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In their submission delivered this week for the canadian “Review of the Commercial Radio Policy“, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) has published an interesting summary of the “Radio 2.0″ landscape:
This list shows very well that there are lots of new content sources (I would add “user generated media somewhere in the list”) and distribution mechanisms. This is really bad news to commercial radio broadcasters because it can only mean fragmentation.
What can save them?
I would argue that the solution lies in the separation of the application and the network. Roughly, I think that broadcasters will have to sell their application (radio) through other networks while they will also have to open their networks to other applications.
In a digital world, bits are bits… and the “radio” bits may not be the “killer app” for the “radio” pipe. Because in the future, their will be no such thing as ”radio” pipes. There will only be dumb pipes for “ones” and “zeros”. That’s all.
Technorati Tags : radio+application, radio+network, radio+2.0, cab+radio, radio+policy, radio+canada, commercial+radio
Within some hours after its publication, Michael Geist already posted a first glance analysis of the final report of the canadian “Telecommunications Policy Review Panel”. To a certain extent, it looks like that Panel has recognized the need to protect network neutrality principles. To me, this sounds like good news.
Net neutrality is one of the important topics in telecommunications this year. To give you an idea, net neutrality guarantees that all IP packets get the same treatment whoever sent them, whatever they carry and whatever the path they travel. Without net neutrality, your ISP could “slow down” or even block a VOIP service that’s provided by a competitor. In the wireless world, net neutrality will allow you to make Skype calls with your cell phone over your data plan (and thus avoiding the usual premium fees for voice services). Net neutrality should consequently allow for a more competitive and innovative market.
With this in mind, I’ve been wondering if net neutrality principles could also somehow be defined for terrestrial broadcasting. Do current broadcast regulations guarantee content diversity and fair access to braodcast networks? Would they support the new “user generated media” trend?
First, let’s not forget that broadcasting IS telecommunications. Broadcasting is a particular form of telecommunications specialized in one-to-many messages. It is unidirectional but has a very high data transfer capacity (because we’ve allocated large spectrum chunks to it!). Digital broadcasting will be a component (if we ever get it) of the global communications infrastructure.
Considering these great properties, could we imagine a flexible, Internet-like broadcast context where content and applications would dynamically and fairly get their chance to “hold the mike” for some time?
To take an example, I could imagine a “Top 100 YouTube” off-air mobile video channel. In such a service, nobody would be in control… or actually everybody since popularity, derived form real Internet consumption statistics, would be the content selection criteria. So in the end, the people would decide, implicitly, what content they want to “promote” to the broadcast level. Because again, in an pre-WiMax era (?), terrestrial broadcasting is still an extremely powerful delivery network.
In other words, I realize that this would suggest a reversed broadcast system. Before, content got popular BECAUSE it aired on broadcast networks. Today, the actual popularity could be derived from the Internet and used as the principal criteria to decide how to populate the broadcast spectrum. This would probably allow for a more natural emergence of content.
Would this be a way to support network neutrality principles in braodcasting? Your comments please.
Will we consider concepts like these in the current canadian Review of the Commercial Radio Policy? I think I would not bet on this one!
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This web service adds geotagging information to photos you post to Flickr with your cell phone based on tower localisation.
One of the recurring theme at ETECH last week was the “mechanical Turk”. In his introductory Keynote, Bruce Sterling first suggested that the artificial intelligence (AI) dream had slowed down the development of computer science in general. Because of this, research has been focused on emulating humans with machines, instead of complementing humans. Tim O’reilly talked about IA (intelligence augmentation) as opposed to AI. According to Wikipedia:
The Turk was a famous hoax which purported to be a chess-playing automaton first constructed and unveiled in 1769 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734-1804)
In other words, the mechanical Turk is about putting a human intelligence inside the machine.
New web services are now implementing this very simple principle for applications where humans are much better than computers. In fact, amazon.com is offering a new open platform for the development of third party web services. It’s called… guess what? The “amazon mechanical turk” on the theme “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”.
More interesting to you, dear readers of Broadcasting 2.0, is that some people have built a podcasting transcription service called castingwords.com and it is actually based on amazon’s Turk system. In fact, for 42 cents a minute, castingwords.com will transcribe almost any podcast (in English) within 24 hours with the help of amazon’s “tested” transcription Turks.
And why would prodcast transcripts be useful? I think that they would mainly help increase the overall “granularity” of the “podcastsphere”. This, in turn, would drive much better finding, remixing and sharing capabilities.
Most of the time right now, search results lead to full podcast files with variable durations ranging from some minutes up to over an hour. These searches normally operate on podcast names or short descriptions. As a consequence, a search for interviews with a specific politician (for example) would result in many hours of listening because there is no good mechanism to locate specific content inside a podcast itself.
With good podcasts, “chapters” are very handy here but if you’re like me, your favorite podcast has no chapters. In my case, it’s a 2.5 hours French speaking CBC daily podcast called “Indicatif Présent“. Can you imagine? 12.5 listening hours per week. Do I have time to listen to all this? No. Would I like to be able to locate stuff more precisely here? Absolutely. Why? Because I NEED to be able to skip what’s not interesting to me.
Along with podcast tagging and content “markers”, transcripts would also support very important functions like remixing and sharing.
To me, remixing is the capability that I need to aggregate my personal podcast stream based on podcast segments that I get from different sources. Remixing here is the ability to collate 10 minutes from one show here with 2 minutes from another one there with 15 minutes of music with…, and so on. Again, I can’t do that easily with my favorite CBC show right now. Podcast users, and probably most of us in the future, will want that flexibility. There is too much good content out there.
Finally, transcripts alone may not be the solution but we need mechanisms to annotate (or tag) media content like we do for photos (Flickr.com) or bookmarks (del.icio.us.com). Good annotation allows for better retrieving as well as sharing possibilities. Very often, I find myself having to write down podcasts timing information in order to retrieve specific segments or share them with friends. That’s not convenient at all.
Coming back to our mechanical Turk and my favorite CBC podcast. With castingwords.com, the whole transcript of a single show would amount to roughly 75$ (46cents/min. x 150 min.). So is there a reason why CBC can’t do it right away (they could do it themselves if they wished). What is 75$ in a 2.5 hours public radio show budget?
Observations of my own behavior make me think that it all comes down to this: either they do it or they won’t get my attention!
Technorati Tags : mechanical+turk, podcast+transcripts, cbc, podcasting, podcast+chapters, podcast+segments
What is the size of the whole blogosphere? What capacity would be required to transmit it over a broadcast channel? Let’s see…
Blogging is still exploding. In his “state of the blogosphere” speech last week at ETECH, David Sifry, CEO of the blog indexing web service Technorati, presented the latest statistics:
- 30.000.000 blogs worldwide
- 100.000 new blogs are created daily
- the blogosphere is 60 times larger than 3 years ago
- there are 1.5 million legitimate posts(by humans for humans) per day
Let’s assume that each post contains 500 characters, no pictures, and that they are posted regularly over time. This would produce a constant bandwidth of:
500ch * 1byte/ch *1.5 million = 750 Mbytes / day
or
70 kbps !
What? The most massive conversation of the world requires only 70 kbps? That’s less than a single digital broadcasting audio channel! That’s 30 million voices for the price of one! Let’s turn the numbers around once again: with 70 kbps we could have each and every Canadian (30 million, all ages!) broadcast one 500 characters message to all other Canadians every 20 days?!?
That’s impressive. Does that make sense? I think I would agree to trade a local FM station in my area for this new “Whole Blogosphere Channel”. Would you?
Technorati Tags : broadcasting+blogosphere, david+sifry, state+blogosphere, blogosphere+channel, blog+broadcast
Consumer-generated media (CGM) is a relatively new expression that refers to content that is produced by… well… consumers (Wikipedia definition). This is really taking off now with blogs, podcasts, video blogs and so on. I used to refer to it as grass root or bottom-up media. This type of content could probably also be called Citizen Media or User Generated Media. I found this paper that describes CGM and other acronyms such as EGM (enterprise …) and CGM2 (consuber-generated multimedia).
Anyway, this is really happening. A web service like YouTube.com gets 20.000 uploads per day! How much of this is really CGM? Well… many files now are TV recordings. Because of this, YouTube can be seen as a huge collective PVR that “stimulates” a direct competition for attention between corporate TV and CGM.
So I’ll start using these acronyms… until new ones emerge!
I’m just back to my hotel, looking on the blogosphere for some “early” analysis of the opening keynotes tonight. Only 2 posts on Technorati by now.
Because I must say I did not catch much of Bruce Sterling’s talk about “The Internet of Things”. Well, all I got is that it will happen in 30 years from now. We can’t name it today because we’re just in the middle of it. We (the ETECH crowd) can’t name it because we’re to close and too tech oriented to see the big picture. We only see the tech side of it.
“The Internet of Things” is not Web 2.0 because Web 2.0 is today. Web 2.0 formulates new mechanisms by which Web 1.0 guys can exploit new web stuff (I’m not so sure Mr. O’reilly appreciated this statement?).
I understood that “The Internet of Things” will be about searching, linking, ranking, sorting,… these entities he calls spimes: objects that are traceable in space and time.
Now I need to understand what all this really means. I’m sure I’ll find some great analysis tomorrow.
On the other hand, I found that the two organizers keynotes (Rael Dornfest and Tim O’Reilly) were not as punchy as last year. They repeated a lot of stuff for the new crowd (at least half of the attendees). They also did not focus much on the theme “Attention” which I did expect. Also a bit surprising that the main opening keynote was not related to this theme.
I’m still looking forward for tomorrow’s great line of speakers.
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Scial media tagging
This year again I have the opportunity to attend this “alpha geek” brainstorming session. The theme this year: The Attention Economy :
…bandwidth continues to broaden, storage grows ever larger and cheaper, and content keeps pouring from the firehose. How do we visualize all of this digital data, filter it, remix it, and access it in meaningful ways? The coming technical challenge is not about generating digital content-we have more than enough already. It’s time to do something with that data. It’s time to build The Attention Economy.
Broadcasting has to deal with attention a lot. All these new information and entertainment sources segment users attention. There is a lot of new content out there but the total attention pool is not necessarily increasing.
I’m sure I’ll get away with new ideas.
Bonjour!
My name is François Lefebvre. I’m a broadcast research engineer at CRC. This blog helps me explore some thoughts about the future of broadcasting. The views expressed here reflect my personal opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. Please do not hesitate to write your comments or to suggest stories.
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