Broadcasters face an expected 9% loss in revenue next year, and after February 17th, 2009, every confused consumer will represent lost viewing, lower ratings, and potentially lower ad revenue. Broadcasters could fill some of this gap with revenue from new interactive services that take advantage of the opportunities afforded by digital transmission, but Mermigas writes that this isn’t happening. Many stations and group owners have no clear strategy for how to use the spectrum or how to make money from it.

What strategies are public TV stations pursuing? Public TV’s older demographic is most likely to be confused by the switch, and more likely to be cut off from viewing when analog goes dark. Beyond that difficult problem is how public broadcasters plan to achieve the revenues necessary to support 2-5 channels. And Mermigas’ post implies a bigger question: what new services can you develop that will utilize the capabilities of digital broadcasting to further your mission, while building a stronger financial future for public TV?

I’ve already offered up my snarky remarks on the 24 hour PBS HD feed – that it looks great in a Best Buy store, but once it convinces you that you must own an HD set, it offers very little. My bias is toward multicast; or more choice, rather than more pixels.

This manager takes a somewhat different smarter view:

1) People really do watch that 24 hour HD channel. It’s mostly anecdotal, I think, but he’s probably right. There is something mesmerizing about programs like NOVA, or even Smart Travels, when you see them in high definition. It makes you want to watch more TV. I’m not sure how long that lasts, or whether it means that public TV should devote 24 hours a day to eye candy across the majority of the digital bandwidth. Especially when the HD channel schedule is repetitious, and often the series episodes shown don’t match what I see on my regular, old-fashioned PBS channel. But maybe this doesn’t matter. If I used to watch 3 hours of public TV a week, and now I watch 6 hours because the HD channel is really cool, that’s a good thing, right? Hmmm… maybe I should see a high definition TV personality occasionally, asking me for some more money.

2) How much HD you offer should be tied to how much HD you produce. It’s silly of me to ask my public TV station to stop transmitting all those bandwidth-sucking vistas; my public TV network here has made a huge commitment to HD. For a few years now, it’s entire production capability in the field has been HD. (Remember the Monty Python sketch where the guys are shot on video indoors, and they grow curious about why every time they look out the door, they’re shot on film?) The field makeover is to be followed by a makeover of its three studios, the first of which is likely to debut this fall. The reason for all this? The network is committed to preventing our small midwestern state from “disappearing” in the digital future. It’s a core piece of the network’s overall strategy. It goes without saying that a network that is churning out dozens of hours of HD programs a year can make a stronger case for a significant commitment of bandwidth to it.

3) Multicast is damn expensive. Even networks like Create that repackage stuff we’ve already paid for cost money. I hear that one planned multicast service is asking stations to sign 10 year contracts. That amazes me, but it’s the stark reality of maintaining the service.

So what do you do?

Our network here is investigating low cost ways to find existing content, which few ever see, and make it available to a much wider audience. This is a smart move. Research Channel dramatically increases a university’s ROI in lectures and presentations. When taxpayers help make all of this intellectual content possible at the universities in their state, they should be able to get access to more of it than they do, and public TV can be a conduit for it, and catalyst for the creation of more of it, at very little cost to itself.

What other content is there? Ethan Zuckerman writes compellingly about Al Jazeera English. Why can’t my public TV station offer it for a few hours a week on multicast? My PBS station already offers BBC World News. Slap an hour of BBC World News next to an hour of Al Jazeera, or (as the PBS manager says) next to an hour of TV produced for external consumption by our own Broadcasting Board of Governors. Put fixed cameras in public radio studios and offer up talk shows and other programs on TV. A few hundred thousand people watch Imus on TV every day. Follow the TPT or CET models and find partners who will help you create content. I still really like the idea of giving over a small portion of digital bandwidth to retransmit public radio stations. Your channel becomes a portal to a wealth of public media content, whether audio or video. (btw, at present, can you do this? Public radio network number one: no; public radio network number two: maybe; public radio network number three: yes. Streaming rights? Don’t even ask.)
Are three cameras always better than one? No. C-SPAN has shown us that an event recorded with one camera, can result in compelling content for those who are compelled to view it. I watch Merlin Mann’s “The Merlin Show” religiously. It’s shot with one camera that never moves. Is it an amateur video podcast? No, it’s well produced and soon it will be available in 720p. Does it need a second camera? No. Why? Because the production doesn’t require it, AND it’s great content.

People far smarter than me could come up with many more ideas than that, and are. I can live with big, jaw-droppingly beautiful HD images, if there’s still some room for innovation and experimentation in multicasting. In a way, this is like the first days of television all over again. Once again, we have a medium that almost no one is watching, a space to try anything that we can think of, for little or no money (relatively speaking), a space in which to fall flat on our faces, or perhaps to rewrite the rule book for TV.

I believe there is a wide-ranging group of benefits, [...] accruing to public broadcasters from a multi-pronged web strategy:

• Stations can serve existing listeners and viewrs more deeply. This is by far the guiding principle behind most station web sites as well as the NPR and PBS sites, and is the focus of most current station interest in web innovations. Although it’s sometimes put down as a “glorified program guide” approach, it’s totally rational and is likely to remain a top priority for stations for some time. On-demand content can serve this need well — more depth, more quantity, etc. — with tangible benefits in traditional sources of revenue. But this isn’t enough.
• Stations can improve their standing as important institutions in their communities by serving a community aggregation function for public media. More and more organizations and individuals in our communities are producing or trying to produce public media. At my university, there are 8-10 video editing stations available to students for their use in doing class assignments in lieu of or in addition to writing term papers. One high school student I know of in California has some 40 video features produced and edited. Schools, colleges, universities, museums, libraries, archives, government agencies are all in need of production, aggregation and distribution services. No, most of this stuff doesn’t belong on the air when time is dear, but to apply that standard to web-based distribution is to deny the public its own voice. Nothing will provide a better demonstration to corporate, foundation and tax-based sources of your lasting value in your community, regardless of how you define it.
• Recycling the audiences from our own stations between air and the web will not be sufficient to provide the economic kryptonite we need to survive the disruptive changes in the media industry. The NPR podcasting pilot with iTunes has ably demonstrated how we can hitchhike with other brands to provide distribution into the yellow area of the universe above and beyond — for pay if we want that, and I think we do in many cases. There are many of ways of providing services for compensation and tools available to make it successful. How-to programming could “hitchhike” with a brand like Home Depot, outdoor programming with REI, and more. Musical and news genres can be made available by subscriptions exposed through other partnerships. Get creative.

He covers a lot of important ground in a handful of paragraphs. I find myself challenged in another way by this: my cherished multi-stream strategy for television and radio doesn’t amount to a hill of beans if I’m not doing something new and thoughtful with it, if I’m not engaging my community in the content production for it. Do I really want a “Create” or a “World” channel if they simply fill several megabits per second of spectrum with repeats of programs I’m struggling to find an audience for on the main channel? Is that audience service? Is it fulfilling the promise of public media?

There are some smart people who believe that over the next few years, we’ll reach a tipping point in on demand video that will disrupt linear cable and satellite television and most of those niche channels created over the past 15 years will fade away, many of them shifting to an online, on demand presence. It’s possible that in the not-too-distant future, our universe of television could comprise 30 channels, with hundreds of online niche content providers. This may happen or it may not. What I do believe is that the end-game for public media isn’t going to be the broadcast of wasteful streams of the same old crap. It’s going to be about the creation of new content; the creation of new content with partners – including citizens with some equipment, skills and a point of view; and it’s going to involve a serious re-think of the lavish production model that has come to characterize everything public television does. We don’t have the money to play by the old rules anymore, and we don’t have any excuse for not trying some new things. We have great examples out there, from TPT’s Minnesota Channel to WGBH Forum to ‘GBH’s 6:55 to WNBC’s Independent Producer Showcase. There’s room for more experimentation.
Note: this is a true Haarsager Mashup: all the links point to content he’s referenced in the past 6 weeks.

Because of a minor issue (let’s call it Autosave), these notes are adapted from Jessica Duda’s excellent summary on the Beyond Broadcast blog. I summarize them here not to pass them off as my own but to have a record here of the sessions.

Diane Mermigas, The Hollywood Reporter

Both commercial and public media need to do the following:

• change their orientation and embrace interactivity
• understand how technology empowers the consumer
• redefine the concept of content
• deepen advertising and commerce
• reinvent business models
• view the process with an entrepreneurial spirit

Focus on the strength of public media – strong content

Public media needs an organized effort of producing content that is creative, independent, diverse, credible, and in-depth, with links to education and problem-solving. This will ensure public media’s survival and their ability to make money.

Media property rights are in flux. Currently, the web is a deliberate system with most online companies posting content through a filtering system and users consuming only what they specifically seek, which narrows their interests and creates an information vacuum. BBC, MTV are examples of the passive broadcast model of web delivery services; they could be more interactive – and more profitable.

The role of public media is thus to fill the void of the marketplace and monetize these ideas. Public media should learn from these models to create the services and interactivity:

• TiVo
• Ipod
• Open TV
• Visible World

Seek strategic partnerships

There are a variety of partnerships that public media should pursue. Serving as a content provider to other businesses can include providing local content, such as to Google. At the April 2006 National Association of Broadcasters conference, they discussed working with cable operators to obtain local advertisers as these operators have a local connection. Media companies with such partnerships have increased local advertising revenue growth by 30 percent in the past four years – as opposed to the usual three to four percent. Public media should do the same and align with consumer technology companies to expand digital delivery options.

There are also many unknowns, especially as old media financial targets and benchmarks are used to evaluate and set new media goals – without knowing how consumers will ultimately use the quickly-evolving technologies that will also affect new, unanticipated forms of expression, [such as Second Life.] Thus, making assumptions is challenging and focusing on the consumer is key. Overall, for every challenge, there are at least two opportunities.

Dan Nova, Highland Capital Partners

There is a problem of the “needle in a haystack” of online media companies/services. A new online firm is funded every day and they are all excited about the Web 2.0 world. Audience trends show that new outlets of public participatory media can grow exponentially as early as the first year, such as YouTube growing up to 6.5 million users and Technorati reaching 1.5 million users.

Low costs of participatory media and attractive business models

The old adage of “If you build it, they will come” has changed to “if they build it, they will come.” Participatory media presents many attractive low cost and high value content that in turn affect the criteria investors use to fund new participatory online sites.

Participatory media costs

• Low costs to attract participatory media
• Low customer acquisition costs
• Low customer retention costs
• Low marketing costs
• Low content development costs
• Low technology costs (open source)

Characteristics of quality content

• Easy to use
• Effective
• Entertaining
• Participatory

Acquisitions are increasing

Traditional media are being squeezed – being cash rich can be a liability. New media have had financial success, but the business models are moving quickly. Now, old media is competing with new media to buy new-new media.

How to evaluate participatory media websites through three main development stages

New opportunities

• Focus on the team
• Assess how the idea compares to the existing competition
• Review the development time and cost
• Don’t emphasize the business model specifics – it is premature
• Look at a valuation range of 0-5 million upfront

Mid-stage value drivers

The mid-stage of participatory media development is a tenuous time and is dangerous for investors as the valuation is based on the initial ‘buzz’ – not hard numbers of tried and true audiences.

Later stage companies

Assessing later stage companies, look for the same fundamentals as the new opportunities.

• Focus on the team
• Assess the revenue streams and sources
• Review the margins
• Confirm the financial sustainability
• Critically assess the business model – very important
• Assess where the biggest windows exist

Other characteristics of the successful later stage companies include: an “insane” customer focus, simple content presentation, huge market, active/missionary leaders, and constant improvement.

Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation

Business models discussed at this conference have largely been based on charity or advertising. In order to for them to be sustainable, public media must have a public purpose. The trends all show the revolution has arrived, especially as the two biggest commercial TV stations are putting their content on the web for free. Once measured by the household (radio, television), media consumption metrics are per the individual (internet, on demand); thus, changing the benchmarks and terms of media.

Changes in the public media audience – new creators

Public media should go to VOD on the internet as attention is the challenge – distribution is not the problem. Of course monetization is another problem for public media. Media cannot be a one-way company in a two-way world. The old media presented a push approach and treated the audience as mute. Now they can see the explosion of self-expression. The old media cannot ignore the public are creators, users, and speakers. The old media will try to make the public ‘feel’ as though we are interactive which may not be the case. A new way to assess media delivery is that old models are broadcast, cable TV, public TV and the new is “Independent Noncommercial TV” and the “networked individual.”

Much growth still needs to occur within the new media users as the current 40 million bloggers amount to less than one percent of the world population – public media need to reach the other 99 percent. At the same time, the internet, while useful, timely and convenient lacks public trust – to the extent local television ranks higher.

Recommendations for membership-based participatory media

One out of every two Americans are apart of member of a cooperative – namely credit unions which are a trust institutions. Information is also trust issue and we can use this concept of a membership-based, participatory organization to create our own credible content. The public should form and pay dues to media membership organizations to create their own local news so that the people can decide what is newsworthy. They should look for a base in civil society organizations and ask people to pay to join a group that allows them cooperatively provide their own content.

Ironically, civic society groups are pushing back on this idea – they believe the government should fund such public media. However, “you can’t speak to power on power’s nickel.” Professional journalists are also suspicious of citizen journalists and such membership organizations. Professionally-trained journalists should conduct the investigative work but media organizations should also have a space for citizen journalists to report other types of news and information.

Overall, the old media format is to report, edit, and control responses and have such [limiting] mottos as “All the news that is fit to print.” The media presented at this conference seek to break this top-down approach – from Google to Wikipedia. All of these models have different functions and are open and closed to varying degrees. If you give participants the chance to be a member and use more functions, the more they will be willing pay dues to have an impact influence beyond their community. We can have a chance to make that revolution.

Bill Buzenberg spoke about Public Insight Journalism: “for every story, someone in our audience knows more than we do”, their use of “idea generators” like The Future of Small Towns. Those ideas become reports and series on-air, become comments online, become townhall meetings and symposia, and eventually generates more content. American Public Media has created the Center for Innovation in Journalism to offer Public Insight Journalism to public broadcasters around the country.

Terry Heaton said disruption is an opportunity for growth.

• Media is unbundled at the point of origin and rebundled at the point of consumption. (media is embracing the first part of this, but not the second.)
• Mediated people make their own media.

David Liroff spoke about WGBH’s new media and interactive efforts. “This is less about technology and more about engagement.”

We’re bad at predicting the future of technology; we have to understand that and the policy implications of it.

The inability to see the potential of commons-based media: we are blind to the opportunities this kind of media offers at every level; there has to be a balance between proprietary and open source. How open should it be? How closed? These questions apply from user-generated content to internet protocols.

We tend to undervalue the potential of openness.

We undervalue the costs of locking up content with extended copyright.

Why? Our understanding of “property” is still based on physical things.

The Internet is the story of an anomaly – the creation of an open structure when, if it had been created in the conventional sense, would probably never been as open – more like Mini-tel than the Internet.

Where is the balance of “open” and “control”? We need to be aware of our cognitive biases and how they shape our decision making.

Boyle: Leave as open as possible, as long as possible, so others can see possibilities that you can’t and make them real.

I think the social networking aspect of these and other sites has less potential for public broadcasters – at least for now, while our main demographic is still late-GenX/Baby Boom. This generation discovered the internet as adults and although it’s changed how they interact, it’s not been the revolutionary shift that our next generation of listeners is living through now as teens and 20-somethings.

So to my mind, that pushes networking down the list – and makes interaction the most important concept for us to aim for. And I think it’s hugely important because interaction goes to the heart of what public broadcasting is about. The kinds of experiences that our “founding fathers” envisioned in 1967 – the multi-way conversation that would entwine broadcasters, listeners, culture-makers and public policy-makers – are the experiences we’re actually able to deliver with the Internet. This isn’t just the logical next step, it’s core to our mission as public service broadcasters.

So far, the main model for interaction that we’ve implemented has been comments. It’s a great first step, but it doesn’t fulfill the promise because while it’s a form of interaction, it takes place within a highly-controlled environment – listeners can comment on what we do. And while comment threads may veer off in other directions, they’re forced to exist within the rigid structure we’ve imposed – the original story that sparked the conversation, the thread’s title and category and keywords. The infrastructure of comments channels the river, so to speak.

I think the key to living up to our promise is to open the gates wider and invite listeners to be partners with us in generating content. This causes a lot of fear and consternation but it needn’t. And frankly it shouldn’t since this kind of interaction is really a part of our mandate.

Gather

Gather doesn’t have the strongest interface; it’s cluttered, and despite my efforts at customizing my account, I still don’t feel like I’m finding out about stuff on the site that might interest me. I can’t easily track topic areas with RSS, for instance. I’m not terribly interested in seeing the latest photos people have posted to the site on the front page, etc.

In talking to some people in pubradio about Gather I’ve consistently heard two things: it doesn’t feel like public radio; and a lot of the stuff that users submit isn’t that good.

Here’s what I think, having spent some time on the site: some of the content isn’t that great. But some of it is. The writing that people are doing about current events, politics, arts, restaurant, books, etc, and the comments others submit to these pieces are high level stuff.

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that works and what doesn’t work on Gather, and here’s my opinion: to the extent that Gather is a place for people to share their thoughts on ANY issue they’d like to; to the extent that Gather is a place for others to comment on that work; to the extent that Gather is a place where people can find others who share views or ideas or interests and form sub-groups, it’s great.

It boils down to this, in my view: to the extent that Gather is a public square, it’s a success.

Here’s where I think it doesn’t work as well: it also tries to be your blog. When Gather becomes the place for your pictures of your dog, your daily ramblings about going to the grocery store, etc., it falls down. The blog dilutes its effectiveness as a public square.

Public Action

This is hard to talk about because I’ve seen so little of it, but based on those brief views:

Public Action is trying to be the compromise tool for public broadcasters who feel like they need to have some kind of comment function open and the others who think it might be good, but are afraid of it. It offers a wide range of customization – you can moderate comments, you can let them go live immediately, you can approve groups, you can let listeners vote on groups, you can let a thousand groups bloom.

Users are encouraged to play the social networking game to a certain extent – they can create profiles, I think they can upload a picture, they can choose as their “icon” a favorite show or their station. It’s acceptable, not particularly over-the-top on the Friendster scale of networking.

At stations that follow a more open model, listeners should find it easy to comment on stories, form groups, etc. But I think Public Action – at least as it “exists” now – misses the boat on User Generated Content. The architecture is comments on stories, and not on original content. Yes, someone could write a thoughtful essay on banning smoking in restaurants and bars, and if the station has published a story on that topic, the listener has a place to put it. If there isn’t a story on that topic, where does it go? How does it ever get noticed or read? Do I have to create a “Smoking in Restaurants” group to ever have a chance of seeing that piece? That listener has broken out of the architecture of comments and promptly falls into a black hole.

Comments and groups are the tip of the iceberg of UGC, and it’s hardly the most important part.

The true value of our capability to generate interaction online isn’t the “I agree” or “you’re full of crap” comment. It’s allowing our website to be the place where our smart, thoughtful listeners, with their range of experiences and views, can share that intelligence and experience – a true public square. Some of our listeners will never contribute but will drop by to read what other people are writing. Some people are going to be happy enough leaving a comment. But I think plenty of our listeners are going to feel strongly enough about a topic that they’ll sit down and write 300-500 words of well-reasoned prose about it; or maybe they’ll make an audio or video story. We need to be the place where they go to present this kind of stuff; and the place where they can expect to be engaged by others at that same level.

We need to let our listeners be partners with us.

So, what is this architecture of participation? I’m certainly no expert, but I think it has to include:

• The ability to comment on anything we do or anything anybody else writes;
• The ability for listeners to submit lengthy content – text, audio or video;
• A system that allows open submission but also a level of curatorial responsibility – someone at the station who reads this stuff, pushes the good stuff to the front of the line;
• A process for users to nominate or recommend stuff they see that’s really good;
• A showcase for this great stuff;
• A mechanism for the station to not only ask for submissions in general, but in particular. If you’re working on a series on poverty, its outlines don’t need to be a secret. You can tell your online users what’s coming, what the focus of the series is, and ask them to submit their views on poverty. What you end up with is a richer exploration of the issues of poverty – far richer than you as a station can yourselves create because you’ve drawn on the expertise of your vast audience. (mind you, I don’t mean this to be “tell us how to cover the story”; certainly, this “public insight journalism” component is really good and we should all pursue something like this; but what I want to avoid is always forcing the issue to float around the station; the issue is poverty and its impact on the community, and while some people will express their views to you about how you should cover it in your series, the issue of poverty is bigger than you and your station and its series.);
• A mechanism to feed some of the very best of what listeners submit back to the air – from reading excerpts of essays, to airing portions of audio commentaries;
• At the end of the list, a way for users to get to know each other better, discover people with similar interests, discover others’ personal blog sites, etc.

I feel all of this is important for a few reasons:

• As I said earlier, it’s not a nice thing to do – it’s core to our mission.
• We must respect our audience enough not treat them as the great unwashed. We are taking their money; we are thinking of ten different ways to have a deeper relationship with them, all of them designed to benefit us. We’d better make sure it’s not all one-way. They are our partners.
• Haarsager, Hagel and others have talked about serendipitous discovery, and have reminded us that our podcasts can bring us entirely new audiences. So can this content, if it’s allowed to escape the straitjacket of comments to become a community public square – the website that your community comes to believe is the first place to check out when they want to know what people think about an issue or a hot topic of local discussion. (does this mean the public square should escape your station’s website ala Terry Heaton? Maybe.)

I believe public service broadcasting should be the hub of all important discussions in the community, the place listeners AND citizens look to for leadership in promoting arts and culture, discussion of public policy issues – in short, the vitality of the community.

The money quote comes from Ashley Highfield, BBC’s director of new media and technology:

“We want to allow Internet users to go into their own BBC space containing all the content they’re interested in, all the TV shows they like and all the things that they’ve played with on the Web,” said Highfield. “We need to come up with a personalised BBC home page that will provide users with a starting place for their journey through BBC content and beyond.”

That’s significant. Obviously, the site will still overflow with BBC content – news, weather, audio, video, etc – but the BBC space that I experience will be my creation… BBC’s stuff I like, my stuff, perhaps my mashups of BBC content, my network of friends also interacting with BBC content. Behind this is a radical re-visioning of what BBC is.

Here’s a piece I want to keep – ABC and the Future of Media by John Hagel.

I’m going to summarize it here. You should read the whole thing.

… rebundling of media will be where the bulk of value capture occurs in the media business. It will certainly be the key to building scalable and sustainable media businesses.

That is one of the consequences of the growing relative scarcity of attention – anyone who can help audiences connect with the most relevant and engaging content will be richly rewarded.

Branding in the traditional media business still remains largely with the talent rather than the intermediary. Few people go to a movie because of the studio that produced it, watch a TV show because of the network that broadcast it, buy a CD because of the music company that produced it or read a book because of the publisher that issued it. Magazines and radio are partial exceptions that prove the rule – it is not accidental that these are the two traditional media businesses with the most “micro-chunked” content.

As content proliferates, this is going to change profoundly. The most powerful brands in the media business will be held by successful intermediaries that help to consistently improve return on attention for audiences. In the process, the nature of the brand promise will change in a profound way. It will be a massive opportunity for media companies that understand the shift in economic and competitive dynamics and that focus on the rebundling plays required to build these brands.

There’s another way to frame the strategic opportunity/challenge for media businesses going forward. In addition to unbundling and rebundling of content, media companies face a choice: do they want to remain product businesses or do they want to become audience relationship businesses?

Here’s the test: how open is the media company to providing access to third party content on behalf of their audiences? If the answer is not very open, the company is primarily a product business. If the answer is very open, then the company is primarily an audience relationship business.

Audience relationship businesses take… proliferating content options as an opportunity, rather than a challenge. The more options there are, the more value that can be created by organizing, packaging, presenting and adding to these options for specific audiences. It’s a completely different mindset, skill set, culture and economics. Media companies that want to make the transition from a product business to an audience relationship business don’t have to do this overnight. There is a pragmatic migration path that evolves from product mindsets to platform mindsets and then eventually leads to a full blown audience relationship mindset.

I think the power of this piece is Hagel’s understanding that the greatest potential lies in rebundling content, a good portion of which may not be your own, to build a strong relationship with your audience. This reminds me of Terry Heaton’s belief that media companies need to come up with entirely new business models online. Many of his ideas are totally unrelated to the content those companies currently offer – but the content is tied to the needs of your audience – those who already engage with you in your mainline business and those who have no previous experience with your mainline business but will develop a relationship with you based on your new models.

I don’t want to be accused of oversimplifying, but this strikes me as a powerful argument for the role of trusted aggregator.

from Lost Remote.

Rolling out entire program schedules as VOD offering wouldn’t mean the end of “live” television; but if this massive commitment to VOD becomes a reality, it means public television is going to have to think about VOD’s perhaps marginal impact on viewership and on-air fundraising, and – more important – the greater potential to leverage its program assets to create revenue streams, perhaps with premium offerings in addition to free content, or the creation of more “event” specials for purchase or as “pledge events” of sorts for VOD viewers.

Terry Heaton writes today that local stations are eerily silent about this – perhaps because many of them have no idea that their business model may partially collapse around them.

To paraphrase Umair Haque, when your core competency is crumbling, look to build edge competencies. For an industry accustomed to exploiting artificial scarcity, that means understanding the value chain where abundance exists. Smart aggregators help people sort and filter (themselves) in the midst of that abundance, and that’s where local media companies are missing the boat.

That means moving from the supply side of the on-demand world to the demand side. Counterintuitive? Yes, but that describes just about everything in the media 2.0 paradigm.

So if you’re an affiliate, and you’re thinking that sharing download and ad revenues with your network is the road to profitability, ask yourself this. Can I make more money as a pure content provider or as a company that helps people sort, filter and use all that content? Think about it.

CBC’s English Television receives a little more than a quarter of the Corporation’s total Government funding. The rest of its budget, more than 50 per cent, is derived from commercial operations — advertising, subscription fees, program sales. How can you call yourself a public broadcaster when over 50 per cent of your budget comes from competing with the private sector? The reality is that CBC Television is only partly a public broadcaster.

This tension between the commercial and public missions of the network has never been resolved, and perhaps it never can. The result is a network that presents a confusing picture to Canadians. You can see it in the audience statistics and in the lack of viewer loyalty to CBC English Television. Canadians see CBC Radio and the French Radio-Canada radio and TV channels as distinctly Canadian – the services that tie the country and culture together. CBC TV is the oddball. The key here isn’t the commercial nature of the TV network. Radio-Canada’s TV network is commercial. The problem is a lack of distinctiveness at English Television.
Rabinovitch suggests greater investment by the government to buttress the corporation’s services, and a major new initiative to develop Canadian drama for television, much as Radio-Canada has launched on French television.

Major initiatives will be expensive to launch, however. Over the years, CBC has succeeded in wringing significant cost savings out of operations; Rabinovitch quotes impressive numbers in both one-time and continuing savings. But savings have their own costs, so to speak… and CBC English Television is a weaker organization today than it once was.