Archive for PBS
by Rob Paterson
February 2, 2008 at 6:59 am · Filed under
Apple, Barriers, Business Model, Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, NPR, PBS, Podcasts, Public Media, Relationships, iTouch, iTunes
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As sure as the sun rises in the morning – the web will become the primary delivery platform for all information.
Many in public radio and TV, have told me that my feelings about how fast the shift would take place from “air” and cable to web are exagerated. My argument is this. “Weight of money”.
When you pay $45 billion dollars you are not fooling around.
MSFT wish to get ready NOW for this new reality for when the bulk of advertising revenue and action are on the web. Ad revenues are $50 billion right now and are expected to rise to $80 billion by 2009/10. This is the prize. When the ad money shifts out of traditional media, you will hear the sucking sound of a mortal wound. It will be too late to reinvent your self then.
All the supporting parts of a web based radio and TV will have to accelerate their plans
- The viewing platforms such as the iPods and the large screen TV’s are ready now for a direct link. The Early Adopters are watching the bulk of their video online.
- Many listen to radio online at the office or on their iPods on their commute
- YouTube is bursting with great content both from traditional sources and from new entrants
- Channels such as iTunes and Miro are building capacity – it will be the ease of use that these channels offer that will pull in the Early Majority.
- Major Networks have their toe in the water and are offering some content online
The Yahoo bid will accelerate all this work.
So what is the work that Public TV and Radio have to do in this context of no time? It is to solve the business model problem. How to offer the best content from TV and Radio AND keep the stations whole. How to do that? I think the answer is to make the offer direct with the forced choice of the show and the station.
I am not saying that people will not listen to radio nor am I saying that people will stop watching TV. People will still buy SUV’s and Trucks. But the bulk of the people, especially people who are naturally curious will make the switch.
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Remember Mikey – “Give it to Mikey – he hates everything. Well my wife Robin, is the tech Mikey.
Robin is very very resistant to gadgets. BUT …….. She now listens to all her radio online – loading the podcasts onto her MP3 player which she uses when she is doing stuff around the house and walking the dogs. And in her down time, I hardly ever see her anymore – she has discovered YouTube. She has discovered that it is packed with content that she wants to watch – content that is “serious” that is just what a good Public TV member would want to watch. She has discovered that it is easy to watch and listen to what she wants when she wants and that there is tons and tons of great content out there.
She is closer to 60 than 50 and is in the centre of the demographic for Public TV.
So Robin’s desire for interesting content that intrigues her has been met already. Just imagine how easy it will be for her to have access to even more and what her choices will be soon.
Don’t you want her and the millions like her as your audience?
by Rob Paterson
January 21, 2008 at 8:07 am · Filed under
HBO, PBS, Public Media
HBO will launch a new feature on Tuesday this week – Subscribers will be able to download its shows.
Targeted at younger subscribers and travelers who watch TV shows and movies on laptops, HBO on Broadband will offer 600 titles each month, with 400 of those available at any time, as well as a live stream of the main HBO channel.
HBO on Broadband will also suggest titles based on viewing habits. Programming will be available for at least a month, but will be erased from users’ libraries at its expiration date.
The application can be programmed for up to five users and downloaded to five devices that use Microsoft XP or newer operating systems. An Apple version is in the works.
Each month, an HBO original series such as “Entourage”, “The Sopranos” or “Sex In the City” will be available in its entirety.
Apple now rents and allows downloads. Netflix delivers online as does Amazon.
TV is moving decisively in 2008 to an online delivery.
If I want to see a show again on PBS, I have to order it on DVD by mail and it costs $19.95.
I imagine that a block for public television delivering online is the Station Issue.
I would love to have a PBS/Producer subscription that allowed me access online to content. I would have no problem in indicating in my subscription my “home” local station. So the revenue could flow both to the producer and my home station.
Time for an experiment folks – 2009 may be too late to learn.
There is more to profits than simply offering content online – I will talk more on how making the show a social object can add even more soon.
Update – please see comments below where Jen kindly brought it to my attention that PBS announced a few days ago that it will launch a new arrangement with YouTube
by Rob Paterson
January 16, 2008 at 8:17 am · Filed under
Andy Carvin, CPB, Emergent, NPR, NPR Music, PBS, Public Media, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, TV, Trusted Space, Web 2.0, Wisdom of Crowds
Wouldn’t it be something if Public TV and Radio got together to cover the election? Would it be great if the local stations got together with the big producers to cover the election?
Well it’s more than a dream now – CPB is funding just such a Mashup – The beginning I think of the key new force in public media – a Real Network of Many to Many.
Many of us had had a problem wit the term “Network” in Radio and TV. What it really means is one powerful producer using a system to distribute its product. Of course a real network is a diverse multi node system that where many nodes add value to the whole.
This is what is being “born” in Public radio and TV. Our hope a year ago was that the Election would be a powerful enough incentive to help the current large players to grit their teeth and really share and work with each other. This is working.
Here is Andy Carvin with the story.
Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.
“By pooling content produced locally and nationally — for radio, television, and online — we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public,” said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. “We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting.”
“This grant underscores CPB’s support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are,” added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. “This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms.”
The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality – many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn’t have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.
The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR’s annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn’t take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn’t get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work……….
Now with NPR Music – we are seeing a real network emerging. With a real network, there will come the network effects for all concerned.
by Rob Paterson
January 10, 2008 at 7:33 am · Filed under
Business Model, CPB, PBS, Relationships
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Gillette pioneered a business model that still works well in many areas of modern life. Sell a complex tool for a very low price and make your money on the refills – in this case the blades.
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Most cellphone makers partner with the networks who in effect “give away” the the phone for the service.
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All of know now to be careful when we buy a “cheap” printer. It’s the Ink that will cost us.
So now the same guys who make the phones and the printers are working to create the same model for high end expensive Plasma and LCD screens.
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“We already all have beautiful HD televisions. How do you differentiate?” said Bob Scaglione, senior vice president for marketing of Sharp’s American arm. “One way to provide some really unique differentiation is to provide new content.”
“That’s why we’re fighting to find the right content providers.”
The world’s biggest television makers announced a series of partnerships with media companies that will allow delivery of Internet content like videos, news feeds, weather and sports directly to the TV, without the intervention of a PC to complicate matters and confuse consumers.
Sharp unveiled deals to provide weather, stock quotes and comic strips. Samsung Electronics has a deal with USA Today to provide news, weather and stock information straight to its TVs. Panasonic showed how its TVs will pull down YouTube videos and images stored on Google’s Picasa service.
The companies also announced a handful of new televisions capable of receiving Internet content — over Ethernet or wireless connections. But to the insiders here, the electronics show 2008 was less about the products than the partnerships.
The deals are just the beginning, the TV makers hope. They say they are a hint of what could become a new and intimate relationship between the heretofore isolationist hardware makers and upstart creators of Internet content. (NYT)
This is what the Netflix/LG deal is about that I wrote about here a few days ago.
In a small meeting with journalists, Toshihiro Sakamoto, president and senior managing director of Panasonic, the American brand name for the home electronics of Matsushita Electric Industrial, said the company must do a better job of working with content providers. “Without them, we can’t make a big TV,” he said.
In other words, his television sets, no matter how big (and Panasonic displayed a 150-inch monster), will not compete unless they are better integrated into the content food chain.
In the longer term, a more direct relationship with content providers could give them a little more strength in negotiating with cable companies that are still the main pipeline of premium content.
In the immediate term, it might give them a cut of revenue from the delivery of content. Jeffrey Cove, vice president for technology and alliances at Panasonic, declined to discuss the financial terms of the company’s deal with Google’s YouTube and Picasa. But he did say: “We’re the collectors. We are providing an outlet for eyeballs.”
If I was a senior person at PBS and CPB, I would be wondering what I could do in this new context.
by Rob Paterson
January 8, 2008 at 6:29 am · Filed under
Business Model, Comcast, PBS, TV
The end of the world of the fixed schedule and the monopoly of geography gets closer every day. Comcast CEO will announce today Comcasts plans to deal a blow not only to local TV stations but also to the cable approach of restricting choice. (NYT) Maybe Mr Roberts may talk today at CES about “Project Infinity”? which they plan to offer more than 1,000 titles.
In an interview last week at Comcast’s Philadelphia headquarters, Mr. Roberts said his goal was “to give consumers the ability to watch any movie, television show, user-generated content or other video that a producer wants to make available on demand.”
The plan, which Brian L. Roberts, the chairman and chief executive of the Comcast Corporation, will describe in a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is aimed at making a nearly limitless supply of movies and television shows available on television, where Comcast subscribers could view them on demand, and through the Internet, where anyone with Web access could watch them.
Although the television component is still at a nascent stage — Comcast’s existing video-on-demand service has about 300 titles, compared with the 6,000 it eventually hopes to offer — the Web portion is further along.
Comcast has set up a site called Fancast.com where viewers can watch more than 3,000 hours of television shows from NBC, Fox, CBS and MTV and where they will soon be able to remotely program the digital video recorders in their homes. The shows on Fancast are available free. Comcast has yet to say how it will price the rest of the content as its plan moves forward.
My prediction is that in 2008 we will see a Tipping Point. Mainstream viewers will be offered ways of having TV on demand. Currently Innovators and some Early Adopters already have this – they use Torrents and YouTube. It helps to recall what happened to Music. For a long time the Innovators and Early Adopters also had to work to get their music. But then the iPod and iTunes made the process easy.
The mainstream are prepared to pay for convenience.
They will pay to have a convenient way of accessing high quality TV on demand. Not a lot but in aggregate the dollars will be a lot. For instance a copy of a Nature film on PBS is $19.99 plus shipping plus all the time it takes to get to me by mail. Few are going to make this transaction. The PBS Nature page already allows me to get a preview streamed online – why would anyone wait for a DVD?
What are some of the emerging business models?
On iTunes there is a small charge per transaction. In Canada I can get an episode of South Park for $1.99. I would pay more for an hour of say Nature or Nova. How much more? Maybe $5.0. If it was easy to find and easy to get.
On XBox with 10 million members there are 2 levels of membership – one is free and one is pay. We are all very used to this idea by now. The Free Flickr service gets you a taste, the Pro gets you the goods. I can see this working too.
At the moment most of the new suppliers of content on demand are still in the transaction world. At5 the moment, the traditional suppliers of content – our local TV stations both private and public are in deep shit. For On Demand Content for the mainstream is just around the corner.
What can be the best possible approach for a TV station and why might there be a business model that can put them and us the consumer back into a valuable relationship with each other?
More later
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