What is news?
An image of an Iranian protestor posted to Flickr this week
This week’s events in Iran remind me, perhaps too much, of the Tiananmen Square protests twenty years ago. People coming together peacefully to rally against oppression, whether in Selma, Johannesburg, or Berlin brings hope. Knowing how Tiananmen, Prague, and Myanmar ended brings dread.
Optimists say the world has changed. While tyrants can restrict the activities of CNN and the New York Times, they can’t block Twitter, SMS, YouTube, and Facebook as easily. The truth will get out. People can be called to action and know they will outnumber their oppressors. I hope they are prescient, but in this case the tyrants will prevail — at least in the short run, and people will continue to be injured and killed.
Ahmadinejad is about the worst the world has to offer. He will cling to power and he will be as ruthless as a cornered rat when confronted. People are already being killed by his and the clerics’ thugs, the basij. These people with their 15th century worldviews don’t understand Twitter, and they certainly don’t fear it. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube might get the word out, but they can’t block the bullets. We will know more about what happens in Tehran in 2009 than we know about what happened in Tiananmen in 1989, but it’s not going to change the outcome.
The Economist summed up the old media v. new media coverage of the events in Tehran quite well. No flowery speech about how the face of politics is forever changed by Web 2.0 techologies. Just the facts.
[The] much-ballyhooed Twitter swiftly degraded into pointlessness. By deluging threads like Iranelection with cries of support for the protesters, Americans and Britons rendered the site almost useless as a source of information—something that Iran’s government had tried and failed to do. Even at its best the site gave a partial, one-sided view of events. Both Twitter and YouTube are hobbled as sources of news by their clumsy search engines.
It’s ironic that the same week China has begun stepping up its censorship efforts. PCs can only be sold in the People’s Republic with government controlled web filters.
The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PCs starting July 1, would allow the government to regularly update computers with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.
The rules, issued last month, ratchet up Internet restrictions that are already among the most stringent in the world. China regularly blocks Web sites that discuss the Dalai Lama, the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters, and the Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement.
And just this week, Google agreed to further restrictions on the information it serves up to the Chinese people.
Google caved. Dell, Lenovo, and company caved. They cannot be blamed. As publicly traded companies they have a fiduciary responsibility to their share holders to maximize profits, not a mandate to make the world a freer place. Our 401Ks contribute to the problem today, but not as much as many liberals complain. In the end places like Iran and China will have to open up and allow the freer exchange of ideas. Otherwise the best and the brightest will continue to bring their innovations to freer countries. Look at how many Silicon Valley start ups are started by immigrants to the US. Look at the wealth they create. Wealth that keeps the US the dominant economic power. If China and Iran want to continue to be economic and technological followerers, they are on the right path. Otherwise they have to open up their miserable political systems.
So what is news? If CNN can’t get there first, but Twitter and YouTube are too clunky to disseminate information quickly and efficiently, what models will emerge? Large news organizations will have to take on the task of organizing the world’s tweets and mobile videos. It will require new business models and new infrastructures. The traditional satellite feed will diminish in importance.
It’s a good time to be a software designer for the media industry. We still have our fiduciary responsibilities, but we can build the tools to help the world become a freer place.
The future of TV per Cringley
A recent post by Cringley on the future of broadcast, cable, satellite, and Internet TV trods little new ground. Admittedly, it’s pretty much what he’s been saying for the past few years. His general thesis is good, but his argument deteriorates in the details.
…we’re approaching a point where Internet service will equal and then be lower than the marginal per-viewer cost of the broadcast TV model. This crossover will inevitably happen with the only question being when. That’s a function of bandwidth costs decreasing at 50 percent per year and processing power increasing at 50 percent per year. My calculations suggest the crossover will happen around 2015, which used to seem like a long time away but no longer does.
Cost per viewer is an important metric from the supply side, but Cringley fails to take into consideration demand - the value placed on the service by users. Even the most aggressive estimates, don’t have reasonable bandwidth for an acceptable television viewing experience reaching 80% of the homes by 2015. Though I’m mostly pleased with Roku’s performance to my 10-megabit connection at home, I spend enough time watching the buffer reload in the middle of a movie that I don’t consider it an acceptable replacement for video on demand. What happens when everyone has a Roku box or some similar device? Five years seems like an awfully short time to solve all our bandwidth issues.
As I’ve said before, five year predictions are great. If you’re right you can link to the prediction and shout from the rooftops how smart you are. If you’re wrong, no one will remember.
Cringley makes one of his bolder five year predictions. Local TV stations will be facing the same business challenges newspapers do today. Not likely. Not only because IPTV will not be in a position to compete, but because broadcast will remain the most cost effective means of delivering live video entertainment. The Yankees and the Red Sox will keep broadcast TV viable for a bit longer than 5 years.
What spurred me to write this post wasn’t the collection of minor flaws in Cringley’s reasoning about the emergence of IPTV. It was his advice to public television executives that set me off.
When Internet TV becomes dramatically, unequivocally, and inexorably cheaper than the other three distribution models, those other models will quickly go away. That’s why I argued in PBS meetings to forget about spending $1.8 billion to upgrade local stations for digital TV and instead sell or lease that spectrum for commercial data use and throw the resulting $3 billion (lease revenue plus the $1.8 billion savings) into rebuilding the network solely as an Internet service.
Aside from my original point that it’s far too early to ponder such a move. It’s also the wrong path for public television to take. PTV is not a for-profit enterprise. It’s mission is to serve those left unserved by the existing media marketplace. If PTV had any other mission, it would be hard pressed to justify the public funding that accounts for approximately 30% of its operating budget. PTV makes news and public affairs programming, children’s programming, and cultural programming available to those who can’t afford satellite or cable service. How is this population, still watching TV with rabbit ears, going to make the switch to IPTV? I don’t see the political will in America to wire the inner cities and rural areas of America for robust broadband services.
We can debate the best use of public funds to meet PTV’s mission, but we can’t forget the mission. Cringley should know better. PBS gave him his original platform.
Slaying Goliath… a word to my students
Another school year over. Another group of seniors graduating. I’ll miss this bunch. As a graduation present, I give them the following reading assignment.
Being a complete Malcolm Gladwell fanboy, my heart races just a bit whenever I crack a New Yorker that features one of his articles. This week’s issue features Gladwell’s How David Beats Goliath. While primarily focusing on improbable sports and military victories, the main thesis applies to all facets of life. Applied intelligently effort can beat talent. It’s evident in my students’ work. As I grade final projects, I see that students who may lack key technical skills overcome that deficiency by sheer force of will - spending hours on complex workarounds to get the desired result.
Gladwell’s The Tipping Point
If what you do doesn’t make you jump out of bed in the morning eager to get to work, you won’t be any good. I’ve left several jobs and a couple of careers not because I was burned out or miserable, but simply because I’d lost my passion for what I was doing. As another school year ends, I again counsel my students not to do anything they don’t love. If you want to direct, don’t work at Banana Republic. If you want to edit, don’t take a job at an insurance company. Don’t think about money. If you love what you’re doing, you’ll be good. If you’re good, the money will come.
Some of my students have gone on to careers far from the daydreams they passed the time with in the back row of FT504. I’ve taught future special education teachers, web application developers, nutritionists, and a few bankers among the many writers, editors, producers, and directors I’ve had in my class. Now my own kids are thinking about college and what they want to do with the rest of their lives. It’s not what they do that counts, just how they do it.
My day job still fires me up, but there’s that extra bounce on teaching days during the semester. I don’t really look forward to summer vacation as an adult the way I did as a kid. Good luck, graduates. You’ll be missed on campus. Fare thee well.
IPTV’s quiet revolution
Political revolution’s have their defining moment - a statue is toppled in a public square, a wall comes down, somebody’s head is removed. Technology revolutions are (thankfully) a different breed. The revolution is declared, nothing happens for a long time, and then the trickle of change begins. That’s been the case with IPTV. For all the hype, a lot of nothing has been going down. Maybe the ground is beginning to shift.
Saturday my Roku arrived. Roku is a Netflix-enabled set top box, capable of streaming directly from your Netflix to queue to your TV. Only a relative few Netflix DVD titles are available for streaming, but at $99, the box was worth a try. Set up took more than the three minutes the launch screen promised due to a flash update, but still easy enough. Using your existing Internet connection, the box accesses the Netflix queue. Unlike Blu-ray disks, Netflix has yet to charge additional for this functionality. (Of course Blu-ray began at no extra charge, then cost $1/mo., and now runs $4/mo. per standard account.)
Netflix did what I wanted Apple TV to do, bring IPTV to my living room. After a year and a half of Apple TV, I’ve bought less than a handful of titles and rented none. Apple TV in my house is nothing more than an expensive iPod with a nifty screen saver for my HDTV. The family already watched more titles on Roku than Apple TV. Until Apple changes the Apple TV business model, Apple TV will remain moribund.
Though initial reviews and customer testimonials have been overwhelmingly positive, it’s too early to declare victory for Roku. There are still rough patches ahead for Roku - or any potentially successful IPTV platform.
- Pricing model Netflix will have to begin charging for the service. It’s too easy to spend the day streaming titles. Serving up scores of titles per account may become more costly than maintaining DVD stock and using the USPS to act as a governor.
- Network performance As these services gain in popularity, large areas of the country will suffer network performance issues. I can already tell when school’s out every afternoon in my neighbor based on increased network latency. It can only get worse.
- Cable providers will want a piece of the action Roku’s using all that bandwidth to compete against cable’s on-demand offerings. Cable is going to want a piece of the action or things might get ugly.
The larger point is that my family is already hooked on IPTV. There’s no turning back.
Where Cisco wants to take video
Cisco’s acquisition of Pure Digital, makers of the Flip video cameras came as little surprise to the digerati. What Linksys was to wireless home networking, the Flip is to consumer video. Good enough, simple, and inexpensive.
Cisco made its name as a big iron networking powerhouse. With its heavily publicized purchase of Linksys the company bought its way into home networking. And with its less heavily publicized acquisition of set top box maker Scientific Atlanta, Cisco gained control of another digital gateway into the home.
So why would a networking company want into the acquisition business? GigaOm has written extensively on the purchase - the reasoning behind it and whether Cisco overspent.
Cisco is just the company to make video accessible to all. Every household has at least one camcorder. Mostly it sits idle. Acquiring the video is easy enough - hit record just as granny is about to blow out the candles or the cat is about to flush the toilet. The moment can now live forever on tape, disk, or flash media. Therein lies the problem. It’s cumbersome to do anything with it after the material has been recorded. Cuing up the media to show to family and friends around the flat panel is a pain in the neck. Editing and distributing the video online is a similar pain, just head south 36 inches.
The Flip camera solves half the problem. With its USB port, the camera can attach itself to any Mac or PC. Now comes the scary part for a guy who makes his living designing editing software… The Flip camera comes preloaded with all the editing software the consumer needs. Plug the camera into the computer, and it prompts the user to install all the necessary software to edit and publish his video online. The FlipShare software doesn’t compare to Pinnacle Studio or iMovie, but it doesn’t have to. It’s so easy that people will actually use it.
Cisco has the capability to solve the rest of the problem. As GigaOm noted, it can eliminate the computer. Shoot, push to the cloud, and edit on the cloud. No Macs. No PCs. What Polaroid did for photography 50-some years ago, Cisco can do for videography. It can make it instant, inexpensive, and fun.
Cameras preloaded with editing software will be a minor disruption to business as usual. Editing on the cloud is where this is all going, and the industry will be turned on its head.
