Disqus - Latest Comments for Stephen Hill

Re: Aggregation and Consolidation: A Rationale

Stephen Hill — Mon, 15 May 2006 21:45:21 -0000

Todd, Mark:

I couldn't agree more with the spirit, the tone and the specifics of of what you have written here and I have been convinced of the absolutenecessity of offering an aggregated, consolidated, listener-centric hybrid broadcast and web service since the full dimensions of the digital challenge became clear several years ago.

The main thing I have to add to your worthy list of imperatives is to point out the curious avoidance of the core issue at stake here: it is not just the structure and service design of public radio that needs fundamental transformation -- but the existing business model.

What is that model? While the proportions vary, most public broadcasters have diversified and hedged their income portfolio over the years to include a combination of listener contributions, grants, underwriting, and tax-based (CPB) revenue.

The problem is that every one of these income streams is vulnerable to disruption and decline in the world we are moving into.

I've developed this point in more detail elsewhere (see the link to stephen hill : spatial relations on the right) but the main reason is that for the first time in its history, public radio will have significant competition for both its chosen content areas and for general "attention share." This will have the effect of reducing listenership, which will reduce income from underwriting, foundations, and the public. What will happen to CPB funding is anybody's guess, but is not something that we can trust, at least in the current political climate.

So I would add to your list of "why aggregation makes sense"

(d) the need to provide a truly competitive value propostion and level of service
and
(e) the need to build a financial platform that can support the mission and the system in the digital era.

The implication of these two points is that the current value proposition underlying public radio -- as expressed in fundraising, underwriting and grant pitches that say essentially "support us because we are the only place where you can get this kind of programming" (or this particular program) -- will be devalued or rendered obviously false.

Camus said that "There is only one truly serious philosophical question and that is suicide." In the same way, there is only one truly serious issue at the core of this challenge, and that is how we design our infrastructure and business proposition to pursue our mission.

As far as I can see, this is the primary reason to build the kind of aggregated, consolidated, mission and listener-focused services you and other system progressives are proposing. If the resulting services cannot provide a competitive value proposition for both listeners and funders, the public radio system as we have known it is in for a long, unpleasant decline. Public television since cable provides an all too instructive example.

Yet discussion of how we would revise the core business models in the system is still a "third rail" issue: approached, but never really touched. We have to get past that to move forward, and I am eager to participate in the conversation.

:: Stephen Hill

Re: Aggregation and Consolidation: Stephen Hill Comments

Stephen Hill — Wed, 17 May 2006 02:56:55 -0000

Dennis Haarsager posted a particularly useful "Content Flow" diagram last week at his indispensible blog Technology360.com. Referring to It will help to focus this discussion.

The post: http://technology360.typepad.com/technology360/...

The diagram: http://technology360.typepad.com/photos/uncateg...

What this shows in schematic form is the growth of new bi-directional online distribution pathways from "producer" to "listener or viewer," and the rise of a new class of "aggregators" or "bundlers" where programming is or will be available.

The new business model(s) are implicit in this diagram. The next step is to annotate each box and show how each activity on the path to the listener/viewer is being or will be supported.

Of course this diagram refers only the to the public media infrastructure. To get the full picture, the entire diagram must itself be placed in the larger context of all online, audio and video media and delivery options for the public.

:: SH

Re: The IMA impasse

Stephen Hill — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:17:35 -0000

After six or seven years of trying to push the river, I've regretfully come to believe that the forces that drive the legacy system — both in public television and public radio — are simply too entrenched, too torpid, 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.

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 let's face it, the ball has been dropped at the network and system level time after time since the extent of the digital challenge became clear to everyone, and there is little evidence that sufficient positive forces are now acting within the system to change this. Negative forces are not enough.

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

Essentially, the system will get hollowed out from within by 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.

The few stations that remain centers of program production have the best shot to adapt, but it should be worrisome that most trendspotters 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 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 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 increasing 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 every opportunity promoted by the IMA to setup meaningful public media system collaborations, charge them to create significant new services, and fund them so they have a snowball's chance of surviving in a globally flaming mediascape.

Face it folks : it ain't gonna happen here.

The IMA isn't going to accomplish anything because it is fundamentally powerless. The moment of opportunity has passed — it needed to happen in 2004-2005. The IMA turned into a good 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 larger context of a copyright regime that has for years refused or only reluctantly provided the licenses needed for digital services to offer the innovations necessary to wean the public off physical media. That's one problem that public media does not have when it originates its own programming.)

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

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

Re: The IMA impasse

Stephen Hill — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:34:52 -0000

John,

I agree that the work Rob Paterson is doing is terrific, but even in the best scenarios the impact and the benefits of his work will be limited to a small fraction of the network.

Stimulating others to adopt successful formats and operational strategies worked in the past in public broadcasting, but there was a crucial difference: the set of skills and indeed, the very modes of thinking required, were already widely shared and agreed upon within the system. Success online requires a distinctly different skill set and an almost complete inversion of 'broadcast thinking.'

What Doc Searls said on his panel at IMA (I watched it online) was that the new business and service models would come from the demand side, not the supply side.

This observation, if true, condemns legacy broadcasters to the sidelines in this evolving process unless they reinvent themselves effectively. Those in public media who are pushing for more interaction with the 'audience' and more social networking features are moving in the right general direction, but I believe that even these models may be oversimplified for a fully realized digital public media system.

Your idea of inverting the cash flow between stations and the network is nicely subversive. I hope you are not burned at the stake for suggesting it, but I'm pretty sure it would take something like the dramatic meltdown the recorded music industry is now going through to provoke it. Several years of double digit declines in audience numbers would be the equivalent, but that was not enough to motivate PBS and their stations to make the necessary changes, so I wouldn't bet on it happening.

Two years ago and last year at the IMA conference I attempted to pose the issue of new business models for online operation (one of them was similar to your idea -- in fact the networks actually paid the stations to carry their core shows in one variation). No one was ready for even a cursory discussion of these questions, yet they are absolutely central to any effective reorganization of the current system.

Starting a new non-profit entity to unify public media may or may not be necessary. We don't really need a new governing organization as much as we need a common technical platform and a new set of business rules for public media producers, distributors, aggregators and platform providers. It's unavoidably going to be messier than the central network/affiliate paradigm, so we don't need as much control. In fact, too much control may inhibit it from happening.

This is exactly what Mike Homer of Open Media Network (open, get it?) was trying to do before he was sidelined by a chronic illness. Even had this not happened, Mike's extraordinary generosity and functional contribution was almost completely ignored or misunderstood by the powers that be in public broadcasting, and has never been utilized at anywhere near its potential. This is another reason why I believe that the solutions of the future will come from Internet users, programmers and entrepreneurs, not from existing public broadcasters.

I'm pleased you find the example of what we are doing with Hearts of Space inspiring. I wish I could say I was motivated to set a good example for the benefit of others, but in fact the main motivator was survival, and then trying to create something with the resources at hand.

The main thing we have learned from running a niche music archive service online since 2001 is that you have to engage fully with your users/listeners to fulfill their needs and aspirations — not condemn them to limited choices, limited interaction, and twice-yearly appeals for support. You have to reinvent yourself as a web application developer and get into a constant cycle of innovations, improvements and additions to your service — 'permanent beta.'

Finally, while I have no intention of abandoning public broadcasting — we continue to syndicate our show to over 200 CPB qualified stations — our growth and our revenues are increasingly web-centric and multimedia. Essentially, we are going through the same transition that every actor in the public media system will have to go through themselves — now, or in the near future if they want to survive.

I recognize that people have jobs and responsibilities and institutions have histories that are worth celebrating and preserving. So I don't envy you or anyone else who is calling for change in the existing public media system, since it is a 'disruptive' activity by definition. I have simply retired from that fight and, as a tactical matter, am advising you and other progressive voices to consider their options.

If you are going to have your boat rocked by tsunami-sized waves, I think it's better to be on a boat that's headed in the right direction and is used to a certain amount of turbulence. The underlying values that have been articulated and demonstrated by the current institutions will survive. But it is nowhere written in stone who will be the ones to re-assert them in the digital era.

:: SH

Re: Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA

Stephen Hill — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:35:48 -0000

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? Billions.

Mass diffusion of PCs required not only a substantial end user hardware investment that has also taken some 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 that now occurs along generational faultlines.

Establishing MP3 players was done 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.

Re: Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA

Stephen Hill — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:59:45 -0000

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...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 shows, it needs a user inteface 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 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

Re: Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA

Stephen Hill — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:08:06 -0000

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.

Re: Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA

Stephen Hill — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 04:34:31 -0000

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

Re: Why innovation must be part of public media’s DNA

Stephen Hill — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:45:45 -0000

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

Re: Internet memory lane

Stephen Hill — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:47:39 -0000

John, I don't think it's helpful to overplay this distinction and turn it into a polarity.

"Content" "community" and "interactivity" co-exist on the web, and each plays its part in a successful service.

One of the things that leads to this kind of false dichotomizing is the very abstraction of the words "content" and "information."

If you say "programs," "stories," "experiences" and "personalities" you are a lot closer to the actual context of radio listening or television viewing by the so-called public. A lot of this translates intact to the online experience.

On the other hand, you are right in saying that public media organizations need to rethink their priorities and their investments to retain their valued role in our cultural communication mix.

The web is levelling differences in traditional media by operating as a common multimedia platform, and unbalancing the traditional supply and demand equations — but that does not mean that the quality of the "content" is any less important. Indeed, it is the key motivation for involvement.

:: SH

Re: More BPP and innovation thinking

Stephen Hill — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:47:21 -0000

(also posted on Twitter) I'm not too smart for my own good, just not sugar-coating reality where Public Media is concerned.

Steve Behrens just invited me and others to comment on the DirectCurrent forum about the NPR API proposal. Yeah, I probably sound annoying, but argue with me on the merits:

http://currentpublicmedia.ning.com/forum/topic/...

Finally, the important question. Yes, you have to start your own public media company.

From your current vantage point in the frozen north it may sound impossible, but trust me, move to DC and get together with the other frustrated NPR vets and web shop employees and you'll have plenty of energy to work with. Show those bureaucratic MFs how it's done.

If not now, when?

If not you (and the others), who?

:: SH

Re: NPR + PI = ?

Stephen Hill — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:29:49 -0000

Makes sense to me. More production troops and and more capacity to provide web help for stations that don't have their own expertise.

I can't think of any advantage in NPR's an PI's web shops competing with each other to service the same stations. Better an efficient monopoly that offers more comprehensive services.