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Livio NPR Radio

November 26, 2009 in Consumer devices, Industry, Networked media, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

The NPR Radio by Livio_ NPR Shop.pngLivio announces its NPR branded Internet Radio Appliance. This device will offer a specialized menu to easily access NPR’s 800 radio stations. Of course, all other Internet radio stations can be accessed as well.

Are such “specialized” devices the future? We’ve seen the WikiReader recently which only does one thing: portable unconnected access to Wikipedia.

I don’t know but it makes great sense to me. I would love to see a CBC / Radio-Canada device like this. CBC/RC have great Internet offerings but they tend to “capture” the audience into their branded web portals. Because of this, many CBC/RC Internet radio streams are not accessible through Internet appliances other than full fledged PC’s. A branded device seems to be a good compromise to escape the PC prison.

Another very promising effect of this device is that it will help fund NPR’s programming since they will collect a portion of the proceeds. What an original way to fund public broadcasters!

   

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Ads worth more on the net than on TV

June 30, 2009 in Applications, Industry, Networked media, Services by Administrator | No comments

PC world reports that for the first time, advertising during a specific “TV” show will cost more on the net than on traditional TV channel:

If a company wants to run ads alongside an episode of The Simpsons on Hulu or TV.com it will cost the advertiser about $60 per thousand viewers, according to Bloomberg. On prime-time TV that same ad will cost somewhere between $20 and $40 per thousand viewers.

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Radio on Mobile Devices

February 15, 2009 in Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Mobility and radio go hand in hand. James Cridland reports on a current positive trend:

“RAJAR’s recent figures were upbeat about listening to the radio on mobile devices. (They only monitor ‘listening via mobile phones’, despite many MP3 players also having FM radios built-in)”

Competing business models between mobile network operators and broadcasters prevent broadcast receivers from being integrated into mobile phones. At CRC, we work on a project that would allow broadcasters to sponsor and eventually develop their own receivers. The project is called Openmokast. We published our thoughts and results about this in a paper released as part of last month’s EBU Technical Review.

We suggest that innovation in mobile digital broadcasting (including digital radio) will happen with the event of open source platforms like Android and Openmoko.

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Canada to Go All GSM

October 15, 2008 in Consumer devices, Industry, Infrastructures, Mobility by Administrator | No comments

Bell and Telus, the two wireless operators in Canada that are based on Qualcomm’s CDMA technology, announced last week their plans to deploy GSM technology jointly. CBC reports:

“BCE unit Bell and Telus both announced Friday they would be making a significant investment in upgrading their networks, adding high speed packet access, or HSPA, cellular technology to their third-generation networks.”

This could have an impact on the mobile broadcasting technology that will be deployed in Canada. The natural link between CDMA and MediaFLO is quite strong since both technologies belong to Qualcomm. Could this mean less chances for MediaFLO to establish in Canada?

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Mobile Multimedia: A Complex Ecosystem

September 21, 2007 in Consumer devices, Industry, Legislation by Administrator | No comments

Skip Pizzi writes a very interesting piece on the mobile multimedia landscape. He argues that the recent collapse of two major efforts to provide mobile TV (BT-Movio and Modeo) shows the complexity of this new ecosystem.

This is quite different from the traditional world of wireless delivery, where there were really only two businesses involved: 1) broadcasters, who created, distributed and delivered content through the air to consumers, and 2) manufacturers, who built receivers that consumers simply bought, turned on and tuned to broadcast channels to receive content.

Today the chain includes content providers, their hosting services, distribution networks (the Internet backbone), last-mile connectivity (wireless service providers) and compatible devices.

He also points to the fact that telecom carriers have the control over the technologies and functionalities that are enabled on the cell phones. For example, I didn’t know that FM receivers are embedded in many cell phone platforms in the US market today. However, that functionality is simple not enabled!

I believe that technologies should serve our needs and provide a better quality of life (QoL !). An ecosystem that locks down functionality that is there and deployed must be, in fact, VERY complex!

Tags: mobile+multimedia, broadacsting+phones

Video at VON 2007

March 21, 2007 in Industry, Networked media, Services, User Generated Media by Administrator | 1 comment

I spent the last three days at the new video track of the VON conference which has been dealing with Voice On the Net for the last ten years. As we know, video on the net is currently gaining ground on a daily basis with Youtube, Google Video, video blogging and many other passionate artists, producers and and so on. That’s the reason why video was inserted in the VON program this year and I realize that video on the net will probably face regulatory issues that VOIP had to go through in the recent years: intellectual property, copyright protection and network neutrality just to name a few. In fact, Jeff Pulver is being proactive on that issue by launching the Video On the Net Alliance to advocate for this emerging Internet video industry.

Voice over IP is disruptive. The flexibility provided by VOIP is an important factor for its success, but its impact is also quite important in that it opened the telecommunication playing field to new players that can operate outside the grasp of the incumbent telecommunication industry. Jeff Pulver officially stated that VOIP, an industry he triggered, is now well established. “We are now the incumbents who can be disrupted”.

In that respect, video on the net will allow the same type of disruption. Broadcasters and broadcast regulation can (and will) be circumvented by people and organizations who see the Net as an effective distribution platform.

Does Skype ring a bell? Well, they could potentially be #1 in both spaces. But that’s the topic of my next post.

Tags: video+on+the+net, VON2007,

IBC 2006 Conference

September 7, 2006 in Industry by Administrator | No comments

I just arrived yesterday in Amsterdam to participate at the IBC 2006 Conference and Exhibition. We managed to setup our booth yesterday and I will actually be presenting a paper tomorrow in the session titled "Multimedia on the Move" at 14:00 – facts for the upwardly mobile". I wrote the paper with my colleague Pascal and it’s about new developments of our "End-To-End Mobile Multimedia Platform" at CRC. For more details please see our MMB Website.

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Beyond Broadcast 2006

May 12, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Legislation, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

So I’m sitting right there, waiting for the event to begin.

Beyond Broadcast 2006 is loaded with great, experienced speakers with all possible backgrounds: braodcasters, journalists, technologists and so on. The theme is important:

We will explore the thesis that traditional public media — public broadcasting, cable access television, etc — face a unique opportunity to embrace new participatory web-based media models — podcasting, video blogs, social software, etc — and create a stronger and more vital public service.

And if I’ m lucky, my MMB demo will work fine this afternoon! I’ll try to report later.

Technorati Tags: beyondbroadcast, broadcasting+2.0, public+media, public+broadcasting

Radio Realities

March 25, 2006 in Industry, Legislation by Administrator | No comments

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:

 2006_03_25_cab_realitites.jpg

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.

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Net Neutrality in Broadcasting

March 23, 2006 in Industry, Infrastructures, Legislation by Administrator | 1 comment

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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