So far, so fast
It’s only been a year since podcasting hit the mainstream press. In the course of doing some research on TiVo, I came across this Newsweek article from December 7, 2004. It’s an explainer piece about podcasting. It’s hard to believe that only a year ago the word wasn’t even in common usage. Interestingly, the article describes alternatives to podcasting.
Podcasting is not the only technology that saves online audio for your digital player. There’s AudioFeast, an Internet service similar in concept to podcasting but with a menu of hundreds of established shows, and no amateurs, for $50 a year. There’s also RadioShark, a $70 gadget that looks just like a shark’s fin and records live radio onto your hard drive with a time buffer, allowing the user to pause or rewind.
Anybody ever heard of these things?
The RadioShark would make a great Christmas gift… in 1993.
Nifty piece of engineering. Awful timing.
Slam dunk for TiVo
Now things get really interesting. TiVo’s announcement to extend TiVo ToGo to iPod and PSP transfers is exciting enough, but imagine if the commercials could be zapped along the way. It’s probably something that can be done fairly easily in software. Broadcast television signals include closed captions. There’s always a break in the captions when the system goes to commericals. The trick is figuring our which new caption pulse represents the restart of the show and not just another commerical.
And TiVo’s answer to DRM:
To discourage abuse or unlawful use of this feature, TiVo intends to employ “watermark” technologies on programs transferred to a portable device using the TiVo ToGo feature that would enable tracking of the account from which a transferred program originated.
I like it. Don’t put the stuff on BitTorrent and you have nothing to worry about. Of course Apple won’t be thrilled. Those $1.99 episodes of Lost start looking expensive. When the feature ships I will probably switch from my cable company-supplied DVR (with not as good as TiVo functionality to begin with) to the standalone TiVo product.
New Life for Network TV?
Lest anyone think it’s game over for big media. IPTV, pods, and portals will give the major networks a direct connection to their audiences. MIT’s Spotlight on TV features two compelling essays on the topic.
Henry Jenkins of MIT chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of Global Frequency. Jenkins believes the lessons learned by WB will be picked up by all the networks. While I agree with his general premise, existing stake holders will significantly delay Jenkins vision of the future. I just can’t see ASCAP, BMI, AFTRA/SAG, and the WGA allowing the networks free reign to distribute this stuff at their discretion. It will take years to get everyone to sign on the dotted line.
For the nearer term, IPTV will thrive only where the unions and publishing giants don’t have leverage. It’s not just that the long tail is now economically viable. It’s the only stuff that can clear the necessary legal hurdles.
Ivan Askwith’s Slate article, cites the role of DVD sales in keeping series such as Family Guy on the air. He posits that iTunes, Google, and Yahoo! paid downloads will in essence have the audience voting with its wallets, but I’m not so sure that’s the logical conclusion to the trend. Askwith’s a lot smarter than I, so if one was to gamble on whose vision of the future is more likely to come to fruition I’d bet on his. That said, this is my blog, so here’s my opinion. I suspect that these new distribution models will render broadcast television as we know it virtually obsolete. News, weather, and sports will dominate the grid. Even TiVo as we currently know it will go by the wayside. Everything will be available anytime. Why tether it to the box attached to the living room TV? Why make me decide in advance what I want to watch? It’s too easy to forget to record what you want.
Handy iPod video converters
On the Mac side MoviesForMyPod allows for batch encoding for the iPod with the H.264 codec (which Compressor 2 still doesn’t allow). It’s no faster than QuickTime Pro’s export, but the batch capabilities are huge workflow improvement.
There are a bunch on the PC side. Videora has a nice feature set and deals with a decent number of file formats.
Can Google save mobile carriers from themselves?
Last year when Sprint started offering mobile video, and again this past spring when Verizon launched V Cast, I had high hopes for mobile video. Just out of b-school I was brimming with ideas. Unfortunatelty most didn’t have a hope of getting off the ground because getting on the carriers’ closed networks would be too costly. Remember these are the same companies that charge $2.99 for a ring tone when you can buy the whole song for $0.99.
By the way, the ring tone business is one hack away from total elimination. While a greedy little content producer like me can be persuaded that buying a song from iTunes doesn’t entitle me to play a little bit of that song every time my phone rings, that’s going to be one tough ethical case to make to the Kazaa generation. Have at it carriers.
The poor mobile carriers seem to forget that they are a commodity. They supply a dumb pipe. Trying to add value to their networks with exclusive content (or services) is a fools errand. Any content worth making available to millions of Verizon customers is worth making available to millions of T-Mobile customers. Unless the carrier’s willing to pay through the nose for exclusive content, it won’t be exclusive and they will be forced once again to compete on price. If the carrier does pay through the nose, the customers aren’t going to pay enough for it to make it worthwhile.
Here’s one way of looking at it. Let’s say the NFL wants to sell the rights to game summaries to wireless customers. Now if any organization understands marketing, it’s the NFL. They know exactly how many people want that content. They probably have a reasonable assumption about how much those people would be willing to pay. And they are also smart enough to know that very, very few people are going to switch carriers on the basis of NFL highlight availability on a 2″ screen. This last point is lost on the carriers. It’s a phone, not a lifestyle enhancement device. Until every carrier offers great reception everywhere (and they are not even close to that benchmark) people are going to choose a service based on reception. Verizon owns me. Cingular has no signal in the Kingpin Interactive northeast regional headquarters complex. Neither does T-Mobile, and Sprint has a poor signal. So I’m stuck, and VZ could charge me almost anything it wanted.
So I don’t care if Cingular has the NFL exclusively. I’m not going anywhere. And the NFL knows this. It would charge an exclusive carrier enough to make up for all that lost revenue from people like me who have been indentured by carriers. That’s why there are no NFL highlights on mobile phones. It’s a shame. I’d love access to game highlights around the NFL when I’m sitting in Gillette stadium at half time or in the parking lot for an hour after the game. But that’s only eight times a year. The better business model would be to buy a la carte from the NFL. But the stupid carriers don’t get this. They could make money selling me bandwidth to get to the NFL, but they can’t make money selling me the NFL. (If the NFL could ever pull this off, it can use Gotuit’s nifty ITV technology to tag the highlights I want and save a limited number of them on my phone.)
So how is Google going to fix this? I was reading Charlene Li’s blog the other day. She had a Forrester colleague review Google’s local service on mobile phones. Charlie Golvin noted this:
While the carriers may bemoan the fact that Google is taking traffic from their own yellow pages and directory information services, in truth this is a very good thing for them. The familiar Google interface as a simple extension of the desktop experience will drive users to consume more data on their phones, and while that doesn’t necessarily mean revenue for carriers like Sprint who price data flat, it means that consumers are shifting their behavior from voice to voice and data — which is the most significant impediment to the adoption of other data services today.
It’s great when an analyst gets it.
If the carriers wise up and let the Googles of the world do what they do best, they can make a living with their dumb pipes. But if they continue to try to become media moguls, they will fail.
