Web 1.0 was about web pages; Web 2.0 was, among other things, about the rise of web services; and what you can here are potentially the next few steps for the browser, from a piece of software that displays pages, to an environment where sites you’ve visited, clippings you’ve accumulated, pieces of data you’re monitoring, auctions you’re following, the people you chat with, the credit card you use to buy stuff, exist as objects, which you can manipulate easily, and which can be recognized and understood across sites as you use them.

You’re seeing one view of something people have been talking about for awhile now – the power of metadata to extract information from static web pages and deliver it in a variety of forms, as needed. We can already do this, with RSS, with API’s, etc., but these are still islands in the sea of data. The next steps will be to turn these islands into continents of data, and then to tie that data together in meaningful ways.

Yes, your web site becomes a lot less important than the data you’re moving through it and transmitting through RSS and API’s to other users and services, but this is already happening and has been happening for some time and it’s the tip of the iceberg. Your data becomes more valuable than ever, to users and other services, and also to you.

There are four videos; you can watch them all, but the first one will give you enough information to see the potential of this possible future.

I talk to some of these people regularly on the phone or by email and these are great ways to stay connected when I can’t see them in person, but Twitter has allowed me to enjoy a small percentage of their daily mundanities – the little things I used to find out from these friends because I saw them face-to-face all the time; now that we’re apart, these are the things that get edited out of the more formalized phone conversations or emails – stuff that’s too small to care about, but when it comes from people you care about, fills in the spaces of their lives in a way that’s enjoyable and comforting. It’s connective tissue.
This ambient intimacy is the original reason for Twitter: what are you doing right now? Up until recently, it was my primary use for it.

But if you follow these things, you know that by March of this year, Twitter was not only growing rapidly, but it was evolving in a number of ways, driven by users themselves. A couple are notable. First, people started choosing to bypass the direct messaging capability of Twitter, and began addressing friends publicly: @toddmundt… This conversation, the equivalent of shouting across a bar to a friend, is like IM but, at least for me, breaks out of the prison of the instant message paradigm: you should be online now, you should be interrupted by the message instantly, you should respond nearly instantaneously. I’ve used IM for about 12 years, but I’m far more pleased with Twitter’s capabilities in this regard, and the way I can control interruptions compared with IM.

The second evolution came very quickly, too, and this is where I’ve found Twitter and Jaiku to be the most valuable: the information sharing that’s taking place. I find out about some news stories on Twitter before they reach the front pages of CNN.com and the New York Times. More importantly, as the conversation grows and I add more diverse, interesting and thoughtful people to my network, I’m finding out about trends earlier, and discovering new ideas – like this Twitter note from American Public Media’s Jon Gordon that arrived a couple minutes ago:

Listener-conducted interviews? Post raw interviews for listeners to edit?

So here’s the deal: do you work in public radio? Do you work in public TV? Do you work at a joint licensee? Are you a consultant to these industries?

• Do you use Twitter? Add me.
• Do you use Jaiku? Add me.
• By all means, add John Barth, Tim Eby, and as many of the other public radio and TV folks you care to add.

NOT because I’m so smart and have so much to offer. Add me because you’re smart and you have good ideas and I want to know what you’re talking about. It will make me smarter, and perhaps as more of us in this industry chatter about stuff outside of occasional meetings and conferences, we’ll share ideas more efficiently and move more quickly.

That’s something we’re not known for, if you haven’t noticed.

Coyote Run Farm

Originally uploaded by toddmundt

Chuck and I did the Iowa Farm Crawl yesterday, driving south of Des Moines about 45 minutes to a small group of farms, clustered near each other, which supply much of our food during the growing season. Chuck knows some of these folks well, since he’s out the door at 7am every Saturday to buy their food at the farmer’s market.

We spent most of our time at Coyote Run Farm, where Pat Standley and Matt Russell grow most of the produce we eat in the summer; they also supply the best eggs I’ve ever tasted. We’ll eat one of their turkeys this Thanksgiving. We also stopped by Reichert’s Dairy Air, where about a dozen goats produce 50 lbs of cheese a week.

It was nice to get out of the house on a Sunday afternoon, but even better, it was exciting to see where our food comes from. You’d think that wouldn’t be hard to do in a place like Iowa, but almost everything this state produces gets shipped somewhere else for processing. Ironically, some Iowans are farther (and, perhaps, further) away from their food than people who live in big cities.

That’s what makes the local food movement so important here – it’s a bright spot in the midst of an economy built on subsidized corn, petroleum-based fertilizers, transcontinental shipping, and artificially cheap food.

I wasn’t able to get out of Minneapolis (PRPD) until this morning, but I got in just in time for Phillip Swann’s unveiling of his annual list of HDTV predictions.

The list is below; Phillip’s complete version is here.

• Digital TV becomes a political football – expect calls to move the transition back a bit
• The average HDTV set price will stabilize a bit – prices went down too fast last year
• Consequently, more people will buy low cost digital televisions
• Digital TV converter boxes will do poorly – not much promotion; consumers will remain confused
• The HDTV arms race between sat, cable and the telcos will only get worse
• Consumer confusion will only increase – more and more stories about the transition, many will be incorrect
• Local HDTV news will become a marketing weapon to get ratings
• HDTV is going to become a marketing weapon among the cable companies
• The networks will produce more shows that are geared to the HDTV audience
• Sony and Toshiba will reach a deal on a single HD DVD standard

There seems to be a growing consensus around the importance of high definition programming – driven largely by consumer demand. (By “growing consensus” I mean, Dennis Haarsager and others have been saying something like this for a long time, and I finally understood that they’re right.)

My interest in multicasting was reasonably strong, until I finally upgraded to HD in May. Once I could watch HD every day, I lost interest in having additional, inferior-looking multicast channels thrust upon me, especially channels that merely regurgitate the stuff I don’t like from the main channel. (Ahem, Create.) In fact, I’ve grown to dislike watching any show in SD.
So there it is, I guess: when it comes to video, more isn’t better; better is better.

Speaking of Dennis Haarsager, he’ll be speaking at the DTV Symposium tomorrow afternoon. His topic: Myth, Media and Meta; Three Information Epochs and What The Mean for Broadcasting. I have no doubt it will be good, and I’ll be there taking notes.

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.

Why do we need aggregation and consolidated technologies?

That’s how Mark Fuerst phrased it in a note to stations following the NPR New Realities event in Washington earlier this month. Someone else put it this way in an iMA web conference call: What is the vision that sets the tone for this?

“This” is a loose set of ideas that is broadly transformative of public radio as we know it now. It ranges from a more systematic sharing of online content to a consolidated backend, to ideas for increased social interaction, improved metrics, an alignment of metadata and other infrastructures, to a possible restructuring of the relationship between NPR and the member stations. As many have pointed out, quite rightly, we’re putting the cart before the horse – we’re deciding what we want to do without being able to articulate exactly why we should be doing it. Here’s a suggestion:

A Vision for Public Radio: Essential to America

The past 40 years has been a progression from a public radio service seen as alternative or interesting, to today’s important, core news and music streams, served by about 700 stations nationwide and reaching about 30 million listeners a week. We’ve become important; some of our stations have become market leaders, and we’ve become very good.

Now the issue is: what lies beyond this. How does an important radio service evolve into an essential communications network?  It wouldn’t be merely important to 30 million listeners a week; it would be essential to the cultural and political life of all Americans. This might be (should be?) our guiding strategy.

How might we frame what essential means?  I think this requires examining where we are now.

What do we care about?

1. Providing services that our audiences trust and rely upon
2. Executing those services with a profound respect for our audiences
3. Ensuring that our services offer a diverse array of voices and perspectives
4. Creating and distributing national music and news programs that unite our audiences around common experiences and concerns
5. Creating local music and news services that speak to the common experiences of citizens in small towns, cities, counties, states
6. Demonstrating the courage of our own convictions in non-commercial media, in contrast to the current state of commercial broadcasting, which can be characterized as an abandonment of local service and fact-based reporting

What can we do better than anyone else?

1. We have, at our fingertips, a “newsroom” that extends from international bureaus and a Washington headquarters to “bureaus” in cities and towns all over the country. If we found a way to harness the collective power of our national, regional and local reporting teams, we could create a world-class journalistic enterprise.
2. Our decades-long history of presenting different genres of music, away from the pressures of commercial sponsorship has allowed us to create services where it really is “about the music.” And with the goal of audience service as our primary responsibility, we are uniquely positioned to serve American’s desire for a diverse array of music, reflecting regional cultures and international influences.
3. Our audience is vast (30 million people!) and heterogeneous, but our listeners share common traits, including an insatiable curiosity about their world and a desire to participate in it. If we utilize our leadership in fact-based journalism and culture, we can create new ways of interacting with our audience, on-air, online, and in-person, that will help to secure public radio’s position at the center of American cultural and civic life.

Many of you will recognize this model; I’ve lifted it from Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great.” Now, we want to tie this vision to the pursuit of aggregation and consolidated technologies.

Is technology the driver or the bus?

We would be wrong to assume that technological advancements are the sole driver of the changes we propose. Technology is certainly a factor, in that the pace of change has delivered a powerful wake-up call to our industry. But the primary driver will be our vision of public radio’s place in the lives of the American people – in other words, it will be an initiative built primarily on our strategy and our content. Technology’s proper role is as the enabler for both our content and strategic initiatives.

Why aggregation makes sense:

The basic arguments for aggregation come down to three points:
(a) the need to focus on the user-experience rather than the organizational boundaries;
(b) the cost of the investment required;
(c) the need to invest in content development rather than overhead.

Research initiated by the Online Publishers Assocation shows that people already expect media companies to provide service on multiple platforms.  They view these platforms as various faces of the same company, with each platform giving them some advantages (radio signals are more convenient; websites allow for time-shifting and search).

That research suggests the opportunity to “recycle audience” from on-air to online.  Proper exploitation of search functions would seem to offer great opportunities to expand audience, when people find our content online and come back for more.  What are we seeing?  The most comprehensive study we have of listener use of our websites suggests that the “cume online audience” (unique visitor count) is less than 10% of on-air cume at almost every public radio station.

The problem, at least in part, is a fractured user-experience.  Right now, users get a very satisfying experience from our signals: programs sound great; mobile devices (like car radios) pick up the signal very well, require no buffering, and rarely experience drop outs).  Online the user experience is completely different–highly fractured, incomplete, often frustrating.  For listeners of a station featuring a standard sample of network programs, people can get some things at your station.org site; some at NPR.org; other things, at Echoes.org, Marketplace.org, or ThisAmericanLife.org. This fragmentation does not reflect the user’s sense of what we are (an integrated system).  The end result is low use.

We must continue to satisfy current listener needs and expand to meet needs that are part of the fully-wired world, such as translating news to text and graphics; providing audio on demand; publishing strategically in multiple platforms through multiple partners. We must deliver this content in a way that is focused on the user, and not dictated by the station or the network.  To date, our strategic thinking is dominated by the needs of organizations in our system and not focused (or focused enough) on the needs of our audience. We must install and maintain a delivery platform that is focused on the user—who often does not know or care where the content comes from.

After ten years of effort, only a handful of stations have achieved a strong online franchise that properly complements their on-air service. Most of them are music stations.  Changing this is a very expensive task—if we approach it one station at a time.  Very few organizations in public radio (or TV) are capable of even considering the level investment that might be required to meet state-of-the-art delivery standards.  Yet, over the next decade, media companies will have to develop multi-platform content and marketing services.  It is almost inconceivable that hundreds of public radio and TV stations will be able to achieve this presence without assistance, for two reasons: the costs are too high and the content stations provide comes from so many different sources.  Developing this kind of system requires a type and scale of collaboration as large as any we’ve made to date. In aggregate, station and network expenditures on infrastructure – networks, backend technologies, etc – are considerable.

Development of many discrete systems may give individual stations or networks a sense of independence and control, but the development of multiple infrastructures contributes very little to the actual service experienced by the audience—certainly not in the way that our program services do. (For this reason, I call them non-core services.)  To the extent that there is duplication of non-core services, it is a drain on station and network resources, robbing dollars from content production. While some duplication of non-core services can contribute to innovation (individual stations as test-beds for new concepts), the level of duplication systemwide is unsustainable, and, over time, will leach millions of dollars away from the core mission of producing content.
We face these imperatives:

1. We must diversity our content in a way that we have not been willing or able to do so far, including providing service to minority audiences, and reshape at least some of our content to reach younger audiences whose media expectations will be far different from our own.
2. We must find ways to gain economies of scale, in services, staffing, and investment, that will allow us to put maximum investment into content creation and user-oriented service, rather than overhead.
3. We must install a transaction platform capable of processing millions of requests for a content and service in a satisfying and secure way.

Therefore, we must assess our non-core infrastructure, and make every effort to restructure those operations to ensure maximum cost-savings while providing a common-sense service to the end-user, and while maintaining the local and national brands that are a source of strength to public broadcasting. This includes potentially a wide range of services, ranging from metadata to a centralized online content depot, the “consolidated backend,” etc.

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.

where the concept of ‘property’ loses significance for consumers. Media companies’ response to the widespread availability of pirated content seems to be to concentrate on the experience, which is spot on. As I’ve argued many times before, consumers don’t consume content: they engage in practices around it, and it is these practices that they seek and are willing to pay for. The practice of downloading pirated content, managing the files, backing them up, burning them to a DVD, is a messy and geeky one. It’s much better to get a Roku box and pay Rhapsody a small monthly fee to get a steady supply of pleasant, evocative, elegant experiences. There will always be a market for providers of media experiences.

What about the pleasure of owning content? Owning, and all the enjoyments that go with it, is no more that yet another practice. I own my personal contacts, even if they are spread accross Exchange servers, PDAs, mobile phones, etc and I don’t have anything physical to keep. Or even better, even if I lose a physical thing, I still have my contacts because they are somewhere in the cloud, somewhere only I (and my boss) can reach. That’s close enough to ownership in the good old physical sense.

In the future we will care less and less about files and about content. They will both be seen as the invisible enablers of experiences that they’ve always been.

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.

“… I think we’re approaching a world in which a near-live media distribution environment will be a major partner to broadcast TV within five-ten years. This environment will be focused on show-by-show subscriptions and ultimate personalisation to get stuff down to viewers over normal broadband and mediated by the bog-standard boring old internet – probably even through the web. And it’s my suspicion that there may only be enough room for five or six major (partially democratised) distribution hubs (at a complete guess as mentioned in the above post: Amazon, AOL, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google). The group that’s going to have the most trouble with this is the public sector broadcasters – they need to be trying to work out how to influence and work with that environment and find a space for free or publically supported content as soon as is bloody possible, rather than trying to develop their own necessarily prescribed and undersupported media distribution platforms. …”

The BBC’s director of new media and technology has outlined the results of the 5,000 user test of the BBC integrated media player, which delivered a selection of BBC programs to users over a peer-to-peer network.

A couple of notable findings from the test: first, users lost access to many of the programs they downloaded before they had a chance to view them. The seven-day window cut them off. There needs to be a better accomodation of the “long tail” effect; BBC will explore allowing programs to be viewed for a short time beyond the seven day window in which they’re available for download. Second, about a third of users reported watching a program about which they might not have known otherwise. This is important, and it’s another pointer to something that Dennis Haarsager has made me aware of – the concept of “serendipitous discovery.” To paraphrase Haarsager, on-demand content deepens your relationship with your existing audience, but it also opens up your content to new audiences, something to which many of us in public broadcasting haven’t given enough thought.

The idea that podcasts are going to reduce contributions to public radio is a bit far-fetched. Dennis Haarsager argues, rightly in my opinion, that having favorite programs on-demand increases audience loyalty and helps to extend the programs to others who haven’t heard them before. I won’t even get into the ways you can use podcasts as tools to generate corporate support or as tools to encourage on-demand users to become members. Suffice it to say, podcasts drawing away support from public radio is a low-level threat.

If you read that Wired article a little more carefully, you can see the real threat – to business-as-usual in public broadcasting. Public radio in America is an uncommon mix of national networks and program producers, with local stations and producers, and local control as the central feature. Ask most American public radio listeners and they think this is the best possible solution; many in public radio agree.

But this model rests on a set of assumptions and compromises, including that local public radio stations are the sole purveyors of “NPR” or public radio in their respective areas. This worked for a long time, until the natural barriers began falling: other distribution paths opened up, beyond the radio signal. Streaming brought distant public radio stations to computers everywhere; streaming now extends non-radio public radio listening to your handheld or your smartphone. Podcasting brings listeners their favorite programs on-demand, freeing them from their local station’s schedule. And satellite radio has opened up an opportunity for public broadcasting to offer multiple flavors of nationwide service.

This is disruption. It worries us and it should. But how we respond to it determines whether we ride the wave or get buried beneath it.

So far, we’ve seen two categories of reponse from public radio (besides the classic ignore it and hope it will go away): 1) it’s paramount to preserve the current model and any new technologies we embrace must adhere to the model; and 2) an embrace of change, acceptance and assimilation of new technologies, and experimentation.

Who is doing #1? Well, let’s not start a fight. Let’s talk about who is pursuing #2: KCRW, WGBH, KQED, WNYC, Northwest Public Radio, Michigan Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, NPR, PRI – by no means a complete list.

The disruption has brought new experimentation to public broadcasting, on a level that we haven’t seen in a long time. It’s producing good data, some great early success stories, and potentially some new business models for the industry.

But the disruption is just beginning.

The technologies continue to develop. My Sprint card frees me from WiFi and lets me listen to uninterrupted Internet streams while I drive. When I stand in line at Starbucks, I might be listening to Morning Edition streaming on my cellphone, but it doesn’t have to be my station – WNYC or Minnesota Public Radio or WCPN or KPBS might be just as enticing as choices for Morning Edition.

And the biggest disruption of all is likely to be to our way of doing business – that strange, special, often dysfunctional, but viable model we fashioned out of national producers and local stations. And that’s why, yet again, we’re hearing some local managers use public radio’s dreaded word: bypass.
John Sutton wasn’t the first to throw down the gauntlet, but his provocative post about access to Morning Edition and All Things Considered on satellite radio frames the issue very well, and he makes his biggest and best point in another post:

It’s not bypass, it’s listener choice.

The disruption we face now is driven by technology and by listener choice. Meeting these new challenges requires serious and deep discussions within public broadcasting – discussions that may topple our safe, decades-old business model. But if we try to maintain our old way of doing business at the expense of service to our audience, we will pay a huge price.

It’s time to start talking.

I’m beginning to change my mind about things. Even though we have a great eco system for music stores etc, the reality is that our OEM partners are never ever going to create a product like the iPod. They are simply no match for the iPod Dock Connector, which [h]as generated an ecosystem of hardware that’s probably more lucrative than the online music business.

This conclusion follows a long list of product features that no single non-iPod player has been able to match.

My search wasn’t as extensive as his but it led me to the same conclusion a year and a half ago, and last fall, I consummated the engagement by switching from my Tablet PC to a Powerbook. (Yes, I’ve been won over. Perhaps version 2.0 of Origami will push me back to the Windows platform when I’m on the go.)

One word about Microsoft and blogging: it’s effective. There’s been an explosion of Microsoft blogging in the past year, and the list includes some of the smartest people in the building – Ozzie, Shahine, Scoble, the Office 2007 team. All of the bloggers operate with at least a certain amount of freedom to say what they want; they get a larger audience for their ideas, and Microsoft gets the invaluable PR lift that other companies are seeking through the blogging platform.

Read these and other Microsoft blogs, if you haven’t already, and look at the picture of Microsoft that emerges: a more humanized corporation made up of individuals with strong smart opinions, who often don’t tow the company line, who speak openly and positively of rival products like iPod and Firefox, and who show a willingness to work with competitors to make the online experience better for all.

This may not be your view of Microsoft. But Microsoft, in permitting its employees to openly engage developers and consumers outside regular company channels, reaps the benefits of improved perception of the company in the long run. Microsoft could spend years and millions of dollars telling you “we’re not big and evil.” Allowing its employees to shine through their own blogs begins to force the battle to new territory – from our view of Microsoft’s reputation to our view of Microsoft’s reputation, filtered through individuals who are known, respected and trusted. Microsoft hasn’t extended this battle to consumers, most of whom are highly unlikely to read a Microsoft blog. But maybe that’s alright. The vast majority of consumers own at least one Microsoft product; and though they might complain about it, they still qualify as satisfied customers since their next purchase is still likely to be a Microsoft product. The everyday consumer was where the battle was during the Microsoft litigation of the late 1990′s, but that’s not the case anymore.

This is not the first time this has happened, but blogging now represents the latest example of companies building and burnishing their reputations on the backs of their brightest and most respected employees. It’s “under the radar” PR and smart companies need to be thinking about this.

The internet shows us that, assuming a minimum level of quality, consumers will choose quantity over quality. NPR’s audience testing shows that listeners can’t tell much difference between CD-quality digital music and a 48kb/s stream of the same music on an HD stream. Perhaps the more correct way to say this is that listeners might hear a difference, but for them, it’s a completely acceptable trade-off for having more choices.

I bet you can think of several ways that you’ve made this compromise. I spend several hours a day listening to soma.fm’s Groove Salad internet stream while I work. I’ve pruned my CD collection as I’ve ripped the CD’s into my iTunes library. I listen to my iPod in the car using an FM transmitter, rather than CD’s. We’re about to sell the big Klipsch speakers in the living room; the likely replacement for our stereo and TV – the Apple Hifi.

As broacasters and programmers, we need to consider carefully what consumers are telling us about how the listen to music and the kinds of compromises they’re willing to make in return for other perceived benefits. This should guide our multicasting strategies for radio.

And I’m beginning to wonder how this might play out on TV. Consumers appear to be sending a very clear message about HDTV; they’re buying giant HD screens by the thousands. But I think if you look deeper, you’ll find that most of them are taking their sets home, hooking up the DVD player, plugging in analog cable, or SD digital satellite, and are watching the 4:3 signals stretched across their 16:9 screens. In other words, most of what they’re watching now actually looks worse than it did on their old TV’s – it’s flattened and stretched and more grainy; but it’s on a brighter, bigger screen.

It’s too early to draw many conclusions from this. If more of the popular cable networks were in HD, for instance, it might be easier to judge viewing patterns. But I do find myself wondering if, ultimately, viewers will seek out HD where the content demands it – movies, drama, nature docs, etc – and will be happy will SD quality for much of the rest of what they see. (Will viewers care if you spend half a million dollars to convert your local news to HD?) That compromise ultimately means more choices in the available bandwidth and if there’s anything that consumers seem to be saying clearly so far in this vast transformation of broadcasting, choice is important.