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