Technological Drivers of Change for the Rest of Us
March 24th, 2006 by Beth Gallaway“I’m not here to celebrate these technologies, just to make you aware of them.”
Dr David Liroff from WGBH began his presentation by saying, “I hope you have a chance to do the recommended reading… you’ll find it in the Sunday papers” and waving Staples and Best Buy flyers around. It’s called Marketplace intelligence - thumb through the inserts then go to these stores (technology warehouses, office supply chains) and ask: “What does this do and why do people buy it,” not “How does this work?”
Congress has chosen February 17, 2009 as the date that analog TV will no longer be available
(After the Superbowl and BEFORE the Big Four!) Coupons & converter boxes will be available, and libraries will be the first places people go to ask why their TV doesn’t work and what they have to do to make it work.
He advised us to “Close your eyes and listen to my storytelling,” as he wasn’t beginning with a Powerpoint presentation.
WGBH public television station in Boston produces 1/3 of national PBS programming and their related websites, including children’s programming such as Arthur & Zoom
A pioneer in accessibility for visual and hearing impaired, inventor of close captioning
WGBH began as an 1830’s bequest for public lectures for the city of Boston partners include local colleges and museums; WGBH forum network has 30 organizations providing lectures for the public online at http://www.wgbh.org/.
He used to call himself a broadcaster, now he is “platform agnostic.”
The bulk of the history of the 20th century is on magnetic media – a major concern is that these archives will not be playable on new media machines. We must developing standards for the preservation of media.
WGBH produces Teacher’s Domain at http://www.teachersdomain.org/ is an online educational service with two related components — collections and courses — that help teachers enhance their students’ learning experiences and advance their own teaching skills. The Teachers’ Domain collections include classroom-ready multimedia resources for use in lessons or independent study, and the Teachers Domain Professional Development courses utilize many of the same resources along with videos of exemplary classroom practice.”
So why is someone from public broadcasting talking to public librarians? he asked. WE have many commonalities:
We are both public service organizations, serving our citizens not as consumers
We are both locus / catalyst for community activities through forums
Digital technology is blurring the lines between text & audio; broadcasting is moving into libraries & archives; libraries are moving into audio & video. The threshold has disappeared; there is a convergence in the partnership for a nation of learners. Their website, http://www.partnershipforlearners.org/ promotes grant programs specifically designed to encourage collaborations between libraries, museums & public broadcasters
Quips:
“I keep looking for the seatbelt on my office chair… (because the rate of change is so fast) We have state of the art equipment – the state of the art keeps changing!”
Our understand of our world is based on what had been an immutable presence – geographic distance is no longer a barrier between immediate interpersonal communication
Referenced the medium is the massage, Marshall McLuran’s book on media philosophy. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Medium_is_the_Massage
“Because of electric speed, we can longer just wait and see.” The rate of change is occurring exponentially.
We are at a “Strategic Inflection Point (Andy Grove) - fewer & fewer of the old rules apply – if we do business using the old rules, we’ll fail BUT the new rules haven’t been written yet. http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove.htm
DRIVERS
- Moore’s Law: processing power doubles every 18 months
- Cost of digital storage drops 50% every 10 months
- Advances in A/V compression continues - Dr. Liroff explained that MP3 is a compression algorithm
Dr. Liroff said, “referring to the above three trends, if I had stood in the store another few hours, the price would have dropped. If two months ago I had said I was walking around with 2 gigabytes in my pocket, you’d have thought I was leading up to an off-color joke.”
- Analog to digital cable = 8 times as many channel choices (there’s still nothing on, of course) and 4xs as many streams
- Satellite increase the number of channel choices
- 1.5 million-subscriber increase for Sirius radio when Howard Stern made the leap
- Cross platform exchanges – cell phones & handheld Internet Protocol provides interoperable language for voice audio and video. More choice, no quality guarantees
- More than 30% of US homes have broadband access
- Fiber optic cable: 400000 mbps
- Hybrid fiber optic/coaxial cable: 850
- Copper twisted pair: 10
- Shift from wired to wireless technology - becoming omnipresent with whole CITIES going wireless for economic development and educational access. Access to Internet will be as essential as telephone is now
- There may be a charge for universal charge to make telephone access available everywhere
- The proliferation of GPS facilities delivery of a location specific content and services, like you can do by texting Google’s SMS service at http://www.google.com/sms. Now phones are incorporating buddy lists with GPS
- Personalization & customization options, collaborative systems, recommendation engines. Does this sound familiar: “Others who ordered this book also ordered…”
- Increasingly sophisticated searching
- Miniaturization and wearables – sweatshirts with players & receiving with tiny chips. More and more use of nanatechnology, RFID in retail, media applications,
- Users access what they want when they want it, on whatever display device is most convenient
- A shift from real-time to non-real time use of content using DVRs/PVRs, Video on Demand
- Broadband facilitates on demand distribution emerges as real-time/non-real time audio/video/interactive/distribution program platform
- These are time machines – 50% of US households will own them in the next five years
- Increasing capacity of packaged media HD-DVDs
- Proliferation of iPods, MP3s, podcasting, video iPods
- Videogames emerging as content platforms for education and training as well as for entertainment, storytelling, online connectivity
- The evolution of home media storage
- Technologies which ignore geography: (internet, satellite, wireless) and erode geographic market boundaries
- Exacerbates battles between wholesalers and retailers over who delivers - ABC allowed apple to download Lost & Desperate Housewives - their network affiliates were angry!
- Speculation: One of the major TV networks will abandon its stations and deliver direct to consumers in the next year
- New item: a Slingbox ($250) relays any TV program out to an Internet connected TV - Local becomes global! It also provides full control of your home TV or DVR from ANY location, even if someone else it watching at home (new meaning to the battle over the remote).
CONSEQUENCES of drivers:
- For media producers and distributors, accelerating audience segmentation/fragmentation
- Erosion of interruption marketing
- Product placement, donations, sponsored programs, integrated into TV. The Google advertising model of users search preference identifying their areas of interest John Wannamaker, owner of the first U.S. department store said “1⁄2 the money I spend on advertising is wasted but I can never find out which half.” The people who click on Google ad links have declared themselves interested before they every get to the advertisement
- Anyone can do a weblog or podcast; IBM has an official blogging policy to ENCOURAGE their employees, led by a blogging evangelist
- Technology facilitates interaction between provides & their audience
- Two way interactivity — no more moats between public and PR department. “Markets are conversations” example: Clue Train http://www.cluetrain.com/
- Critical need for content providers, including us!
- Kids programming has been the most popular on-demand service
- The Long Tail Phenomenon by Chris Anderson http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
- Concept that we have space to provide access to archived or less in demand materials, because more than 50% of sales/circs come from outside the top titles perceived as the moneymaker or bestseller.
Contact Dr. Liroff at dliroff AT wbgh DOT org
Tags: conferences, PLA, PLA2006
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