Public Address - Hard News (Home)

On the Box | Jul 28, 2009 10:39

I grabbed an interview with Tom Rogers, the CEO of TiVo, on Monday, which will be excerpted on this week's Media7 (see the bottom of this post if you'd like to come along). Sadly, I couldn't blag my way into the main event of his visit -- a lunchtime briefing at the Westin for agencies and media buyers to explain to them how their free-to-air TV model is going to work when anyone can fast-forward through their commercials.

I'm guessing the answer was: principally through flags and commercial offers that pop up, more-or-less in context, while the viewer is using the device. Example: TiVo's partnership in the US with Amazon, which lets you buy Oprah's book of the month while you're still watching Oprah. How far they've got that from the Brave New World of Commerce to something a lot of people are actually doing, I'm not sure.

The market that does seem to be working is movies-on-demand from Netflix and Blockbuster, and commentators seem quite exercised about TiVo's new partnership with the big US retail chain Best Buy (Best Buy promotes TiVo hardware in its stores, possibly integrates TiVo software into other devices, and uses TiVo as a marketing platform).

For me, the ability to smoothly view YouTube via a box attached to my TV would be great (I refuse to even look at an Apple TV until it gets a refresh, and the PS3's YouTube application is hilariously awful). TiVo provides that as part of a subscription service in the US -- but won't do so, at least at first, in New Zealand or Australia, where there is no monthly fee to use the box (strictly speaking, American TiVo customers pay the sub to use the programme guide).

What you will see via broadband on TiVo here is TVNZ's on-demand programming -- both catch-ups of programmes already screened, on-demand movies (from Blockbuster, one would think) and some exclusive on-demand TV programming. Plus, of course, it's a digital video recorder and you can order pizzas with it.

But this is going to be a crowded space. Next month, Panasonic NZ launches this fat, sleek little piggy: a Blu-Ray recorder with two Freeview tuners, PVR functionality and a YouTube application. There are already TV sets with Ethernet ports, and (in the US) built-in YouTube apps and Netflix service.

TiVo in New Zealand will be more open, more networkable and more expandable than MySky. It's a powerful brand. But the 30,000 people most likely to want a TiVo already have a MySky. It's not going to be easy to sell an $800 box to the rest of the country.

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There were two striking things to come from the coverage of San Diego Comic-Con over the weekend. One is the extent to which it seems the entire media industry is looking to geek entertainment for a solution. As the New York Times put it:

virtually no one who makes or stars in Hollywood blockbusters can afford to sidestep this four-day conclave, which is all about direct communication with the fans. It is also very much about marketing, an event that has acquired major importance on the industry's calendar; major studios promote their biggest coming projects, and television producers for shows like "Lost" and "24" try to stoke interest in their approaching seasons.

Which would be one thing. But when the producers of Glee (a feel-good college glee-group TV drama that recently piloted to some acclaim) turn up, we're way out of classic geek territory.

The other striking thing is how much of it all involves Peter Jackson.

I09 has the Jackson roundup: District 9, The Hobbit, The Lovely Bones, Tintin, The Dambusters (with accompanying replica aircraft project) and a prospective miniseries based on Naomi Novik's Temeraire series of novels.

Amazingly, they left out the review of the New Zealand Film Commission.

EW has video of the forum it sponsored, with Jackson and James Cameron. They get to the great white hope of the cinema: 3D. (Tim Burton and Cameron will have Alice in Wonderland and Avatar available in 3D, and Disney is hauling out one of the holy texts of geekdom, Tron.)

Cameron is having Titanic converted for 3D screening, and Jackson is trying to convince Warners to stump up to do the same with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the studio feels there aren't enough 3D cinemas, "and I say 'there will be in two years when the thing's finished, so why don't we just get started on it?' .."

"There'll be a lot more 3D screens when they know that the Lord of the Rings films are going to be available," Cameron observes.

Although Cameron suggests that the consumer electronics industry might quickly catch up and start offering 3D as home entertainment, it seems more likely to be something to pay to go and see for a while yet. You can't pirate bums-on-seats entertainment.

In the same forum, Jackson talks about working with Universal Studios on a King Kong amusement ride to replace the one that burned down a couple of years ago: a "super-Cinerama" 3D visual experience at 60 frames a second, viewed from a tram travelling through the middle of the Really Big Fight between Kong and the T Rexes, with the "hot air and the stinky breath of the dinosaurs on people … and when Kong gives the dinosaur a right hook there'll be goo flying out of his mouth … "

District 9 -- which emerged after studio politics sank the Halo movie Jackson was going to make with South African director Neill Blomkamp -- looks great.

The film is based on Blomkamp's earlier short work, Alive in Joburg, which can be seen here on YouTube:

Or downloaded from Archive.org here.

And the District 9 trailer is here.

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As I noted above, the Tom Rogers TiVo interview will feature in this week's Media7, with an accompanying panel discussion. There will also be some korero about Maori Language Week with the Rev Hone Kaa, Maori Television's Julian Wilcox and Naida Gllavish, who, as a toll operator in 1984, famously stood up for her right to greet callers with "kia ora". And Gary Gottlieb will talk about headline-driven legislative panic.

If you'd like to join us in the audience, hit "Reply" and let me know asap. We'd need you at TVNZ around 5pm tomorrow.

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The Short and Long of It | Jul 24, 2009 10:46

My friends' clever teenage daughter started following on Twitter on Saturday. She joined three weeks ago with the words: "ew, twitter, I can't believe I caved". It seems that it's now compulsory to be jaded about Twitter before you start using it. (Her next tweet, 14 minutes later, was "character number limitations on usernames is about as fascist as the futurists". I did say she was clever.)

Well … I like Twitter. And I can hardly be accused of getting down the kids, given that the kids don't do it. Probably. The much-discussed Morgan Stanley research note from 15 year-old Matthew Robson ("Twitter is not for teens") was intriguing, even illuminating, but essentially anecdotal.

The Guardian found two more teenagers, who said, actually, they did read newspapers, but, as one said: "teenagers are disenchanted with sites such as Twitter attempting to become the next big thing and remain Facebook-faithful."

The Guardian grown-ups further debated the issue -- because there's nothing else to worry about in the world, right? -- and some of what they said rang true. This comment:

Twitter isn't the holy grail, nor is it Satan personified. It's just a web-service that lots of people seem to like. Whether or not you use it will most likely not affect the millions of non-celebrity, non-media types that chat with their friends and with strangers - it certainly doesn't merit the backlash it gets from people who have no interest in it.

And this one:

Twitter is chaos; teenagers prefer organised chaos - think of a MySpace profile with 30 different songs automatically starting at the same time or the hilarity of the 9,000 applications installed on one teenager's Facebook profile. Twitter is not a viable medium for them.

It is precisely the way Facebook seeks to organise me that jibes. It seems redolent of the irritating hypersocialisation of American college culture. It's dating and yearbooks writ large. It wants me to behave in a way I don't behave.

I have a Facebook page, of course, because I need to be available to people who do actively use it, but I almost grit my teeth every time I go there. If I haven't responded to your friend request, it's not because I don't like you. It's not all bad: it's fun when I'm tagged in a vintage photograph. YMMV, naturally. (And I truly do appreciate the birthday greetings my Facebook friends write on my wall.)

Twitter, on the other hand, is a simple web service that my friends and I can knead into the shape that suits us. Because I am a famous blogger, I have 1100 followers, but most of the people I follow are personally known to me. I like Ben Goodger's existential murmurings from the coding coalface, and Chad Taylor progress reports (as spare and economical as all his prose -- the guy could get by fine in 50 characters), and Hickey, Saarinen, Slack and the others. I'll post interesting links and plug PA posts, but sometimes I'll just shoot the breeze. I even find myself using Twitter as an email or IM substitute. It's so quick and accessible. When I return to my computer, Ill click Tweetie first.

I spoke to PR consultant Paul Blomfield this week. He uses Twitter searches for media monitoring on his clients. Other people I know use it to make contact with leaders in their professional fields. My friend Brian uses Tweetdeck to post simultaneously to Twitter and Facebook.

The mediaphile in me likes the meta-perspectives to which Twitter lends itself. Because it is so open, there are multiple third-party services based on trendspotting. That openness also means a choice of applications. My experience improved a lot once I started using Tweetie, in both its desktop and iPhone versions. The comparison to Facebook is pretty stark in that respect.

The brevity and directness offers me a more immediate outlet than the fully-fleshed posts that tend to appear here on Public Address. I even actually enjoy paring back my thoughts to 140 characters. It's good practice.

Essentially, Twitter is poetic, and Facebook is administrative.

And I've always been better at one than the other.

@publicaddress
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There has been a bit of chatter about Lance Wiggs' post Why I don't read Public Address. I got a bit snippy (with some reason) in the comments that followed, but it was a useful and lively discussion.

Some of Lance's criticisms (the "expectation" that a post should contain only one topic; the view that PA posts are "far too long for the internet media") don't move me, and the "political blog rankings" he quotes don't actually reflect real traffic -- but I'm naturally concerned if people do find aspects of the site difficult.

Being able to do something about it is another matter, but I'm hoping to have a redesign that better integrates PA "classic" and System in place by the end of the year. And that much-desired edit button will be introduced as part of a revamp of the forums functionality within the month. (Although if Karl at CactusLab needs to spend more time with new baby Arthur, he should do that.) The work will eat up a fair chunk of the year's income, but that's life.

In the meantime -- and to answer one common complaint -- don't forget that you can enlarge the text on Public Address with the text-size widget that's on every page. And is there demand for full RSS feeds as an option? I'd prefer people to come to the website (and not only for advertising reasons), but if there's a demand from the community here I'll look at it.

And for all that I sometimes wonder about the zeal of WordPress afficiandos (it's content platform, not a religion), WordCamp NZ, August 8 and 9 in Wellington, is shaping as a landmark event. And it's at a bowling club!

PS: Our first in-studio Media7 is now online. The panel talks about PR and journalism -- and Jock Anderson expresses his dissatisfaction with PRINZ' handling of his ethics complaint against Glenda Hughes. Then we look at the global newspaper crisis and hear from both Barry Colman and Bernard Hickey. It looks a lot more swish than it did at The Classic …

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On Ideas | Jul 22, 2009 09:47

For all that it stretches the imagination to suppose that a productivity task force appointed by Rodney Hide and Don Brash will be stocked with independent and open minds, I suspect that will need to be the case if the latest addition to Hide's menagerie of pet projects is to have any real credibility.

In one sense, the appointment of Brash as chairman of the taskforce is a gift to the Opposition parties. Not only can Brash be cast as the economic bogeyman, there's a reasonable chance that he'll live up to the role. That his ideological convictions will trump political commonsense and the taskforce will offer up extreme solutions. And that its findings will consequently amount to a version of Auckland City's "Birch Report" on a national stage.

John Key seems already to be trying to head off that possibility by declaring that "there's no point coming up with policies unless they're implementable". Declaring that your economic doctor will be ignored if he insists on acting crazy seems an odd way to start.

But the productivity problem is real: we do need to hear new ideas. And the taskforce's explicit orientation towards "catching up" with Australia suggests that some of those ideas might be heretical. An honest comparison of our liberal regulatory environment with Australia's, for example, may struggle to conclude that ours has worked better.

An interesting story by Brian Fallow in the Herald today notes that Treasury research suggests that a key problem isn't the efficiency of the labour market, but "capital shallowness" -- a failure by business to make productive capital investment.

Fallow ventures in his story that "Brash appear[s] to accept the importance of capital deepening", as if he is describing a man coming around to the idea that the earth isn't flat. Well, perhaps the taskforce could do with a member who won't quote Hayek like the Bible. Someone who has written about our low capital intensity before. And who wrote at the beginning of this year:

Improving productivity was relatively easy during the first 15 years of economic reform. Deep structural change made the economy more efficient which in turn created a large supply of spare employees and plant.

As the economy grew, companies expanded by absorbing the spare capacity.

But in recent years, we've run out of spare people and plant. So we can progress now only by investing heavily in the skills of people and the technology of plants. Worse, the level of sophistication required of both for the country to remain internationally competitive keeps rising rapidly thanks to fast progress overseas.

Thankfully, the economic development data shows we are making progress. The ratio of capital to labour in the economy trended up slowly from the late-1980s then accelerated rapidly from 2003. Once the labour market became really tight, companies began investing more heavily in plant and technology.

Total investment in plant and machinery equalled 8% of GDP in 2005, a higher rate than Australia, Denmark, the UK and US the four OECD countries the study uses as benchmarks and higher than the median rate for all OECD countries.

Yes, Rod Oram. I'm saying it more in hope than expectation, but I'm saying it.

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Meanwhile, if Phil Goff wants to float ideas, could he please ensure they don't have any holes in them when he pushes them out from the jetty? He was obliged to deeply qualify (and that's a kind way of putting it) his call for unemployment benefit to be available to people with working partners almost as soon as he made it. There is a case to be made that the current household income thresholds are too mean, and that's the one he should have made in the first place.

If he wants to squander the momentum his party gained in the Mt Albert by-election, he's going the right way about it.

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And finally, if David Farrar wants to be known as a man of ideas, perhaps he should stop screaming when people discuss them. His STFU attack on Sian Elias was not pretty.

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A New Hope | Jul 20, 2009 09:43

The National Business Review's publisher said it was "moving into a new phase of electronic publishing". No, I'm not referring to Barry Colman's letter last week announcing the NBR' website's embarking on "The Great New Journalism Adventure" -- it is introducing paid-subscriber-only content -- but to the last time Barry declared a sea-change: 10 years ago when he announced that the NBR website was being closed down because it wasn't making enough money.

In 1999, Chris Barton wrote an excellent post-mortem of NBR's first foray on the Web , listing the errors of its conception, and noting nonetheless that even Colman admitted the site was actually making money:

"Even on the week it closed, the advertising more than covered the cost of the operation. On the day of the announcement, Saatchi rang to book a new campaign. It wasn't a financially driven decision at all - it was a strategic one based on whether we could ever sell information on the Net."

After two-and-half years Colman now knows he can't. "We were expecting at least 2000 subscribers by now - we've ended up with 200."

And now Barry's hot new thing is to … sell subscriptions.

In making the announcement, he railed against:

… a huge band of amateur, untrained, unqualified bloggers who have swarmed over the internet pouring out columns of unsubstantiated "facts" and hysterical opinion.

Most of these "citizen journalists" don't have access to decision makers and are infamous for their biased and inaccurate reporting on almost any subject under the sun (while invariably criticising professional news coverage whose original material they depend on to base their diatribes).

And as if that weren't enough, the editorial page column by "The Scribbler" in last week's NBR lays into Twitter and, quite personally, into Bernard Hickey of interest.co.nz. Barry needs to careful lest people think he has a chip on his shoulder …

The responses have been swift and generally savaging. Lance Wiggs ventured with The NBR is in trouble – what should they do?. And Bernard Hickey himself has a post headed How to profitably publish financial news online for free, with which I largely agree.

Interest.co.nz is part of Trade Me's advertising network (meaning Trade Me sells ad impressions on interest.co.nz) and also, I think, still sells advertising direct. It is in the happy position of targeting readers who want information and analysis on finance and investment -- the same market a big chunk of the internet advertising dollar is also trying to reach. But advertising still isn't what makes it profitable. Says Bernard:

5. Donate the news and sell the data

This is at the core of how we make a profit. We collect an awful lot of data about interest rates, the housing market, the economy, financial markets and commodity prices. We display these in charts and tables for free and use them in free news and commentary on our website.

A major source of traffic to our site is to our rates comparison pages (mortgages, term deposits under one year, term deposits over one year, and credit cards) and that's where many advertisers want to be for obvious reasons.

We then collect and store the data for these pages and sell that in various concentrated forms and formats to banks, regulators and other media. We mine these data sets constantly for story ideas and new ways to profit from them.

That's not only great work: it's the kind of work NBR half-pie got underway the first time it tried. The first version of nbr.co.nz was rich with data -- property, company, credit and vehicle registration databases..

It was bloody hard to find though, even after the site was redesigned. It was the classic Cold Fusion mess. Yet if NBR had worked on better ways of packaging and selling data online, it might created a whole new market for itself. It's not like Barry hasn't found mechanical, profitable ways to sell data in the past. And it wasn't like they didn't have time. The site was making money.

So what's NBR selling this time? Says Barry:

What we will be introducing will not make the mistake of providing journalism as usual and charging for it. We know that we will have to provide a consistently superior news service and I believe you will quickly see we are up to the challenge.

And:

I expect about 20 per cent of our web news to be Subscriber Only Content. The exact ratio will vary as we will be using the category for only the best news stories, scoops and commentary pieces that we post on any one day. Besides the serious issues of the moment the content will include large doses of satire and goings on uncovered by our nosey Private Bin reporters.

One might debate the wisdom of making your "best" stories the very ones that no one can link to. But why also slap a price on the very genre in demonstrable oversupply on the internet -- commentary? Who is really going to pay to read last week's ruminations on climate change sceptic Chris de Freitas, when so much of the same is free online?

To be fair -- and Barry's critics seem to be missing this -- most of his subscriber content, from lead news stories to most of the columns weren't online anyway (only The Listener more diligently protects its opinion-formers from the dangers of conversation). So he seems so far to largely be selling stuff that wasn't previously for sale in web format.

And yet, while Bernard is brilliant at what he does -- he's smart, prolific, quotable and agile, and he loves the data -- the news is not all made of that. The reporter who spends a month (or even a week) nailing an important story doesn't fit the pulsing, real-time environment of blog-cultured online news. I don't think it's a coincidence that the model Bernard lauds looks exactly like his own. It works for him.

But even here, the difference isn't what readers pay to get that reporting in print form -- that money is largely eaten up by production and distribution -- but in what advertisers will pay to be on a print page rather than in the banner at the top of a web page, and in the massive oversupply of advertising inventory in a world where anyone may publish.

Advertising is supposed to be supporting a brave new world of news, views, sound and vision. But there simply isn't enough money around to make everyone's dreams come true. Music rights holders complain they're not getting enough from YouTube, but it's not like YouTube isn't costing Google half a billion dollars a year to run.

I suspect that hardware may come to the publishers' rescue, by which I mean that a really good post-Kindle mobile information product could work. Mobile communications services have always been able to sell the contents of their walled gardens, but the experience has largely sucked.

Maybe what my iPhone does changes that a bit. I use my traffic camera app and my Twitter app. And guess what? I paid for all of them, once. I paid for the applications to get the content. And it was cheap. That seems to have worked for all concerned.

In his recent smoochfest of an interview with Fox News from the Allen and Company media conference in Sun Valley, Rupert Murdoch confirmed his plans to "lead the newspaper industry into monetising what it has", and confirms that he's in conversation with hardware makers and "we're all working on wireless readers for newspapers, or for books and magazines".

You may now be thinking that if Murdoch could manipulate his digital pages with the same ease with which Amazon can delete 1984 from your kindle, that's a bit scary.

But there is no avoiding the fact that this is a networked world, that a big news story with popular currency will always beat a big news story behind a paywall. There will be places where openness gives way to utility (hey, I'm a Mac user, I did that), but I can't see Murdoch or Colman's adventures in monetisation turning out quite as planned.

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NB This is all a very long way of saying that we'll be featuring both Bernard Hickey (at his place of work) and Barry Colman (in the studio) on Media7 this week. It should be lively. This is the first show to be recorded in Studio 3 at TVNZ, rather than at The Classic. Not our choice, but a good new challenge. Our audience space is somewhat constrained, so we'll have to be a bit less relaxed about people just strolling in. On the upside, we will still be serving drinks. If you'd like to join us from 5pm on Wednesday, hit the Reply button and let me know.

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