DDC Group: System Leaders – Rich Dean

The members of the Digital Distribution Consortium spend most of their time talking about what kinds of technologies public media needs to serve its audience – the kinds of nuts-and-bolts services that create a rich experience for listeners and viewers who access our content online. We’re also drawing wisdom from outside the group – from inside and outside public media.

Last week, we phoned Rich Dean, Director of Channels at KUT in Austin, TX. Rich is an advocate for new technologies and services that allow stations to build audience and loyalty, but he’s leery of creating a new structure, when the tools and local stations are what matters.

We’re keenly aware of that tension. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine creating a new kind of structure to manage the technologies we envision. But as I’ve said before, just about the last thing this system needs is another layer of organization, governance, meetings, committe, inertia. That’s not what we’re planning to recommend.

Last week’s conversation with Rich was a chance for us to hear what he wants from his project. The following are my notes from the conversation.

Rich Dean (KUT): What we need out of the process is not so much a shared system, as shared standards and shared ways of doing business. The podcast project helped us – it helped our processes, gave us standards. That’s more of what we need – standards, projects.

• encoding rates, bit rates – pretty much worked out
• metadata – shared standards
• web metrics
• federated search
• marketing

These projects are easy to define and easy to take on.

Debra May Hughes (PI): So a standards body? That’s something we’ve all talked about.

Rich: Shared standards would be a huge thing.

Jake Shapiro (PRX): The podcast project is driving the process toward better standards, and it seems like this is a good example – standards, and the implementation of them. That’s a hope for this project, too.

Rich: A big issue will be keeping the local station at the center. I’m concerned that if you adopt a centralized strategy, local stations will stop making their own investments in content and technology. We need strong ways for local content to trickle up nationally, internationally.

Jake: We’re trying to address that and also address stationality issues, including local presence inside the national content. That’s one of our priorities: create a set of distribution services, and stations can take advantage of the content that comes through it – curating, etc., the content you want to offer, with your own identity inserted, with our tools enabling other kinds of local innovation and audience engagement. What more could you do if you had access to this? Would you even want this?

Rich: Whatever we do, it should be easy. We (KUT) would definitely take advantage of that – local inserts on Morning Edition podcasts, for example. If you start off with the question of how can we expose more local content to a national audience, then you come up with a number of solutions that can be tried.

Tim Olson (KQED): We’ve been thinking about how we can enable services – and thinking about some target opportunities like a regional news service or local partnerships for content.

Rich: I like the enabling language. Music stations can coordinate rights release, for example. We’re also having trouble breaking through the clutter as a smaller station and so joint promotion needs to be something that this entity does. I’m less concerned about getting deals with Sprint, Melodeo, than about iTunes – at this moment. If we go to Sprint etc, I hope the smaller stations can get more prominence in that kind of a deal. I’d like this group to work on a more equitable promotional strategy.

Jake: There’s a variety of techniques to do that.

Rich: The big messages are: we need to invest locally and in the local stations – how to make that a priority. And how do we focus more on shared standards than on shared systems?

Jay: How do you help all the small stations meet the standards you set?

Rich: You have to set a level of expectation. IMA might provide more practical assistance to stations that need it.

Tim: Maybe you build some middleware to handle this.

Jake: Done right, a system in the middle might be able to help with this.

Rich: The podcasting project is a bummer – the more stations that join, the less money I make. The next step that will keep us interested is the insertion of local. It could be underwriting and then eventually content. I mean “spots” inserted into any podcast downloaded in Austin – not just our own podcasts. The users would be self-identified.

Jake: Federated identity

Rich: I’m down with that (federated identity) only in the sense that it would support some other use. I don’t always want to force registration.

Jake: We want to take these good ideas and create some momentum around them. The part we haven’t got into is figuring out what to do and then looking at current systems.

Rich: Some of these ideas might be best taken on by stations – incubated from below.

Tim: this is the exciting area – the stuff we don’t know is going on at local stations.

Debra May: Tapping the hidden strengths of local stations.

Tim: Growing at the edges.

Rich: You have to be careful about how you communicate about this. The word is you are building this big thing. Even from the blog and the wiki, it seems that’s the goal. There’s probably more support for [a system of standards and tools] than the idea you might be unintentionally communicating. Saying you’re working on a “Business Plan” creates perceptions.

Michael Kleeman (DDC Consultant): The concept of the business plan isn’t so much to create an entity as to consider a whole system and figure out if it’s self-sustaining. How it gets executed is a separate issue.