVo automatically rewound those 10 seconds to where the program actually returned from commercials (I may be off with the 10 seconds, but that's close). My 9-year-old daughter mastered it in no time.

Now I find I cannot time it just right, that I almost always end up going back too far and watch the end of the last commercial before the program returns. This is an annoyance, and it's not a good idea to annoy your customers, especially as fresh competitors come onto the scene. In addition, in at least an earlier rendition of the DishNetwork PVR, I could FF much faster than TiVo. This comes in handy if you want to skip through, say, an hour's worth of programming. Research, especially in library science, has consistently shown that we can put up with about 7-8 seconds of latency, and after that we start to get impatient (or, once again, annoyed).

It remains my strong belief that if you put the control of the programming in the hands of the viewer and give them the option of watching a commercial (or 2 or 3) in lieu of paying for the content, that's a bargain Americans are used to. I further believe that this has always limited the adoption and diffusion of pay-per-view television up to this point in our history.

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4.12.05

TV Guide Video Search

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I may have missed this, but TV Guide online has a beta test of its video search engine. Folks, the parallel introduction of new ways for the audience to control its choices of television viewing. See http://online.tvguide.com/NewSearch/index.aspx

Anyone used this? Any comments>