Backfield in Motion

Capsule:  Today's digital TV won't evolve into tomorrow's TV fantasy--mobile, transformational, interoperable, personalized, location-based, searchable, technologically advanced, service-laden, efficient, fertile and environmentally sensitive--until traditional TV (facilities-bound broadcast, cable and satellite) finds a way to score even more points--as in dollars-and-sense--from their lock on the US entertainment leader-board.  Is it possible that the Google/Apple nexus--and its mobile digital progeny--will work with regulators to disrupt the process?  


The Financial Times on Google-Apple
The Economist on Apps


Functional business models for online TV entertainment don't exist beyond gaming. Despite the multimedia promises of monoliths Google, Apple and Microsoft, the only TV model still making sense these days is multichannel TV through cable and satellite (including broadcast) distribution.  Cable profits continue to rise in volume and speed, giving MSO's a penchant to buy themselves something big to forestall death and taxes.  Still, the core cable distribution profit drivers--top-line customer and revenue growth--are spending the Summer of 2010 in rerun mode, building mainly on rate increases and the churn-churned spending requirements of reselling every home on the block on the Triple Play.

So there's something riveting about the evolving Google-Apple grudge match and its relationship to our imagined digital TV future. Who'll bring it on in the next wave of digital TV--playing FM to cable's persistent AM of successful news and sports?  Will HBO really GO online, like its TV Everywhere brand extension promises?  Or will it OD on subscription-on-demand contentment, while a new mobile entertainment form becomes the new TV? (Can you imagine "It's not TV; it's HBO" being turned into a critique?)

The mobile point's tough to fake.  It'll require a major leap for the fixed wired cable and satellite distributors to re-imagine themselves as healthy fast food, in addition to that full Sunday dinner served in the fancy eating room.  Just as you can't imagine prime rib in a bag as a meal one-the-go, none of us can stay "on the cord" and stay active.  What will cable and satellite do to reinvent themselves as the new protein bar?

Can content and distribution break themselves into bite-size profitable chunks for mobile money?  Or, should the renaissance of vertical integration rule?  Is it time to start rethinking all the successful content and distribution break-ups over the past few years--Time Warner's top-of-mind--as so 2008?  Not really. Strong tensions between content and distribution are way-older than 2008.  The separation between cable content and cable programming was mandated in the 1980's when the US government required cable operators to sell their programming services to their satellite competition.  

But could a similar move, favoring the programmers over the distributors, be in the works today?  The new FCC doesn't look like it wants too active a role in re-sorting the media world.  Still, it's easy to imagine a 2012 trip across-the-border that requires cable distributors to share the programming they own with digital distributors--like Google and Apple--at reasonable rates and with supportive service guarantees in exchange for the many rights the wired world continues to enjoy and employ.  

Of course: there is that nasty competitive quarrel between Google and Apple about alternative platforms and standards. No matter how combative the quarreling duo may be, does anyone doubt that the combatants are at their most powerful working together?  They complement each other so well.  You say: Open system; I say: Closed system. You say: Free; I say: Paid. You say: Plays Anywhere; I say: Plays-best-on-My-devices.  The only thing we both say in unison is: It's fun making money sailing on a cloud.

As a quid pro quo for being granted a new form of broadband distribution transmission rights in a competitive form to cable and satellite (while "borrowing" the "utility portion" of cable and telco broadband networks,) Google/Apple may just agree to subsidize state and local governments with a new mobile franchise payment, equivalent to a small portion of the revenue they derive from mobile content delivery.  Of course, once we're down this path, we might as well imagine several G-APPS--or application-driven versions of Google and Apple--because if money starts moving to this side of the ledger, it could be a digital green-fields moment for new distribution hybrids (and for new technology and new jobs.)

Wireless spectrum owners and device manufacturers are unlikely to put up a fight.  Many will benefit if they can resolve the spectrum capacity and interoperability issues that need to be smoothed out to form a clear revenue superhighway.  They'll need to resolve these issues anyway, just to stay ahead of the existing competition and to keep pace with the equity markets' performance growth requirements.

On the public side of the issue, given the number of real gaps between local, state and federal budgets and the money the US stands to earn on our current course over the next few years, new "Google/Apple hybrids" driving new taxes-and-fees across the jurisdictional spectrum are likely to be welcomed by Democrats and Republicans alike, no matter who's in charge. 

Which content companies win in this scenario?  Maybe Disney is the likely innovator, with its broad catalogue of TV content and distribution, including broadcast, cable and theme parks, not to mention the international sports monolith ESPN.  What about Viacom and Fox?  How far will Time Warner's HBO Go go?  

In preparation for a world where the media makes even more money from more places than it does today, traditional TV will have to learn how to divide a larger pie with a larger field of players on the move.  


That kind of score is going to require distributed mobility, meaning: our mobile future will include more than today's wireless telcos.  And, depending on how quickly the content companies decide to place their bets, inertia will define the competitive dynamics: the media in motion will remain in motion and the rest will remain at rest.

Cool Fire

Capsule: This week's lethal gunfire on the Mavi Marmara competed with the Gulf Coast oil spill for most infuriating news story. In contrast to the intensity of the reporting--hour after hour of repetitive video footage of the Gaza-bound flotilla blood fight interrupted by dead and dying Louisiana marsh and sea-life--the lasting public reaction to both stories seems subdued, at least in terms of igniting a real policy dialogue.  Are we quietly reasoning through the issues in the news on our way to an evolved dialogue about the environment, energy consumption and peace in the Middle East?  Or has the TV medium--resplendent in its apparent access to diverse views on hundreds of news programs--become the message?  Have we delegated our emotional reactions to the companies delivering the news, while we observe life in air conditioned comfort?


What if We Drop Israel?
On the Media: The Role of Video in Israeli Blockade Crisis

BP's Gulf of Mexico Response
The Huffington Post: Louisiana Oil Spill 2010 Photos
Network
Marshall McLuhan
Noam Chomsky


Following this week's Israeli gunfire that killed nine aid workers en route to Gaza, the news cycle broke only to turn to the developing BP Gulf Coast oil slick, giving equal time to the rage-stoking arguments for and against an American break up with both the oil industry and with Israel. Really?


Are either of these ideas remotely realistic or desirable?  How do they get introduced as possibilities?  Have we started consuming our news as if it's  targeted just to us in pre-digested pieces--a long-held media aspiration that's an equal mix of technological brilliance and grand commercialism?  When will we be able to vote out anything we don't like with the click of a cursor or a remote--the ultimate reality a la carte?  


With all of our new age digital technology, we may be avoiding educated decisions about the most difficult issues in the news because of the simple emotional way our news is delivered.  It may feel good when we see something that reinforces our deepest desires for simplicity, power and satiety.  It may even feel good when we're invited to explode--or when the people in the TV explode for us--but are we really making things better?  


Much of what we're doing when we watch cable news and cruise broadband headlines is distracting ourselves, drawing our minds away from difficult questions. Why don't we have a respectable plan for oil independence beyond offshore drilling?  Is it because a real plan has no silver bullets and will involve some long-term combination of offshore drilling, nuclear energy, repurposed natural gas and an improved relationship with oil exporters? Yuck. Who wants to spend their wind down time after work winding up on that kind of a brain-teaser?


While we're at it: what's our evolved thinking for peace in the Middle East?  G_d knows we've been thinking about it for awhile. Is it time to stand staunchly beside our ally Israel while having deep but ineffective sympathies for the Palestinians? (The targeted "B" side of that ideological single is, of course, standing staunchly behind the Palestinians while having deep but ineffective sympathies for Israel.) Why does our relationship with Israel and the Middle East get accepted--even marketed--as an imponderable rather than as a commitment to a long-term set of actions to be taken responsibly and courageously?


Of course in the real world, someplace well outside the range of many TV cameras, the two issues dominating this news week were linked, connected viscerally by armed conflict in the Middle East and Africa over the last century.  Blood has been spilled all over the world trying to carry out reasonable and unreasonable policies on oil rights and the breaking down or building up of the fragile balance between Israel, the Palestinians and the intractable warrior stance of many of Israel's neighbors. 


Given the number of wars that have been inspired by oil and Middle East aggression, why aren't we moved to more responsible action?  Shouldn't we be getting as mad as hell--like Network's Howard Beale in Paddy Chayevsky's 1976 master-work--until we decide we're not going to take it anymore?  


Maybe the anger we need is inside the TV.  The news borders on dramatic entertainment; certainly, distracting pathos.  Think about this Winter's rage-filled imagery of neo-libertarians summoning Hitler as a fascist facsimile for the Obama administration. Think about the late Spring's smoldering media fury over the fact that President Obama doesn't get furious enough for the TV cameras.  We've got a cable news mood ring for every season--and lately it's always red.  Why do more?


Broadband news reads aren't much better as they compete with TV for passive eyeballs.  Newser's bad boy (and Rupert Murdoch biographer) Michael Wolff crashed another ridiculous headline onto the shore of the media consciousness this week, asking why we don't "just break up" with Israel in one of his blogs.  That's not a serious thought; it's an emotional distraction that puts distance between us and our ability to think constructively. Of course, it may make us want to read more Wolff wondering what delicious lunacy he'll concoct next.  


It makes you wonder if the news was full of similar emotional distractions in the wind-up to the 20th century's two World Wars.  The growth of tabloid journalism in the UK has been linked to WWII; and, American tabloid newspapers published many 20th century "yellow pages" stoking public emotion around multiple wars.  Has the media always been both the relief valve and the advance signal for the dark emotions inside you and me?  Despite our deepest paranoia: likely, not intentionally.  


One of the paradoxical features of the news throughout media history is that it's gotten less global and therefore less complete during periods of heavy competition.  Today's western media consumer enjoys hundreds of news brands, all vying in a commercially inhospitable digital world for a business model, looking for tons of viewers who will provide tons of revenue to ensure profitable survival for the lucky few, who will duplicate each other until the market runs dry.


Costly foreign bureaus have been consolidated or closed in record numbers as Google and Yahoo!'s Brand X news has grown.  The beginning of the end of the newspaper, relatively speaking, may mean our tolerance for in-depth information and analytical nuance has decreased in proportion to the number of video stories and emotional web headlines replacing it.


There is a glimmer of hope in broadband's cool fire: internet savvy news readers may be better informed in their active news hunting than passive TV viewers, mostly because of the instantaneous access internet search can provide to alternative content.  Of course, news hunting via Google, Yahoo! and Bing comes with its own counter-balancing glimmer of despair: how devoted is a relatively passive and highly distracted citizenry to the news hunt?  How good is a search-optimized media world at turning up the untold story?


A sample web search of this week's in-depth reporting on the Middle East and the Gulf Coast leaves much insight to be desired.  Are the tonier news tomes in need of better search-engine optimization?  Do you have to be well-informed in the first place in order to search for meaningful information? How can we stay focused on complex issues with so many sirens blaring and newscasters raging and weeping in, let's face it, a pretty entertaining style?


Of course, we know that solving the world's problems will require us to spend time and energy getting underneath the headlines and into history and context. Of course, we know that it will be hard and time-consuming.  Of course, we know that a rich understanding of the moral principles behind the news is reserved for the few who stay hungry.  


Still...it's easier to feel sated by balancing a few ad-infused hours in front of the TV kind of emoting with a few ad-infused hours on the internet kind of searching.  But if we know that we're getting the news we deserve, isn't it time we asked for more? 




"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume." 
Noam Chomsky 

When Worlds Collide

Capsule:  Digital media turned an important personal growth corner this week. The Wall Street Journal revealed that Facebook and MySpace were betraying friends while friending advertisers. Exactly how excited must the Journal have been to put the screws to the digital revolution by spying on the spies? Pretty excited, except when it came to inquire about News Corp's MySpace and its intelligence-sharing policies.... Can democracy be crowd-sourced by private enterprise? Should people ever entrust their personal rights to a digital media business? Was the digital euphoria of this last pre-recession decade a product of utopian wishful-thinking in a social climate of greed and excess?  (Oh, grow up!)

The Wall Street Journal
Forget Email
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
Yahoo! on MySpace


Last week, digital darlings Facebook and MySpace were caught sharing their "users'" personally identifiable information (e.g., names and hometowns) with advertisers.  Like any predictable pre-teen, Facebook claimed it had been misunderstood and "changed" its policy after the deception was revealed--but not before protesting that there would have been no deception had its registered users bothered to read the terms and conditions they signed up for in the first place.  


By using the caveat emptor defense, Facebook unfriended its users as well as the digital "opt-in" concept at a critical phase.  Advertising is trying to find its market through new business models in a determinedly digital world.  To succeed, digital marketers will have to take the "opt-in" concept to new bankable heights.  They'll have to be clear until it hurts when it comes to informing online customers of the terms and conditions of their digital business relationships.  And, digital customers will have to grow up and recognize that they're just customers to those digital brands that seemed to understand them so well. 


In the same week, Google was caught by Germany--how do they have the time? weren't they still chasing Greece?--collecting e-mails through intercepted wireless paths while roving German neighborhoods to improve their Google Maps product.  Google quickly revealed the screw-up, claiming that the wireless data interception was unintentional--tough to believe given that Google admits to combing g-mail for attitudinal data that pegs its users to specific commercial segments that appeal to advertisers.  Is Google really reading our mail? What about our blogs? (Let's hope so.)  Did we inadvertently sign up for that by failing to read that never-ending bore of a terms-and-conditions micro-screen pop-up?


Maybe it's time for everybody to take some personal responsibility for this wacky state of affairs.  For years, while the global consumer market was enjoying the fruits of past, present and future labors, the digital economy was setting its ground-rules.  Rule #1: the "user" is king.  More than profit, more than revenue, online usage is the number one metric of online success.  Build crowds and the money will follow.


And follow it has, through advertising contracts that have made the digital advertiser the most important user of all.  The brands are in on our lives; they're in on our conversations; and, they're even in on our pictures, if useful brand data can be gleaned from our digital albums.  Yet, even with all of this personal access, the ultimate digital advertising money won't be realized until the theory of personalized advertising as a new direct marketing hybrid pays off.


Because it bets on future buying behavior (for now, in a recession,) digital ad revenue is more of a loan on future results than cash for the rest of us.  Like hyper-inflated values on digital real estate, usage metrics have promised advertisers a rich future that has only been realized to date by the equity participants savvy enough to get in and get out through the very tight ownership window.  Everybody else--including both advertisers and regular people who have made the investment of time and heart it takes to build a Facebook page--has paid without equivalent profit.  


Digital payment currency for the consumer includes unsolicited advertising approaches as well as the foreboding of knowing you're being watched by interested fans who might easily turn into an angry mob led by your creditors (or your ex-spouse.)  But don't worry: freedom (i.e., peaceful anonymity) can come through an actual "Facebook suicide"--the bathos-filled term used for erasing all traces of your Facebook page.


NPR Now entered the privacy debate last week by analyzing the potential personal cost of social media in a report on online privacy violations.  According to NPR's legal sources, Facebook is commonly searched by attorneys looking for incriminating tidbits that can strengthen workers' compensation and divorce cases--all admissable in court.  Those pictures of you obviously drunk with a too-familiar co-worker?  If they show you standing, they can cost you your disability claim.  If they show you canoodling, they can cost you your prenup in a nasty divorce.


Lucky dogs, traditional media have been slow to take what they know about the experiential habits of their customers to the digital bank. Federal regulators prohibited wired distributors from using personal data to exploit their customers years ago.  Strangely, in its balancing of traditional and digital media, the federal government's regulatory instincts have been inconsistent in concept and execution.  While cable operators are prohibited from revealing personal data (like name and home address) linked to TV viewing habits, few clear rules apply to protecting online users surfing through a media world far more exotic than angry Fox and MSNBC editorialists, Playboy on Demand and the occasional disreputable infomercial.


So, now that we've eaten from the tree of Knowledge of Digital Good and Evil, must we live outside the Garden?  Yes.  


Of course, digital nirvana never really existed.  As painful as it is, this truth can set the media free.  At least, it can help establish new blended advertising values built on the best intentions as well as the best results.

Trading Places

Capsule:  Could Arizona's new people-control law be a reincarnation of world attitudes following the Great Depression--the one that followed the US Stock market crash of 1929?  Sometimes, you've got to move to the edge in order to see what the edge really looks like.  

CNM News Network

The New York Daily News

Now Public Crowd Powered Media 

Facebook 1 Million Strong Against the Arizona Immigration Law

Bridging the Online Language Barrier (OTM, WNYC)

Wikipedia on World Population

Wikipedia on The Great Recession

This week's media coverage of Arizona's new people-control bill is whipping up a storm of protest.  It's also reacquainting our country with our unresolved relationship with our American identity.  


Helping things get better and get worse, the media has a few neuroses of its own to de-kink.  In 2009, CNN stepped up to the pro-immigration plate by releasing TV host Lou Dobbs, who had opined loudly that our nation was going to hell because of Latin American immigration.  On the con side, Fox News is still the number one rated cable news channel, proving the power of American entertainment over culture at a time when we could use a real stab at the news.


We may be saved from our claustrophobic video-dome by our new online tools of crowd-sourcing, social media and social activism.  Have social media replaced the face in the mirror with the faces in the crowd?  Will American cultural leaders heed the call to move from Visionary Narcissism to Visionary Social Entrepreneurship because, in the end, diversity profits? 


There are over 6.8 billion people in the world. The United States has 310 million of them, meaning that if the world were a democracy where every person had a vote, America would have to make friends quick in order to influence policy.  "Friending" India or Indonesia or Brazil could do a lot to lift our numbers; and many public and private hands have turned to the task of firming up those connections.  Still, a better online connection with our global knowledge base has reintroduced some facts that are fanning US paranoia, aided by our stubborn insistence on blindly confusing the news with entertainment.


The United States represents less than five percent of the world's population.  As our relative size sinks in, it's also whipping up a familiar destructive instinct to protect our borders with force as the last bastion of America's eternal influence.  Of course broadband power, courtesy of America's largest media distributors, has delivered the tools to break those illusions down to size.  And, at cross purposes, media content is giving neo-American-isolationism a greater berth than reality actually affords.


American media influence on the global dialogue remains far larger than one might expect for a country with 5% of the world's population.  The American GDP exceeds $14 trillion--three times the world's second-largest economy in Japan and twice the GDP-per-person of China.  And even though the national debt has soared to 87% of US GDP, the American economy remains the largest in the world.  The American media voice breaks through walls around the world--a nearly $1 trillion global industry--some of which now carry the angry faces of Arizona and the angry faces of the rest of us facing Arizona.


Some of the American media influence comes from the commonality of the English language--the prominent language in the most socially mobile parts of India and, up until recently, the prominent language on the web.  But English language web dominance is changing rapidly as different world voices are building web businesses and social media in their own languages.  A rapidly growing percentage of today's internet sites are written in a language other than English.  


For the English-speaking parts of the world, there are web translators, but these translation engines make English trade places with each site's native tongue, fueling our language isolation and failing to provide a real taste of our dialogue with the rest of the world.  Our media economy may be missing more than a few coins in its sofa cushions as a result.


America's largest loss may be a newer deal than our nationalist approach to language.  US media content has embraced commercialism so completely that much of the news isn't even the news anymore.  Newspapers were always faced with this dilemma--the one that pits making a living against making a profit from hysteria that scorns objectivity.  Today, even the liberal news media give too much press significance to hate-mongering and far-right-wing bathos.  The coverage given to extreme Tea Party activists throughout 2010 is one example of the so-called liberal media falling off the other side of the horse.  


Comforting news persists from the media cynics who've studied our historical ideological dialogue closely.  The media point-of-view swings between left-and-right via a very narrow arc.  The difference between the American right and the American left is small when looked at closely--in part because the American fabric has interwoven diversity through constant cycles of immigration into its DNA.  


People coming up always moderate the views of those running in place.  The viewpoints of the young balance out the viewpoints of the old, for better and for worse.  New immigrant struggles remind us of how America became the nation that dreams of freedom and justice in the first place.  Our idealism balances our fears armed with statistics and hope.


In this light, it would be pretty to think that the Arizona legislature will walk its recent immigration bill back a giant step toward a constructive position that's actually on our ideological arc.  That process would be hastened if we acknowledged that--as mighty as our economy and our military make us--we are routinely digesting and transmitting a relatively small arc of ideas, making us less than uniformly great and less than uniformly hateful. Our highest point on the American arc is reserved for hopes and dreams, balanced on our lowest point by fear.  


When American ideals soar, they represent some of the greatest egalitarian poetry of the human spirit.  We should expect nothing less from this nation of immigrants that built its 20th century wealth fighting some portion of its wars to free the world from tyranny, influenced by the often liberal immigration policies that have given America its trans-cultural face.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Capsule:  Where did our 70's yen for social revolution go?  Today's social change is conflated with social media, courtesy of Facebook, YouTube, twitter and MySpace. Yesterday's generation gaps are today's socio-economic gulfs, defined by whether you listen to alternative music on your iPhone, slim down your telephone service to wireless only and pare your broadband down to wireless 3G--with the richest demographic trending more progressive on media and less progressive on politics. Maybe the media was always a poor barometer of cultural evolution.  But today, social change seems pushed into the background in a world of immediate gratification through centralized search, e-books, iTunes, apps and news-filtering aggregators. As predicted, the medium is the message; and, the message is less about art, political and cultural change than about recovering economic dominance.

Revolutionary Media
Revisiting the Day When Internet was Born
NPR on Wikipedia
On the Media




The Hidden Brain


People love the Beatles. Their lyrics seemed right in the '70's and they still seem right today. 

You say you want a revolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world. You tell me that it's evolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world. But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. You say you got a real solution. Well, you know we'd all love to see the plan. You ask me for a contribution. Well, you know we're doing what we can. But when you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right. You say you'll change the constitution. Well, you know we all want to change your head. You tell me it's the institution. Well, you know you better free your mind instead. But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow. Don't you know it's gonna be all right, all right, all right.  (From: "Revolution," initially released in 1968 as the "B" side of "Hey Jude.")

In some ways, the most revolutionary aspect of the Beatles' Revolution lyrics is the fact that we can look them up online today and quote them anywhere--probably not as powerful as what Lennon had in mind.  Today, one of the highest ranking Google choices under "revolutionary media" is a religious site of the same name. 

Media milestones in the '70's included what seemed like confrontational coverage of centralized power and geopolitics. In a rich irony, The New York Times' Pentagon Papers and The Washington Post's Watergate coverage poisoned perceptions of the Vietnam War and helped depose the US President who took us out of it. 

For those who cared to learn what havoc the cold war and colonialism were wreaking in southeast Asia, the Middle East and South and Central America, there were words and images that had never before been shared.   

NPR was born in 1970, beginning its 40+ years of earnest struggle to maintain an attitudinal center.  And, for distraction, widespread sales of color TV's and VCR's offered technicolor entertainment, as did the beginning of today's 500+ TV choices with the birth of cable, including MTV and CNN as the 70's turned into the '80's.

Today's media milestones include: the international coverage of September 11th; the Iraq War and its aftermath in an increasingly unstable Middle East; Hurricane Katrina; 2008's US Presidential campaign; President Obama's inauguration; the passage of national Health Care legislation; and, lots of gut-wrenching news that doesn't seem like news at all, reported in high emotional color by cable networks and bloggers with vague  attachments to the facts and strong affiliations with their employers' bottom lines. 

We may not have news the way we used to yearn to make it, but we have greater content personalization and greatly expanded distribution at a fraction of the cost of old media and, maybe, at a fraction of the social impact.  The evidence of these changes--captured by the global internet and iTunes, as well as Google's entry into and exit from China--seems less revolutionary than powerful in placing cultural choices in alignment with economics.

NPR, having survived a near-death experience in 1983, is still striving to earn its 2005 Harris Poll credential of "America's Most Trusted News Source"--despite the misappropriation of titles like this by popular cable news networks.  WNYC's On the Media carries stories like this past week's nuclear summit, during which President Obama asked the press to leave, just as the discussions began; this year's Pulitzer award to ProPublica, an internet-only news source, reporting on the deaths of purportedly euthanized patients in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; and, the publication of Panorama, a 328-page newspaper designed for nostalgic news interests.

On the Media also blows the lid off gender bias--again?--by completing an inventory of NPR news sources and commentators, concluding that the voices invoked most commonly overwhelmingly belong to men.  (Even at NPR?)

On the Media's commenter on this story is a male university professor and blogger who has the guts to say that women still don't stand up for themselves in the marketplace because of a too-substantial fear of what people will think.  His theory: there won't be real media equal rights until women learn not to give a *#$@! (You know the word; I'd say it but I'm afraid of what you might think.)

Brooke Gladstone, On the Media's host, opines that women have learned not to express themselves aggressively, because when we do, we're treated as if we've expelled methane in public.  Can this story really still be in the news 40 years after Gloria Steinem first published Ms. magazine?

Is the culprit an unevolved media or is it The Hidden Brain? Shankar Vedantam's 2010 book hypothesizes that most public thought is the product of a collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious.  On gender bias and racial prejudice, Vedantam theorizes that our earliest cultural associations favor men and caucasians and that this unconscious bias is most likely to defeat conscious thought when we're emotionally weak--fearful, angry, distracted. 

Maybe this explains the lack of a real revolution in today's media images.  Instead, we have a steady stream of angry white men and a few unattractively angry women--at least they seem unattractive to our collective unconscious, according to Vedantam (who, after all, likes an angry Mommy?)--talking about taxpayer revolts, attempts to rewrite the Constitution and our perceived proximity to communist China. 

And this is just the right wing.  The left wing seems delusional in mistaking our common sense in electing an African-American President and Democratic party leader for real revolution, when it seems that today's revolution is all in our heads.

Apple Bites

Capsule:  Has Apple reinvented retail for the rest of us?  Is the iPad launch akin to the birth of broadcast or cable TV?  Before TV, movies fit in the theater; sports, in the stadium; and, news on the broadsheet.  After TV, they all fit--shorter, portable and with commercials--on a little screen. After reinventing music, has Apple reinvented TV--as well as newspapers and magazines, to fit on the Mac, the PC, the TV, the smart phone, the "pod," the "pad," in the purse, in the pocket--everywhere, as long as you buy your media from Apple?  Will the media ever be the same?


Apple Bytes
Business Insider
The New York Review of Books
Apple iPad
The New York Times
The Financial Times


It's a new way of experiencing media, they say.  Could it be long before they say: "It's a new way of watching TV?"  Will a new way of shopping be far behind? 

"They" are the inaugural iPad buyers, who came alive this past Saturday, April 3rd, when over 300,000 iPads were sold. 

Other Apple iPad "birthday" statistics: one million applications were downloaded, as were 250,000 e-books from the iBookstore, prompting JP Morgan to increase its Apple per-share price target from $240 to $305.  

Apple is projected to sell one million iPads in Q2 and five million in FY 2010.  For a nation of over 300 million consumers, that ain't chicken-feed--especially at $500-$800 a pop, plus monthly 3G subscription fees for partners on the high end.  Is the iPad a green shoot (planted by Johnny Appleseed) on its way to becoming a retail media beanstalk?

Americans spend over 30 hours a week watching TV and 13 hours online.  The American media appetite is extraordinary.  Until now, that appetite couldn't go out on the town.  It had to be satisfied at home through a cable, satellite or telco TV connection.  After the iPad launch, who will keep us down on the farm now that we've seen Paris?

It's inevitable that WiFi service, as well as subscription 3G and plus-G's services, will make TV more of an online viewing experience: something you can watch at home and carry with you to share.  But with our current wired and wireless broadband limitations, we don't yet have a sense of how the portable online viewing experience will alter today's network-and-VOD spin around the digital-set-top-box dial.

We'll have a better sense soon. Before those five million iPad's are sold by year's end, the iPad model will begin to stimulate broadband expansion.  Cable and telco broadband distributors will announce improvements to the American online experience, as they've already begun to do through wideband and 100-500Mbps broadband market launches.  Broadband's main motivation for a service upgrade: to retain customers and to ensure that cable and telcos' retail path to the customer wallet and credit card remains the preferred way to buy media.

Developing an alternative retail view, Apple has already announced a plan to add more TV and movies to its iTunes online store.  It's even talking numbers with content giants CBS, News Corp., Disney and others.  As a show of media strength, Apple's iBookstore disrupted the Amazon Kindle retail book-selling model before the iPad was even launched. Given that two major publishing houses--Simon&Schuster and Harper-Collins--are owned by CBS and News Corp., multimedia content deals make sense.

Omnibus content deals also make sense because it's time content found other outlets beyond the existing wired mega-model.  Cable networks remain on solid revenue footing as long as the combination of advertising and subscription dollars continue to dual-stream in.  But the breakdown of advertising value--enabled in part by Google and its ad search model that has contained ad unit pricing within its online revenue zip codes for most of the last five years--persists. 

Cable networks have pushed the subscription stream as far as possible by adopting what some cable distributors call "the arms merchant model"--selling to cable, telcos and satellite until they've wrung the annual growth potential out of the wired subscription model.  Seeing this coming, content networks have been hopeful that their world will get larger with new wireless TV subscription distribution through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile's wireless phones. These hopes have been largely dashed over the last decade; phone companies have been even less likely to "get" TV in its wireless form than in its wired Fios or U-verse just-like-cable-plus versions.

All of which leads today's content mega-giants to the retail Master of the Universe: Apple.  Ready to accept TV as the new software with open arms, Apple's iPad is developing its brand definition as a media device for today's media consumer.  Computing seems old-school, particularly when most computer users use computers more as portals, simple e-mailers, word processors, calculators and TV screens already.  (Can door-stops be far behind?)

Where will this all lead?  Cable, satellite and telco TV distribution won't go away, but their attractive growth will likely be curbed as content networks find new supplementary distribution paths, grinding their primary distribution relationships down to arguments over carriage fees while pretending to wonder: "Where did the love go?"

If they're cautious, distributors will resist iTV the same way they resisted alliances with DVD retail (and, before that, videotape rentals and purchases.) But, given the speed of the device advances that digital technology has wrought, waiting out the deterioration of the iTV platform as if it were Blockbuster won't necessarily work.

If confident, distributors will jump on the iTV bandwagon with a clear vision of their broadband backbone as the best foundation for the iTV retail store, even when that store travels via an iPad.

In the meantime, the biggest losers could be Google and the TV commercial.  Isn't it likely that Apple goes after advertising after conquering music, voice, books, movies and TV?   In this scenario, TV ads will follow their fast-shrinking relatives--the online display ad, the online search ad and the displaced newspaper ad--into a more confined space.

With iPad viewers free to catch-and-carry TV-on-the-run, TV ads may have to thrive in a new media form--iSpots?--via a new technology embrace. Google--the online advertising market-maker--may have to search its pockets to play in an online environment that carries TV-and-text on a portable screen.

Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple bit Google in the end? 

It's not so far-fetched. These twin online Masters of the Universe are already in a scuffle over mobile operating systems.  A scuffle over the value of advertising may be next, with Apple setting the market for ad prices on its ingenious traveling platform.  Because the iPad will get there first, Google's Android model--stuck on a phone while looking for a tablet to call its own--may have to dance to the iTunes' music. 

Welcome to the new media reality: it's paradoxically like a  musical chairs game where the market plays its tune while technology pulls chairs to eliminate players. Will the last laugh belong to the last distributor standing?

TV, TV Everywhere

Capsule:  TV Everywhere is the cable-led armada trying to colonize the internet by navigating subscription TV's dual-revenue stream.  It's here now because its cable royalty parents--Time Warner and Comcast--are ready to move forward with a-mostly-agreed-upon first-use model for QoS-and-DRM-supported broadband video.  While Time Warner's HBO Go is beginning to share its internet look-and-feel, TV Everywhere isn't TV, yet.  TV will be Everywhere when either the cable industry or the new cloud media giants turn their vision for internet viewing into a product, like HBO turned movies and sports from broadcast into cable TV over 30 years ago.  The biggest challenge: putting content and distribution back together again.


New TeeVee
FierceOnlineVideo Weekly
iTunes Everywhere
iPhone Live Event Streaming
Dishes Everywhere


"TV Everywhere" is the new black.  It's racing "fiber-rich," "high definition" and "Triple Play" to the top of the multichannel search list hall-of-fame.  It's "what you want when you want it;" it's "always on;" it's "lightning fast;" and, it will be every other term cable marketers have used to sell digital TV and broadband for the last 15 years.  


It's not TV.  It's TV Everywhere.  And it can save or destroy the distribution side of the cable and satellite industries.


The current TV Everywhere plan is to authenticate the billable identity of a cable, satellite or telco TV customer by giving him an internet "identity card" that will transcend borders when that customer watches TV over his broadband connection.  Of course, border control costs money and permits taxes, fees and surcharges to follow customer migration--making it likely to receive government support. But the most important aspect of TV Everywhere's authentication process is that it can help content and distribution companies know more about who watched what, when and where as well as how to increase revenue based on that knowledge.


The TV Everywhere business strategy is to use authentication to safeguard digital rights and digital revenue.  Of course, authentication alone won't lead to profitable growth without new product and pricing strategies.  Ultimately, TV and broadband subscription customers are going to drive these new product strategies by preferring to watch some of their favorite TV shows and movies online, with searchable navigation, which alone will change the nature of TV viewing, making the PC screen arguably superior to that cool fire in the living room.


Unfortunately, the negative of searchable navigation is its powerful pull towards a la carte and away from cable networks and their retentive brands.  Searchable navigation favors individual TV shows and movies, just like internet music favors singles.  In order to off-set a la carte cannibalization, TV distribution is likely to end up charging more for broadband TV as a service--both to increase profits on its most valuable tier in the home and to slow down the movement of its customers toward the siren song of internet TV.  


A broadband "navigation surcharge" may be a useful way to think about driving higher broadband rates, as long as it can be tied to a real cable broadband navigation product.  It's better than imposing a "bandwidth utilization" or "bandwidth metering" charge when considered against today's vibrant regulatory landscape.  It's more distribution-friendly than a "broadband content fee" since surcharges on internet TV content will have to be shared with the content companies.  


No matter how lucrative increased broadband navigation charges might become, they're unlikely to power a new collection of cable content and distribution products on their own.  Cable pricing will lose its elasticity when stretched over an increasingly expensive Triple Play including immobile TV and deteriorating voice values. For cable, a new generation of mobility products is a better solution to making TV Everywhere more than a zero sum game.


Mobility can drive profitable growth for the cable, satellite and telco industries provided distribution embraces a new media math--one that looks at spectrum utilization differently and is prepared to invest more capital into plant, equipment, software, devices and business development partnerships.  The new mobility math will reward distribution companies for network expansion, maintenance, billing, customer service and new authentication features, like personalized navigation.  It's also likely to favor content and device partners with what may seem like a disproportionate revenue share just for showing up.


The addition of mobility to the cable product line can also bring substantial omnibus benefits, including improved pricing elasticity; new combined wired-and-wireless spectrum for niche and VOD content; a new syndication quick-stop on the DRM food-chain; and, new market access to a younger demographic that might be inclined to buy broadband-only or, worse, to buy wireless broadband only from a wireless provider.  If cable can carve out a claim to a wireless footprint with a handful of wireless products, it can also promote its healthy economics, including the dual advertising-and-subscription revenue stream that floats all boats in the wired world.  And, it can leverage the cable industry's greatest strength: its fixed connectivity and ongoing billing/credit relationship with the home that supports a complete understanding of who its customers are and what they're doing.


The cable industry hasn't yet tapped into these strategic benefits beyond managing receivables with remarkable diligence--no small feat considering the credit storm not yet past.  Cable's most strategic use of its omniscience on where we live and what we buy has been to reduce service and maintenance costs by speeding up the diagnostics process for service technicians.  By properly taking location-based and polling benefits into account, cable distributors can use authentication to move TV from screen-to-screen in the home.  And if catch and capture video can be perfected in the home, mobile TV can't be far behind.


Potential new B-2-C and B-2-B products that TV Everywhere can hasten--for cable, for wireless companies or for the cloud-based internet advertising and retail giants, including Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and, lately, Facebook--include: new TV networks (Google does own YouTube after all) that can place singles or series onto every screen (including the mobile ones) with a single purchase; expanded bandwidth-as-a-service that customers can buy like expanded storage, serving up a new version of the network DVR and combining wired and wireless spectrum to support new niche products like the iPhone supports new "apps;" and, powerful targeted advertising and marketing "avails" that can reach customers with relevant marketing messages on every screen.   


Authentication's theme will be a complete 360-degree-customer-lifestyle-view that can make whoever brings it modern and pervasive (think Apple.)  New interoperable navigation products may jump across screens along with content; and, new bundled voice products can package free calling along with low-priced videoconferencing and pre-programmed podcasts storable on any cable-served customer's fixed or mobile device, including in-car audio systems.


Looked at in terms of its ability to bridge wired and wireless products and content, TV Everywhere can become a new design for a reinvented media sector.  For cable, the limiting factor may be the challenge of imagination.  Big distribution may fail to imagine a future bigger than the Triple Play.  It may exhaust its potential, wringing every cent out of traditional programming-and-distribution arrangements, ending up parched with a museum of STB hardware around its neck and too little exclusive TV content.  


If cable content can't imagine a future where it avoids a la carte value deterioration--a certain outcome if it partners too closely with the new cloud media--it will be similarly beached.  We've seen what happened to publishing and advertising by failing to read the maps correctly. Cable networks may not make the same mistakes.  They may reinvent themselves by thinking of the TV form in a new seamless format that can appear anywhere and everywhere.  Or,  we all may end up watching TV as shorts on YouTube, Apple and Facebook, saving our quality time for online reading and research--if there's enough of quality left to read.

Hedgehog Zillionaire

Capsule:  Who will win the media wars: the hedgehog or the fox?  Traditional media--hedgehog-like in their dedication to a central hierarchy of ideas--won't hit a rebound cycle soon unless the advertising-only revenue model expands to include more diverse business strategies.  Digital media--embracing the fox's complexity with its multiple hierarchies of content sources and technologies--is risking its digital genes by fooling around too long in the interesting idea parking lot without financial consummation.  The digital foxes that have gotten busy making money haven't yet spawned robust sires that can compete with traditional media and their strong syndication and distribution offspring.  But if traditional media can't get enough to eat hunting advertising clients gone digital and digital media can't reproduce enough money to spawn a new generation, what will the media look like in 2020 hindsight?


Media Myth and Realities Survey (2008)
IBM Global Media Report  (2007)
Isaiah Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (The Proper Study of Mankind)
India Brand Equity Foundation
Chasing the Storm




Isaiah Berlin, well-known for finding the roots of modern thought in the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, wrote a famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox."  In it, Berlin meditated on a line from ancient Greek poetry: "The Fox knows many things, but the Hedgehog knows one big thing."  Which would you rather be?


Berlin used the Hedgehog and the Fox to analyze Tolstoy's War and Peace in terms of its blurred distinction between historical fiction and non-fiction.  Hedgehogs were thinkers and writers--history's media figures--who viewed the world through the lens of a single defining idea, e.g., Plato, Dante, Hegel and Nietsche. Foxes, in turn, drew on a wide variety of experiences, e.g., Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe and Joyce. Berlin's essay claimed that Tolstoy was both Hedgehog and Fox--a new media hybrid?--whose writing personality embodied "the queer combination of an English chemist with the soul of an Indian Buddhist."


Students of politics and government have borrowed the Hedgehog and the Fox to describe the political personalities of world leaders. The distinction still works well today when thinking about industries, institutions and personalities--including the personalities of plain-old-folk like you and me. 


Amongst media brands, The New York Times is a hedgehog and Google is a fox. Comcast, like most traditional media distributors with a conventionally self-protective view of content, is a hedgehog. The print, radio, film, cable and broadcast distribution industries are all hedgehogs. Does this augur well for the Comcast/NBCU merger or would it be better if there was a fox who could find new digital revenue somewhere in the merger gene pool? 


Surprisingly, News Corp. is a hedgehog, even though it owns Fox--one of the biggest media hedgehogs in TV history. News Corp. also owns MySpace, which is a fox in the best and worst senses: its scope-y social media platform has strong usage and immature returns. 


C-Span is a hedgehog, as are most TV networks, including ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, Discovery, AETN, HBO, Showtime, MTV, CNN, Cartoon, SyFy, E!, Disney and ESPN. ESPN has been adventurous in its digital and international expansion--a foxy move--but the Disney superstar still operates profitably because it holds a traditional media and sports rights hierarchy clearly in mind.


Some content and distribution hybrids believe that a vertical hierarchy is the only route to media profitability, making Google, Apple and Amazon hedgehogs in fox-clothing. Yet, if a hedgehog knows but one thing and a fox knows many things, digital media has strong fox DNA.  Digital media grows through horizontal expansion--from person-to-person and country-to-country. In this sense, digital media's social-networking bona fides are undeniably sincere.


After Google conquered US advertising by reinventing the US advertising value hierarchy, it moved abroad, replicating itself in Canada, Mexico, South America, western and eastern Europe and, most portentously, in Asia. Many hedgehog cable content networks have similarly expanded horizontally, but their chromosomes are arranged differently, with every alternative market in service to the profitability of its US business.


Google's latest China struggles may seem alarming, but they only strengthen the horizontal giant, promising a stronger product alliance with the US government as the US re-evaluates its China policies. If Google should ever leave China, it will likely be a temporary move traded for a much richer near-term prize of US regulatory harmony.


For Google and rest of the digital foxes, there's also India, the world's second most populous country and its largest democracy. The Republic of India's population is 1.2 billion.  Most interestingly, its media hierarchies are performing differently from those in the US.


India is the world's second largest newspaper market. Its 1,900 news publishers have a combined print circulation of 200 million and growing as the Indian middle class continues to expand. Over 35,000 individual news titles are published, including 4,000 dailies.


India also has a voracious appetite for TV, with 100 million TV HH out of 200 million total market HH. With an average Indian HH size of four-to-five people, the Indian TV market reaches 500 million sets of "eyeballs"--to use a traditional advertising term. Over 60 million TV HH are connected to cable or satellite TV.  Through Direct-To-Home, over 300 broadcast, cable and satellite channels reach the TV viewer, with roughly 50 new networks added each year. (These statistics and those that follow are from a group of media reports on the Indian market published in 2007-2008, just before the 2008 global market correction from which India appears to have recovered within the closing months of 2009.)


The largest Indian media market isn't print or TV. It isn't internet use or traditional voice. Total Indian internet users surpass 81 million, of which less than ten per cent are connected via broadband service. Wired voice lines surpass 37 million. The largest media market for content in India is composed of roughly 550 million mobile phone users, close to half the population.


How can digital content and distribution foxes penetrate the Indian media marketplace profitably? Sheer horizontal scale is valuable, but the average personal and household income in India is relatively low, making the advertising susceptibility different from what many western media companies might recognize.


Borrowing some of the vertical hierarchy of traditional media may be the key to a new sustainable digital middle class, supporting a global digital economy beyond the Google, Apple, Amazon, eBay and Facebook super-majors.  


Partnerships with India's place-based service providers might be the starting point, especially if traditional US media invest in the creation of interactive TV and mobile content that expands in an inverted order from mobile to TV and broadband. With its huge market and strikingly different market considerations, India might be a right-sized place to experiment with new mobile and social media content forms. In a market like this, international media companies might create new TV and data content that is truly portable, forging new distribution models across digital devices and screens in every hand, room, home, bus, car, train, theater, office, school and retail venue.


Drawing on a wide variety of new experiences, it would be a happy accident if the US--that largest of ideological hedgehogs--recovered its economic health, at least in the media, by defying definition and coloring outside the US market lines.  One route to profitable fox-hedgehog hybrid status: a thoughtful alliance between old media and new in a country whose striking similarities and inescapable cultural differences may make us better at our own game.