It's ironic how often bad times can help. They help because they burn away the dross leaving only the gold.
Jevon Macdonald made I think an historic post yesterday that exposes the distraction that has surrounded much of public media over the last 5 years. We live in an immediate world today - Immediacy trumps everything.
All the tools that help offer immediacy are cheap to use and to deploy. Public radio and TV has had a focus on tools that are expensive and hard to deploy and that get in the way of Immediacy.
They also get in the way of the economic future of the system.
Public TV and Radio has been pushing HD TV and Digital Radio. The system has been pushing for an upgrade in the satellite distribution system. But what do the viewer and what does the listener want? What does an examination of the Innovator's Dilemma tell us ?
The core of Jevon's case is this, that "Quality" has been redefined as
- Immediacy - faster = better. I want to see the new now and I will reward those that allow this. The technology that facilitates this is simple and cheap.
- Ease of access to both finding content and to supplying content - in a web that has infinite content - I will value what is easy to find and buy and share - easy = value. The tools that make it easy are very cheap
- Ease of sharing - the whole point of MP3 and MP4 files is that they can be shared and then discussed - I want meaning in my life more than anything - these formats have much less technical quality than what Pub Radio/TV are chasing - MP3 & MP4 have the power of immediacy
The point at I would now like to add is that there is one more aspect of finding the gold versus the dross that we have to consider and that is the nature of the relationship with the viewer/listener.
The bottom line is that the trend is to make content a "Social Object" The differential in power between the all knowing expert broadcaster and the herd like sheep the viewer/listener has to be leveled. With an equality comes a real connection with a real connection comes real support.
So let's make these statements real.
When stations make content a social object - see how Bryant Park is doing this here and how KPBS did this here during the fire - they attract more members in a more attached and supportive manner. Members who are closely attached will be at the heart of the future finances of each station and each producer.
Ask yourself how seeing Nature on HD attaches an audience more closely. You may get a few more viewers but nothing like if the show was easily available on the web AND viewers could share and discuss the content. Then Nature could get a global audience as well. What would it be like for Nature to have an audience of say 40 million a week of people that were deeply attached?
HD on its own does not allow Nature to have a global audience. There is a cultural limit to its current audience now. It is confined to the group that watch TV and who are curious. The vast audience that includes my son and my wife who are curious but who do not watch TV or who will not be prisoners of the schedule - cannot watch it. So even in North America maybe millions are shut out of the show.
Now think of the global audience for Nature. They too can only watch snippets. They too are excluded from all the new rules - the shows are hard to find - can't be shared and are not available at scale.
If I was the producer of Nature I would seek a weekly audience of 100 million
The same all applies for local Radio and Local TV.
Ask how Digital radio is going to help your listeners? What do they want? They want portability. They need to shift through time and space. Again see how Bryant Park are offering the complete time shifter's answer here. How does forcing them to attach to a radio help - this is going in the opposite direction for their needs. How does a box attach the listener to the station?
Did you know that BPP has listeners in the UK? Why wouldn't ME have a global audience? What would change to the economics for NPR and the stations if NPR did have a global audience. One of the largest costs for a small station now are its NPR fees. NPR's costs cannot go down if they are to provide the quality of journalism that is required. So how do we solve this dilemma?
We vastly increase the size and the attachment of the audience. How do we do that - we say that this is what we want to do and we deploy the web and social tools that will allow that.
NPR has to go global to be able to solve the paradox of its costs and journalism. It has to keep up its investment and can only do that with an audience of at least 50 -75 million. This cannot come from within the US alone. It has to come from the world. The only way of making that happen is to go for a global audience via the web. The local stations can't have it both ways. If they want NPR cheaper but as good or better, they have to allow this.
So what does the local station do? It too has to use all these rules and the web to expand and attach its local audience. I will expand on this in later posts as this may be the key to the whole deal - for unless the stations feel safe - they can't free up the national content to go global.
History tells us that we have to take this approach and to disrupt ourselves. I am reminded of the Innovator's Dilemma. Big Steel was undermined by mini mill steel who eroded the power of big steel who were trapped by their legacy infrastructure. This is how the fall always happens. The new starts by being "good enough" but has a high utility.
We have a great case about U.S. Steel, which is being disrupted by mini-mills. The mini-mills started with rebar. Then they went into angle iron and bar and rod, and then they integrated up into making structural beams. The next step was to attack sheet steel. For the mini-mills to get into sheet steel, they had to build a new greenfield mini-mill with a new technology called continuous strip processing. The integrated mills had the very same opportunity to implement this new continuous strip processing technology and Nucor Corporation showed interest. The revenues per ton would be about $350. The cost per ton would be $285, and so the profit per ton is the difference. It was a very attractive investment for Nucor.
For U.S. Steel, if they built a new mill, they would have faced the very same economics. But their financial department looked and said, “Wait a minute. You’re telling me we ought build a new mill and lay out $250 million to build this new mill? That doesn’t make sense, because we have excess capacity in our old mill, and the marginal cost of producing an extra ton in our old mills is only $13 a ton.”
Do the math. When you have excess capacity in an old technology, that marginal cost logic actually makes it very difficult to justify investment in a new technology or a new process, because it is much more attractive to just extend that old technology for one more year and then one more year and then one more year. And then the people with the new technology ultimately kill you.
Following the NUCOR model means that we make the web the centre of how we distribute and that we obey the new rules of what audiences really want. We have to disrupt ourselves!
CPB is under threat. Millions are being spent on HD and Digital Radio. Millions has to be spent on upgrading the satellite system. We are going into a recession. Money will be more scarce than ever.
So what will you focus your time and resources on?
The web offers you a way to transcend all these pressures and to gain a much larger and more reliable support than ever before.
More later
