The 2009 Cable Show - Debunked

Much of what you are about to read is going to be my regurgitation of the information I consumed from reading the Multichannel News coverage of The 2009 Cable Show. The keyword is much, and not all, but I do have to confess, if you are interested in keeping up with the Media Industry, Multichannel News and NAB365 have been doing a phenomenal job of covering the media convergence, and to a lesser extent, The New York Times technology section has been doing a decent job.

Anyway, The 2009 Cable Show, has kicked off and already many new advancements in cable have been announced. Being announced, however does not mean these advancements will see life, just that the companies that are currently in development with them and are hoping these products will be released. The conference's keynote speaker signaled the event by saying,

"The truth is we really don’t know what the future holds . . . we have merely an imperfect glimpse of what a truly connected nation would look like. But it is an exciting vision, and our industry fully intends to do its part to lead.
Competition and our willingness to invest and to take risks have made every aspect of our business more innovative . . . more nimble . . . more responsive to and focused on the consumer."

In these two sentences, I am calling shenanigans on being "more responsive to and focused on the consumer" and "our industry fully intends to do its part to lead," I could call it on my aspects of what is said, but then I'd be here all night. Everything the cable industry does is for the purpose of getting its consumers to give them more dough. They offer greater conveniences and services for more money, not because they care about their consumers in particular, but because they care about their wallets. But, they are all for-profit companies so what else can be expected. As for leading the industry, the cable companies are currently trying to play catch up. Many of the cable companies developed broadband Internet in order to generate more revenue, without considering the consequences on the industry and on other industries. They didn't fully understand the power of the Internet and they still went about unleashing it to their consumers. Now they are scrambling to protect their industry as others seem to be collapsing. I digress.

Cox Communications used the show as a platform to announce its new broadband service which will offer 50Mbps downloaded and 5Mbps uploaded. This service will run users around $139.99/month depending upon the market, for example Lafayette Parish, La. will only pay $89.99/month. They are doing all they can to get their consumers the best their money can buy, especially considering the 50Mbps down a user can get with Verizon is $45/month. Not that Verizon is much better considering the Japanese pay the equivalent of $22/month for 100Mbps down. Why do they pay so little? Instead of cable and DSL lines being considered a utility, their companies are forced to rent the lines to competitors, which act as another revenue source for the company making their service cheaper. That is what I call looking out for the consumer, not what Cox and the other American companies are doing.

Also debuted at the show, Macrovision's Tru2way DVR and Sprint offering the ability for subscribers to view caller ID, voicemail alerts, and such, on their TVs. To me, the Tru2way is a bit deceptive as it gives users the ability to watch DVR recordings on multiple boxes in one house. The user can record on one box, and watch on another and other similar feature. I'd assume with the name of Tru2way a user could participate in 2-way communication with the program. Instead, the user can do something I can already do with my laptop, except I can also leave my house with my laptop and watch the program then, but I guess they need to worry more about piracy than giving their customers that kind of convenience. As for Sprint's new advancement, does anyone else see Google Voice and/or Skype playing a pinnacle role in influencing Sprint, or am I just grasping for a comparison?

The greatest announcement that truly shows how dedicated the cable industry is to being "more responsive to and focused on the consumer" is the announcement of Openet. Openet will work "behind-the-scenes" with two of the U.S. biggest cable operators to track consumers' data, voice, and TV viewing usage. In other words they will be spying on you to see who you call and tracking every move you make online. They say it is so they can "improve the subscriber experience" by seeing what they are interested in. I think I will translate that into, "We really want to help out the RIAA and if the government wants to participate in warrant-less wiretapping again, we'll be prepared." Face it, those are going to be its uses, tracking who is pirating music and/or movies and TV shows and..well, maybe I am getting too 1984 with that second part. This isn't meant to service their subscribers, unless that is a new name for people/companies that what to see what broadband users are doing.

Anyway, it seems the keynote speaker at The 2009 Cable Show is a little out of touch with the rest of the industry, rather that or they didn't inform him they were no longer focusing on the customer's convenience and, instead, more on controlling their usage of media. I suppose this is a good point to leave off, after debunking the "goals" of the cable industry with their own announcements of advancements.

P.s. I am still trying to figure out if I should use this or my blogger, so I am posting the same content to both.

The Social is the New Expert

A New York Times article that ran on March 30th announced that Microsoft was pulling the plug on Encarta. As a web designer I hold no feelings other than loathing towards Microsoft, thank you very much Internet Explorer, so it is pleasing to see that one of Microsoft's ventures has failed. As someone who likes learning, this kind of worries me. Wikipedia is the leading online encyclopedia, if you are unsure of what Wikipedia is, well, you haven't been on the Internet long. Regardless, it is a social encyclopedia in which anyone can contribute and often disputes over the accuracy of the article are solved by majority rules, not what experts say. It is a really cool concept to give the power to the masses, but the legitimacy of the information is a little unnerving. Then again that still hasn't stopped me from using it.

The Internet is changing not just the way we gather information, but by whom the information is given. Information can be the facts we need for our research and I will even include the entertainment we seek, that is a form of information I suppose. It is creating a world where the experts no longer dictate to the people what is true and what is false, a societal truth is what is important.

Many cable companies are beginning to question their free online streaming model. The free streams are creating bad habits "that will eventually lead to the 'Napsterization' of cable and destroy the economic model necessary to create such shows." Unlike broadcast stations, cable companies rely on both advertising and subscription revenue. By going to the web they are losing the subscription revenue and web advertising isn't promising enough to support their shows. The $60 billion a year generated by subscription costs greatly outnumbers online advertising hitting the record high of $23.4 billion in 2008.

Though this tactic is being implemented to help generate the income needed to produce the shows viewers see on cable, it might be too late, if it would have worked. People are going to look at the Internet like they look at cable, they are paying for a service, so they feel like they should get all that this service should offer. If they can't get these online streams for free, like they do now, then some may try to find alternatives, Independent sources, or worse yet for the cable company, some will try to pirate the shows. Now the channel has lost the potential for advertising.

Looking at the worst possible scenario for the cable stations, if this does indeed cause them to collapse, then where will people get their video entertainment? The only other sources I could see are the broadcasters, who aren't doing too well either, or from independent and/or amateur producers. The problem is there is money online, but it is much more spread out than on other media. This may very well lead to the lower budget productions from society over productions from Hollywood or NYC.

Last year 62% of online Journalists felt the business was going in the wrong directions. This year the number is down to 54%. Still, the greater majority of them fear for the future of Journalism. Why shouldn't they? There are currently talks debating if newspapers should be given non-profit status in order to keep them afloat, again, the broadcasters are suffering, and some still fear that online advertising revenues are not enough to support an editorial staff. If I were going to look at the worst case scenario, which I am, it would seem like blogs are going to be the wikipedia of the news world. The biggest problem behind this is lawsuits. When a journalist breaks a story about a company that was devastating to their image or industry, companies will often try to sue. Without the backing of another company's law team, how will the normal person be able to afford to defend themselves from such a lawsuit. For a great example of what I mean, watch The Insider.

To straighten things out, I don't believe either of the hypotheticals I stated will happen, the cases are too extreme. Big production companies will survive, even if many of them close their doors. Online news will not completely fall into the hands of citizen Journalism, and if so, I can guarantee that there will be some sort of federation of citizen journalists formed to not only protect these people from such lawsuits, but to also check into the legitimacy of the journalists.

The point I was trying to make is the power is leaving the hands of the few and being placed upon the shoulders of the many. It is kind of exciting. But, unfortunately, as the saying goes, "The masses are asses," the people will find away to screw up having this power and it will be dstributed back to some form of Oligopoly, kind like our current media industry.

Space Does Not Equal Soft

Again, another couple days without an update, I apologize. My weekend was a mixture of playing with Drupal, video games (oh Top Shop, how I love yet loathe thee), partying, and (finally getting to our topic) toying with Squarespace. It was a fun, educational, stress-free weekend, those rarely happen so I milked it.

Anyway, every time I try to recall Squarespace’s name I seem to try to substitute “space” with “soft,” if that is any indication of where my mind goes. I am an avid TWiT.tv listener/watcher, and for the past week or two they have constantly been talking about a new website for web hosting. Leo Laporte (host of many of the shows and founder) consistently, show after show, is talking about how he is trying to switch his blog's hosting over to it. He has even talked with every guest, whom has been on one of his show’s, about it, including Tech superstar (yes, he is without a doubt a celebrity) Kevin Rose, and every single one of these “Tech guru’s” had nothing but awesome things to say about it. So after a week (again, might have been two) of hearing about it, everyday for about two hours, I finally decided to check it out.

It is easily one of the most powerful website generators I have ever seen. You start out selecting a template, then a layout. The next part is where it truly shines, and that is the font, color, and sizes section. In this section there is a drop down for every possible tag that can be associated with text for your site. When you select a value from the dropdown you can change the font, color, size, letter spacing, text transformation, border, basically any CSS value for text that you can think of, without knowing CSS.

Once the site is created it becomes very easy to edit; you can edit most of the site simply by clicking and dragging elements. In the top right corner there are four icons, Content Editing, Structure Editing, Style Editing, and Preview. With the content editing you can edit the content of the site by clicking what section you want to edit. Squarespace provides WYSIWYG editing, which is really nice. Then of course, the feature I love if every site has, it allows its user to submit customized code.

Other features include, blogging, email forwarding, recording site updates, outside account integration with blogger and others, and RSS feeding.

There are drawbacks. I felt like the site was very limiting. For example, you can have a header and you can have a header image, but you can’t have text and an image in your header, even blogger provides that. I feel like something as simple as that is very strange to not have the option of doing for a system so detailed and complex. It is probably one of the first things I learned how to do with CSS.

Also, the bare minimum site they offer is $8/month, which isn’t bad, but the $8 does not include a domain name, short of yourname.squarespace.com. That feels expensive for a bare minimum website that doesn’t provide it’s user with a .com (or whatever extension he or she may want).

I am not saying it isn’t worth it; it’s just not for me. I feel too limited with it to spend $8 a month for web storage. When I sat down and thought about it, I felt like I could do all of the things I thought were cool, just Squarespace did it faster.

My recommendation, if you know nothing of HTML and CSS, this might be a great service for you to get into if you want to make yourself a website. However, if you do know HTML and CSS, I’d say give it a try, you might feel like the time consumption saved makes Squarespace worth it, I’m just frugal.

If you go to their website, they have a 14 day free trial, no credit card necessary, which to me is just genius. What better way to promote your product than to give away limited time service with no strings attached, people can just walk away after their time is up without fear of giving out financial information. That alone warrants me telling you to at least try it out.

Woot! Drupal, Skimmer's

Sorry for the lack of updates this week, I have been…busy.

Yesterday I worked for 10 hours. When I got home I made dinner and then watched Lost. While watching Lost I downloaded all of the elements needed to install Drupal, an open-source content management system. I then spent the next three hours after Lost configuring my USB drive to think it is an FTP server so that I can install Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Drupal to it. Before I finished the night I have a fully functional Drupal system running on my USB drive. It is time to learn it and PHP and make myself a website, of what I don’t know.

Today I got home from work, and then went to dinner. Since then I have been trolling the Woot-off while filling out an application that I have been meaning to fill out all week. The Woot-off has had a lot of USB drives and cameras. Waiting for the bag of crap.

I also have discovered this nifty program called skimmer. When you download it, it asks for your Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Blogspot, and YouTube credentials. Then it refreshes every (however long you set it to), gathering all of your updates from all 5 sites. Apparently you can update all of those accounts from the program. Considering I only have a Twitter and a Facebook account, and I have only used it to update to Twitter, I can only confirm that Twitter works. Will update with how it works when I can further test it out.

Bye, Bye, News Plan

Do you like reading your Sunday paper while relaxing, still in your robe, drinking a cup of coffee, and slowly eating your, at one time, hot breakfast? Well, enjoy it while you can because some cities no longer produce a major paper and yours might be next. Living in Philadelphia, the fourth (in some studies fifth behind San Francisco) largest media market, one tends to get a first hand glimpse into media trends, though not as great as Chicago, L.A., or N.Y.C. When the minor market newspapers were starting to be forced to close their doors it was merely a sign that it was time to consolidate. However, now the trend has hit the major markets and is trying to tell us, "The newspaper is a dieing breed." For further analysis, let’s explore the five major markets (to avoid argument over who is higher, Philly or San Fran).

San Francisco: Has no major newspaper currently in print.
NYC: The most popular of the city’s papers, The New York Times is on the verge of bankruptcy.
L.A.: The company that owns the Los Angeles Times is bankrupt.
Chicago: The Chicago Sun Times is currently selling stocks at $0.03 a share and has fired its CEO without an announcement of a replacement. Generally a company brings in a new guy fairly quickly if they plan to rebound. The Chicago tribune is owned by the same company that owns the Los Angeles Times.
Philadelphia: see below

There is a thing about Philadelphia that makes it different in comparison to all of the other markets, an attribute that none of the other top 50 markets have. When it comes to its news, Philadelphia is full of some of the most traditional people. For example, since 1977 WPVI (known as 6ABC to many of those in the market) has held the number 1 spot when it comes to their news ratings. No TV station in the major markets can claim the same thing. Why has channel 6 maintained such a streak? The news format many stations have adopted was created there, the quick news stories that are no more than 90 seconds, if that. This is what first caught the public’s eye. As parents watched channel 6, their children grew up watching channel 6, so it became their place for news as well. When they became parents, their children adopted channel 6 as their news station too.

This cycle has perpetuated. Of all of the stations in the market, channel 6 has the lowest anchor turnover rate; Jim Gardner has been there since the 70s. Also, when they tried changing the theme in 1996, the same theme they’ve had since 1972, their audience was so vocal about the change, WPVI changed it back. Philadelphians are dedicated to their news sources. I am not to say this is a good thing because channel 6 is the least innovative and is one of the worst of the Philly stations in terms of news coverage, their reign at the top has made them lazy. I am merely setting up a point.

The dedication to media forms that Philadelphians feel is not enough to save the company that owns both of the city’s major newspapers. Philadelphia Newspapers L.L.C. filed for bankruptcy this past February. Not only is it sad that is it both of Philly's papers being hit at once, but my grandfather worked many years as an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Part of my connection to Journalism is rooted there. Maybe it is a good thing they are both owned by the same company, though not a good thing for proper democratic discussion. At least this way the company could close the doors of one paper to save the other. Regardless, it represents a growing trend. As I said last post, ink and paper are becoming more expensive and classifieds are finding their way online. Even the most traditional of news followers can't save the the papers.

Now, I am a firm believer in the fourth branch of our government and am confident that Washington will remain to be watched over and, maybe I am optimistic, watched even more closely as more and more Internet news sites sprout up. With newspapers dieing so rapidly, what scares me the most is who is going to look after the small towns? As it stands, TV and Radio stations are mostly hosted within cities and their local coverage does very little when it comes to surrounding towns. Small community newspapers have felt much harsher effects of the newspaper crisis than the big city papers. With less and less small town coverage, who is going to keep an eye on the small town politics? Who is going to hold the local mayors accountable? Who is going to be the residents’ watchdog?

If you are waiting to hear that Underdog has come to save the day, keep waiting. The Internet is so global, do we expect it to adapt to the lifestyle of smallville? Maybe I am looking too far into this.

Back to the...50's?

So, this is a very long post, I hope it makes up for not posting this weekend as it was hectic, full of finals and documentary shoots. I also hope this makes up for the chance that I don't update too often this week as I try to enjoy my spring break.

Anyway, it has been increasingly tough for all media during this era of convergence. TV is losing ratings to VoD and the Internet. Newspapers are closing all over the country due to the high costs of ink and paper and losing revenue from classified ads to websites like Craigslist. Radio is losing ratings to IPods and other portable devices. Of the listed media, one medium was already secondary to another.

Back in the 1950s, when television took over as the main source of entertainment in the home, radios were banished from their spot in the living room to the bedroom. Television was the new king of the house, but it didn’t make radio obsolete. They lost, and never regained, a large chunk of their ratings due to the move to TV. Instead of trying to fight the future, radio adopted new formats, including the Top 40 format and various music genre formats, for those who didn’t know, radio wasn’t a primarily music device until the 1960s (which can explain the rapid expansion of Rock and the British Invasion, but that’s a story for a different time).

With another force threatening to take away its audience, what is radio to do? Well, the obvious answer is to go back to the 1950s. Yes, I mean this sarcastically due to the nature in which stations are reverting to the past, but I also mean this strategically to suggest it is time to go back to that time period as a way to re-discuss what its strengths and weaknesses are.

For all of the cynics out there, yes, radio has strengths. For one, there are some radio formats that just don’t translate to video too well. Talk radio, though it can be translated into a rather dry TV format, and the shock-jock formats still work extremely well. Ratings in Myrtle Beach, S.C. proved the talk radio station WRNN-FM 99.5 racked up the highest ratings in the autumn, with a 9.5-estimated share. Many television shows are lucky to pull in a 9.5, let alone an entire station. As for the “radio jokesters,” the Paul and Young Ron show in South Florida repeatedly tops the ratings for both of the stations it is feature on, and has just recently been added to the line-up of a third. They are no Howard Stern or Opie and Anthony, but the price tag that dragged them from terrestrial to satellite radio should be proof enough of the power of the shock-jock.

Moving from Music

Let me be one of the first to say that I do not want radio to move away from music. I for one, when I am in the car, love to turn on the local college station or public broadcasting station. It is generally these stations that you find great non-mainstream music, not trying to knock mainstream or try to sound cool that I only listen to underground (there is no such thing as underground unless you are still playing basement shows). The majority of the artists I have started listening to in the past 5 years has been because of rather because of being part of a college radio station to listening to one or NPR. Also, I will skip over a station if there is a talk show and no music.

With that said, I hope I have established my love for music and hearing new things on the radio, because this next part is going to be rough for me to say. Radio needs to start moving away from music. It doesn’t pull in the ratings that it used to, which means they should still have music, but not focus on it as much. Sure they will lose listeners like me, but we are the music snobs at parties that nobody wants to talk to anyway because all we do is degrade them for being a sheep. Losing that audience wouldn’t necessarily be bad. But all jokes aside, chances are we rarely listen anyway and usually listen to our IPods. The few times we do listen might happen to be the few times the station has music on.

As for the NPRs and the college radio stations who don’t get funding based on audience ratings (NPR does rely on audience contributions though), even they might eventually have to, but the time isn’t necessarily as pressing as it is for commercial radio. With the music industry taking huge loses thanks to the Internet, they have become less likely to take risks, expect commercial music to start to become more stale than it already is (hard to imagine, I know). That negatively impacts the stations as they will eventually have an even less of a variety from them, which the more I think about may be a good thing, might force stations to look more independent. Also, with the record industry taking such hits, they are trying to milk money from anything, including those who advertise them. If this law makes it through, it didn’t the first time, every station will have to pay royalties on any music they play, regardless of the station being for or non-profit. The simple fact this is the second time this law has been put forth, shows that this is a growing concern.

Becoming the 1950s

As radio moves its presence online, many have decided to do what the networks did in the 1950s. When TV was invented they decided to move their shows to television. Regent owns 60 stations in the U.S. and,

“Each of Regent's radio station web sites will feature its own individually-branded Internet television channel capable of providing listeners and Internet visitors with access to originally produced or syndicated video content and programming.”

First off, this may prove to be a bad investment as when Radio networks first moved from radio to TV, they generally had no idea what they were doing and it took them almost a decade to figure it out. Secondly, TV is not figuring out how to move from regular TV to Internet TV. If it is just going to be video content, and not interactive content, then radio stations are going to paint themselves as being consistently a transition behind. Finally, what is the purpose of the video product, to enhance their radio product or to create a new product? If it is to enhance very few shows have gotten away with transitioning from radio to television so how do they expect to transition an entire line-up to TV and be successful? If they are going to create a new product with it, then they leave the realm of radio and thus forfeit moving radio forward.

But what do I know; I am just a grad student? Professionals run the radio industry. I guess that is a scary thought when considering professionals run the record industry as well. We have all seen what professionals do when they don’t get their way; they act like three-year-olds and scream, kick, and lash out at those who provide for them (the audience). Let’s hope radio professionals are a bit more mature, embrace new technology, and find a way to make it work for them instead of fighting and losing to it.

Your TV is on my Internet...which is on your TV

So, as stated in my last post, I managed to go through one of my newsgroups today and found some interesting articles that somewhat pertain to my post about TV I wrote the other night. The first is an Inlet Technologies and Microsoft team up, of sorts. Inlet is a “technology provider” of new media. On their website they proclaim their product can “produce the highest quality video, faster and more efficiently than any other solution.” Now, Inlet has announced its technology will fully support the Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS7) Smooth Streaming Technology. The new Smooth Streaming will broadcast live and VoD over the Internet at true HD (720p+) and “switches seamlessly between multiple streams, depending on the available bandwidth and PC performance at any given moment. The best possible quality video stream is automatically delivered to the end user without stuttering, dropped frames or buffering.” The two will be demonstrating it at the MIX09 conference. I guess we will have to wait for MIX09 to see how well this works. It is great that Microsoft is rolling out potentially awesome new products when Internet Explorer is still one of the worst browsers at interpreting web standards and Vista was beta testing for Windows 7, a very expensive beta test for the user.

Yet I go on, it will make sense in the end, don’t worry. Anyway, I also read an article that is all about watching your favorite television shows on your PC...on your television. It seems to be written by a very un-Internet savvy person, who watched HD quality television shows and movies using his PC and TV, no cable box. The article starts:

Movies, TV shows and other entertaining video are now so plentiful online that "Internet TV" may become mass-media entertainment.

Being generous, that would have been a startling revelation 5 years ago. Now it is commonplace for people to watch TV shows and movies on their computers with only using an Internet connection. It may be a generational gap, but again, refer to my earlier post about TV and take into consideration my boss who is four years older than me and during the debates he hooked up his TV to his computer and watched the debates live with a group of friends over. He said he stopped getting cable a year ago when he realized everything he wants to watch is online.

Regardless, the article is all about the ease this writer had with hooking his TV up to his computer and the great quality that is retained. He even praised S-video as a viable option, quoting his wife describing it as, “pretty good and certainly watchable.” He does bring up a valid point. Though I am used to watching videos on my computer, my coworkers do it, and my friends most certainly do it, not everyone does. I don’t understand why, but some people have a weird disdain and prejudice to it. However, with new technology making streaming clearer and more stable, as we saw above (I can’t believe I am using Microsoft as an example for something good), and the ease of connecting your computer to your TV, there is a strong chance that the computer will become the new family entertainment device. Especially if this man’s article reaches a lot of eyes, teaching a large portion of the population how easy it is and considering the economic downturn. People are looking to cut costs and one way is bills. If people start realizing how easy it is to watch what they want online and how easy it is to make sure their new HD sets don’t go to waste, then one common cost that might start being cut is their cable bill in favor for the Internet. This could happen.

Side Note: Apparently my point about American Idol in my first post is all based on a lie.

Coming up next: Radio revisits the 1950s and why it's going to happen.