broadstuff

Just seen that it is "Temporarily Unavailable".....and they are working on it.

While they are not looking, I am emboldened by others (like A VC) to point out what I think are the glaringly obvious faults with Facebook.

1. The messaging - why do I get an email telling me I have a message etc - just give me the darn message in the email.

2. Added to that, why can't I just set up an email feed or RSS or something for when new data appears in the groups I have joined. Yahoo Groups has done this for yonks.

3. It is very time consuming to use any of the functions really...too many pages have to be hit, the methods of doing things are actually pretty inelegant

4. I hate having to load up the wodgets (sorry, applications) myself so I can see them on my friends' pages - and there are just too many darn apps to boot (I note that the "app churn" of my friends is increasing btw)

5. Whats with all these pokes, dead sheep, zombies etc...will they last? Its cute for a bit, but boy does it pall fast.....

6. The entire canon of work of the feminist movement re discrimination at work has just been trashed... I can just go on facebook and see every darn thing that I can't ask in an interview - and a lot more besides.

7. Those Terms of Service are draconian.

Now, people who have my email addy are mailing me on Facebook.....look, its a much more cumbersome process that way - if you have my email address, email me - I can do it faster - reply offline, pick it up on multiple devices, all those great comms tricks we took for granted in Web 1.0.

(There was an article in the (UK) Times today saying its the New Generation Gap - ie if you don't get Facebook you're so over the hill. That may be so, but (therefore speaking as an old curmudgeon) it seems to me its really just Yahoo Groups (with 2007 style graphics) mixed with a standard Buddy Page service and lots of noisy wodgets. )

Except it has worse communications functionality and its far less open.

In fact I suspect the Youth of Today, rather than "getting it", are being very naive on 3 counts here:

(i) Privacy - just how naive can these kids be....letting it all hang out is fine at Uni, but unlike your miscreant elders, you will have a record forever of all those misjudgements. There are Yahoo groups where the more er...arcane....interests also exist, but people on them are anonymous.

(ii) Content T&C.....people are writing the novel of their lives on Facebook, and someone else owns the IP

(iii) Simple functionality - if you know email, listservers, RSS etc then this is just a plain cumbersome system.

Still, it is very popular right now (well, in the press anyway, other services are bigger but get much less airtime).....but it just seems that bit too high friction to use - probably because Facebook has clearly been optimised for Stats Hounds:

(1) High web page count - you bet, you can't move without going to another webpage, and no way are you going to export data to a more convenient aggregator when you could come and visit the webpages again

(2) Long Time spent on site - yes, as above...and its time consuming to do most things, it is quite a clunky UI in many ways (eg reading group posts etc)

It really would not be too hard to make it better, but of course page views and time spent would drop off.

I am clearly in an heretical minority (an early un-adopter?) but I just can't see how this will retain users over the longer term. It is just too high friction to use as it now stands.

C'mon Yahoo.....you don't need to buy these guys - just a better graphical UI on Groups, a closer link and a bit more SocNet functionality (and a bit more oomph) on your profile pages, some close linking to all the other great apps you have (Delicious, Flickr et al) and you'd have a far better service - and a bigger one I'd bet. Instant media darling time......

Update...just found this.....it may have been hacked. I'll add that to my list, its the New Windows - seriously though, if its not hacked now it will be - do they really think they can collect all that valuable personal data without others wanting to get at it?

Update 2...its even made TechCrunch.....there is clearly a real danger that people actually have to work !

Now this is interesting...Dave Winer's note about Bug Labs here for two reasons - but first, a quick Quote of the Dave:

...Its an architecture for pluggable gadget components. There's a hardware interface, which I know little or nothing about (I'm a software guy). It was explained to me as "60 pins" -- they said they interface all the capabilities of the chip, whatever that means. But at a software level, each of the components interfaces with XML over HTTP. It's as if they read my mind. The pieces are all fractional horsepower HTTP servers. They are using RESTful interfaces everywhere. I haven't actually seen the XML, let's hope it's simple.

Its interesting for 2 reasons:

(i) That it would appear that there is a Consumer / SoHo Appliance play for an XML appliance / service engine emerging - thus far its mainly been corporate ironware and geeky stuff.

(ii) That it is going "back to basics"for webservices - XML, HTTP, REST - the Really Simple Stuff that works - recent trend has been to increasingly complicate things (WS-Splat anyone?), we were already sort of wondering if blue water had been left between the industry heavyweights' desires to "add value", and what people actually wanted. (Along with the usual it apparently also has a GPS...now that has got the cogs turning...)

Turns out that A VC (he of the recent Twitter Investment and the "all people over 30 in this space are drongos" fame*) has invested in it, and comments on Bug Labs over here and notes:

Bug Labs is certainly our most "out there" investment. Some of our investors have a hard time getting their head around it. Brad, who led this investment for us, is always very careful to explain that this is really a software/services bet, not a hardware bet.

But Bug is launching with a hardware product, The Bug, and they are going to launch slowly and ideally without too much hype and expectations.

Right re hype...dinner with Winer and Scoble is just for a bit of witty repartee then...anyway, he goes on to note that:

There's a lot more to Bug than what Dave captured (probably on his napkin) but the parts that Dave got, he got right.

Dave actually refers to it potentially being a "fractional horsepower" server approach, and he has seen it..... Be very interested to see it launch. (Any chance of a prototype to play with, guys ?)

Reading what Dave wrote and adding our own experience, then in our view its probably less "out there" than Twitter - this looks like an XML appliance / server play at the low end (ie easy to use, cheap to buy, market largely deserted by the majors) of the huge and rapidly growing XML Webservice / SaaS infrastructure market ( the emergence of home web appliances is fascinating to contemplate, maybe even potentially a bridge device for the emerging home m2m market eventually?), whereas Twitter is - at best - a nice little consumer Unified Messaging Lite system (sorry, "microblogging system") with no clear monetisation model yet, and a lot of competition emerging that is embedded in far bigger apps (eg Facebook Status Update).

Update....Jeremy Toeman, who has been consulting to Bug Labs, has written a bit more on it here.

If you think about a Lego block, it’s a basic module that you inherently know how to use. This is the right analogy for Bug modules, they are pieces that make sense to any programmer. I’d say I’m a well-below average coder, but can still hack well enough to hook up Facebook and Wordpress for example. With the Bug platform, I probably couldn’t make the best gadget, but at least I’d be able to give it a shot. That’s the hobby I enjoy.

Now.....teasing like this is normally a bit tedious (and will get so unless da beef is shown soon) but if this thingy does what it purports to do on the (veiled) tin, then we are talking about XML appliances in the home / SoHo office...and that could be a major step for the Home Automation market (never mind the whole XML messaging application industry)

Update 2...a bit more useful detail from engadget:

Sounds kind of out there, but here's the model:

Users snag a small Linux-based micro-PC with USB, WiFi, Bluetooth, and plenty of special ports for attaching these functionality modules.
Users can develop Java apps and load custom software onto the base device to take advantage of expansion modules for any usage scenarios they can dream up.
Users expand each portable's capabilities by adding modules, such as a small or large screen, QWERTY keyboard, GPS, camera, speaker, etc.; the user can add whatever is necessary to build the gadget that fits their purpose. (Sorry, no cell radio modules at launch.)
Each component is accessible and web addressable, meaning users can write and load software to / from their own or other users' components, as well as share their functionality or data (i.e. user A can use an app to remotely share his / her GPS locator or digital camera with user B).
Of course, all these hardware component schematics, interface protocols, etc. will be made available online if you want to build your own Bug-based gear.
Bug Labs might also allow users to submit novel and relatively marketable configurations for mass manufacturing, and serve as a storefront for budding gadget designers using the Bug platform.

* A VC is forgiven, as he too gets frustrated with Facebook's crap comms services - its an Old Fart giveaway, once you've seen email there is no going forward

This is maybe a bit off-topic, although its serves as an allegory for crap automation of processes everywhere.

Yesterday, went to the bank to do some company banking - simple stuff, but of the high value / high importance variety, where I like to see it being done in front of my eyes, just in case... (the auto pay-in can glitch, its happened to me once before, and the risk/reward is very skewed - although it was not my fault it was my problem, very fast).

Anyway, I was not in my usual area so went to the local main branch in the area I was in (City of London) as this one had (human) teller service. The bank was like Chartres Cathedral - a huge, high ceilinged glass building, full of light and air, with auto pay-ins etc everywhere like a sort of financial fruit bandit hall - but it was nearly empty, and this was lunch hour in London, banks are usually heaving. And there were no tellers up there in the light and airy part - where were they - downstairs in the basement, where two harried tellers - and a long queue of people - were.

I trotted back upstairs to fill in my stuff at a table, and started to look around the empty atrium...it soon became clear that nearly all the people up there were bank employees "meeting and greeting" the few actual customers, and the number of customers actually using all the auto tellers was tiny.

No, the queue was all for those two harassed tellers in the basement. Anyway, standing in the queue I also had a look around downstairs, and there were more "meeters and greeters" down there. They couldn't do anything, mind - just point you at machines or the (very slow) queue for the tellers.

I became curious...I asked the person behind me to hold my place, trotted upstairs, and counted about 5 "meeters and greeter" roaming the empty floor, downstairs another 3, and another 6 or so while waiting in the slowly moving queue.

So, I hear you ask....why don't all the "meeters and greeters" actually do some work helping customers rather than than just point them at machines they clearly don't want to use, or at a lengthening and ill served queue they don't want to join.

One could only come to the conclusion that The Bank has decided that The Customer is best served by Automating The Service (OK, OK...I'm not that naive - they have clearly calculated that The Punter is most cheaply served by The Automation) and anyone so wilfully malign as to want teller service was being pointed at a tiny, overused service, with long queues, in the basement, to teach them the error of their ways.

Except that it wasn't working out for them either - I suspect that running a Cathedral in the City is not cheap, and to have all that prime floor space totally empty at peak time would break a retailers heart. And its not as of they have actually saved any labour - if it takes c 15 (say 7 FTEs) to mill around as "meeters and greeters" its hardly effective compared to say 2 more tellers.

And thats just by their yardstick of Cost...needless to say the people in the queue were pretty pissed off about it too...it was very clear what was going on - ie automating the process - and that it wasn't working, people didn't like it, and that they were throwing lots of staff at the "PR" bit rather than throwing a few staff at the "help the customer" bit. .

Quite simply it looks like the classic top down automation project - The Apparatchiks have no doubt decided that This Is The Way It Will Be Done, and regardless of real life experience, customer response, staff feedbeck - and probably financial numbers or anything like that, it Will Be Implemented.

In theory one can pack up one's account and go elsewhere, but (I suspect) that all the retail banks have got the same disease right now, these things memes tend to go in waves....no doubt in a while we will se a "return to personal customer service" being trumpeted as the Next Thing.

(Oh, one last thing...when filling out the counterfoil you used to get a stub to take home...that has gone in the New Religion, apparently it won't fit in the New Automation - so the tellers have to now fill in stubs for you - wastes their time and no doubt ittitates them)

We are doing a piece of work right now where the evolution of RFID and M2M (machine to machine) services is a part of it. While working on the mobile aspects of this, it occurred to us that most people conceive of the m2m device / agent / whatever as quite dumb - a pallet, a piece of inventory, a truck etc etc, and its main role is to tell something more intelligent about itself.

But what happens if the device itself is (semi) intelligent, and is using the m2m comms as much for its own purposes as much as anything else. One of the interesting insights from work on Artificial Life is that often the combinations of fairly simple rules allow very complex behaviour, and quite a high level of self organisation.

One fairly common example is where the common or garden house vacuum cleaner robot may use m2m comms to tie up with other devices to define when and where it cleans. But as Moore's law progresses these devices can all have more intelligence, and this can allow them to exhibit fairly complex capabilities even for simple devices.

For a start, they could use evolutionary algorithms to learn new tasks - like learning to fly for example:

Learning how to fly took nature millions of years of trial and error - but a winged robot has cracked it in only a few hours, using the same evolutionary principles.

Krister Wolff and Peter Nordin of Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, built a winged robot and set about testing whether it could learn to fly by itself, without any pre-programmed data on what flapping is or how to do it.

To begin with, the robot just twitched and jerked erratically. But, gradually, it made movements that gained height. At first, it cheated - simply standing on its wing tips was one early short cut.

After three hours, however, the robot abandoned such methods in favour of a more effective flapping technique, where it rotated its wings through 90 degrees and raised them before twisting them back to the horizontal and pushing down.

"This tells us that this kind of evolution is capable of coming up with flying motion," says Peter Bentley, who works on evolutionary computing at University College London. But while the robot had worked out how best to produce lift, it was not about to take off.

"There's only so much that evolution can do," Bentley says. "This thing is never going to fly because the motors will never have the strength to do it," he says.

.

(report from New Scientist)

That was 2002...today, there are robots that can fly like insects - these tiny robot flies (see pic below) for example. Imagine swarms of these operating using self organising behaviour routines (flocking, direction finding etc), each built with a different type of very simple sensor.



But thats just for starters...how about this one - unmanned Aircraft with Solar cells that can in theory cruise the stratosphere in large numbers, using self organising software to keep their coverage going at high levels of reliability - who needs satellites for TV signals, mobile signals, ground surveillance with swarms of these.....the economics vs satellite (or even mobile base station networks) might be pretty interesting.

(The pic below takes it even further - using these to explore Mars)



Now...mash some ideas together - RoboFly RFIDs, Glider Grids....bears thinking about, doesn't it?

Yes, it is "way out there", but it is (theoretically) doable, and it is Friday afternoon after all.

Yes, we've been there 2 months or so, it seems to work...anyone who reads us online is welcome to be a BlogFriend over here.

We've also set up a Broadstuff Group to work on some things going on "in background" - ie "Government / Politics 2.0" and a few other projects.

OK, OK...its a cliche....but historically major changes in comms systems shift many other systems, including political ones. And all our initial work tells us that in most OECD countries, we will not be able to afford to govern ourselves as we do today - demographic shifts, rising expectations, falling share of global wealth all point to the need to re-engineer the ways government works.

This is not the sort of discussion we want to have on a public network, as blog politics tends to get...heated...and this blog is mainly about the issues around new technology strategy, not the political ramifications.

So for now we'll kick it off on our Facebook Group, which you are welcome to join, over there.

Forrester does not apparently like the term User in matters Social Networking or User Generated, and prefer the term "customer", or even "friend"

We quite agree with the User bit, terribly Old School, but demur re Friends...the correct term of course is "sucker".....

As in:

- who put up all the content on YouTube vs who got all the money*

- anything you put on Facebook is theirs. Forever.

Mind you, the barriers to entry for being a "friend" on a Social Net are so low, and the typical ratio of real"users" to "signups" are of the c 1:10 order, so it's probably far harder to be a de facto "user" than a friend....and if you don't believe us, well, who can doubt ValleyWag

Now, some more sanguine folk would argue that these businesses provide essential services to their addic...er friends, (and some are shocked - shocked I say - that other businesses are unsporting enough to think of paying the punters for creating that content) and this value justifies the appropriation of the customer created IP.

The serious point of this is post is the semantics are unimportant - what you call them thar users is less relevant than what they really are. And in our view, a service model where you do the work, and hand over your IP, for nothing, to enrich your new found friend is - very likely - not sustainable (with any quality anyway) medium term.

Or is this the New New Media, and the rules are different?

Maybe...but there is no really long term model like this in the Real World that we can point to - outside of voluntary organisations perhaps - (MacDonalds would probably love a business model where the customers made the hamburgers and ate them and just paid McD every time) where IP changes hands for nothing long term. In the short term, sure - status, kudos, connections are all useful outcomes, but can you feed a family on that? It could of course be that the "Social Networks" are different, that the sheer value of being connected to it makes it all worthwhile, and to cast doubt means one just doesn't "get it".

But we've heard that before.....

* Hint - read that copy of Time magazine (and it will be interesting to see how much ViaCom can claw back...)

Attended the New Statesman New Media Awards last night, for those people interested in Politics 2.0 it threw up a number of interesting directions that the "new" internet will potentially be driving politics. (These awards are for innovative use of New Media in the realm of "transforming communities, connecting government" to quote the program.)

There were a number of categories, and the winners were.....(tah dah)

Education - Create-a-Scape (a runner up was the elgg open source SocNet system which looks pretty useful btw)

Advocacy - Stop the Traffik - a global anti-slavery campaign site

Modernising Government - No10 Downing Street Petitions - allows you to set up petitions online, and people to vote for them

Elected Representative - David Cameron (represented by his Avatar on the night) for best MP's website

Young Innovator - Livebus - James Wheare built a system on his own time that mashes together a bunch of disparate datastreams to discover bus routes and real time bus running times

Contribution to Society - Neigbourhood Fix-It - a sort of "report minor vandalism to the local council" site.

Information and Openness - Intelligent Giving - It profiles 1,500 charities and gives interesting data such as salaries of main employees - a darn good idea, as the charity sector is one that could definitely do with lights being shone in dark places.

These - and many of the runners up - are harbingers of the sort of early day services that the broadband internet will bring into politics, and that will change it fairly radically. (An aside - we are currently investigating ways in which the broadband net, and all it entails, can actually change the structure of governance - a sort of "how would you do all this starting today" project*)

The ones that are especially as "game-changers"were:

No 10 Downing Street - as it allows the Vox Populi to set up and vote on petitions - makes it harder for Our Elected Representatives to ignore / mediate vie the press / otherwise obfuscate the direct opinions of We The People. Our hypothesis is that this is part of the user generated content revolution - ie unbundling issues from packaged goods aggregators (party politics) and being able to select and vote on the most relevant. (Probably) the only reliable way to stop people gaming systems (e.g. Spinning) is to make them very, very transparent

Livebus - not so much because it gives you real time bus info, but because it represents the use of a "mash-up" to put together data that exists in a variety of disparate databases into new services at very low additional costs to current systems. Its hard to value this one owing to the externalised nature of the cost savings (the saving in wasted time over a year for eg) , but some of these future mashups we suspect will have major impact on external and direct costs as well as time wastage, resource usage etc

Neighbourhood Fix-It - its again a sort of User Generated Content play, using the eyes of the many to identify issues - and it keeps a record of rates of offence, resolution etc too - quite interesting if you believe the arguments around "broken windows" policing - fixing small acts of vandalism being a very useful tool for preventing larger problems.

Intelligent Giving - the delicious irony of a not for profit acting as a watchdog on the not for profit sector is a great start, but what this really shows is a new role for the use of not for profits, using new technologies, to start to watch areas that traditional politics has either had to pull out of, or has never really examined too closely.

Sure, a (still too small) number of Old Statesmen MP's are using New Media, and the ability of new media to magnify the impact of more traditional campaigning work is a good thing, but these can more be seen as evolutionary, whereas the ones quoted above are much more revolutionary in nature.

And will Old Statesmen evolve into New Statesmen, with avatars on Second Life, profiles in Facebook / MySpace / The Next Sexy SocNet - it will be interesting to find out......for what its worth, it was compered by the BBC's Rory Cellan Jones, who has a Facebook profile !

* Given that we most certainly will not be able to afford today's systems in the medium term...but that is another post

We were initially asked to present on the Mashup TV 2.0 session held last week, but when it changed dates we were unfortunately unable to make it owing to client commitments (due to IP multimedia projects ironically). However, reading the blogs seems like a good time was had by all, except that a number of comments showed a similar thread - that it felt a bit disjointed, or that no-one defined "Web TV".

To be fair to the Mashup team, it is a large and still emerging area with (just a small !!) amount of hype attached, so here is a piece of background on the industry that may help.

This paper itself has a history, we were asked to write it early in 2006 by a respected journal in the industry, and talk about the evolution of what we then termed the TV "Broadcast Website" rather than Web TV - (This is all pre YouTube, Joost, Babelgum etc etc remember) so some of the terms may seem a bit arcane now, a whole 18 months later.

At any rate, the piece was not used, we were told that we were waaaay off beam. We were planning to use the same basic structure here - albeit updated - at the Mashup, (plus a Part II on current players which we will publish later this week), so see for yourself, 18 months on, just how off beam we were....

BUILDING BROADCAST WEBSITES

The Broadcast Website today – and tomorrow

Over the next few years, the impact of Interactive IP based TV services will define a new type of video media that is far more interactive, and will change the way media is used. The IP Broadcast Website will move from the current model - a Broadcaster’s website pointing to its broadcast services - to being a Website that the customer uses to manages the content.

There are a number of competing approaches to “IP based TV” today. This article focuses on 3 main areas to consider in designing an IPTV broadcast website.

(i) IP Broadcasting Technology
(ii) Core Broadcasting Website Processes
(iii) “Web 2.0” changes


1. IP Broadcasting Technologies

There are 3 main “Internet TV” technologies emerging – fixed line (mainly xDSL based) IPTV, and mobile broadband based (M-TV), plus an interesting hybrid - WiFi based TV.

(A note here - the article assumes some familiarity with IP TV and the differences between transmission over wires vs broadcasting over the airwaves)

Internet Protocol TV (IPTV)

There have been many excellent IPTV articles published (such as this one of ours), this article will focus on the issues facing the Broadcast Website in particular. IPTV today gives a TV like experience already if the evidence so far is anything to go by. In the future 14Mb/sec+ per home (allowing multiple TV feeds) using the improved ADSL2+ format is promised. Moore’s Law also suggests that compression algorithms will continue to get better.

Mobile TV (M-TV)

With the launch of iPod Video and early evidence from the trialling of M-TV services, mobility will clearly have an impact on TV services in the future. At present Mobile TV technologies only exist in trial mode in Europe and the USA. There are 2 essential approaches:

- Over existing 3G networks, a higher speed 3G protocol (c 1.8 Mb/sec) called HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) is being trialled today. A new approach called MBMS (Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Standard) is also being proposed over existing 3G W-CDMA networks.

- Over Broadcast networks - via DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcast - Handheld) protocols, or, in a recent BT trial, using existing Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) technology.

There are technical issues with these new mobile technologies. Both DVB-H and HSDPA would require new infrastructure investment, and it is unclear which technology/s will really win out. South Korean experience is that after initially rolling out mobile streaming video services, the mobile point to point networks became congested and a separate satellite network (DAB based) was required to broadcast mobile TV service.

Wireless IP TV (WiTV?)

WiTV is limited today because so little commercial Wireless IP is available. However, given that it has many of the benefits of mobile IP TV without the costs of getting the higher bandwidths, works fairly easily with fixed line IP TV, and that many Municipal area WiFi services are springing up, this could be a very interesting space to watch in future.

2. Core Broadcasting Website Processes

There are 4 main processes – Ingestion, Repurposing, Distribution, and setting up the required Customer Environment.

Ingestion

Content is taken from a (known) incoming source and format, (for example off a satellite receiver in MPEG-2 format), transcoded into one (or more) of a number of competing digital video protocols for output. MPEG 2 and 4, Windows Real Video, Real Media and Apple standards are the most common.

Content is handled in two major ways; (i) “live” content that has to be ingested on the fly for immediate distribution (for example a TV feed) and (ii) content that can be ingested, stored and then played out later (typically an “on Demand” sort of service).
Ingestion “on the fly” is riskier, and requires more real time processing power and bandwidth – but uses much less storage. Some basic metadata (data about the content) is usually added at Ingestion stage.

Repurposing

Repurposing content for distribution typically includes:

- Marking up the existing metadata further for users to interact with the media – both for the Interactive Program Guide, but also to interact in depth with the media – to search it, and say pull a series of clips of similar types of scene from different films. There are emerging standards (eg MPEG 7) but many other formats are used today. Interactive media can require a lot more markup (and repurposing overall) than straight broadcast media, because it is so flexible.

- Inserting additional data – for example adverts, security and rights access data, rich media streams and so on.

- Editing content – for example, for children.

- Transcoding the ingested content into other user requested formats for output, for eg if your site stores in MPEG 2 format and Real Media is output - and (yet again) to output at various bitrates for different user devices (much as streaming IP does today).

Handling content for “standard size” TV screens is fairly straightforward today. There are major issues with small screens (eg Mobile TV). Close-in headshots work far better than wide-pan shots where you can't really see the detail, and the size of the graphics needs to be increased (as anyone who has tried to surf the web on a mobile will testify).

In the future, users are also expected to want to record – and mark up - a lot of material themselves, and there is already software appearing that lets customers make and manage their own video blogs. Maybe we will all have our own Broadcasting Websites one day!

Distribution – Streaming, Unicast, Multicast and Peer to Peer systems

Streaming in Internet speak commonly means sending out IP audio or video media to a PC. Streamed media is not stored on the end user device, whereas downloaded material is. In Progressive Downloading media is streamed, stored and played from disk as close to real time as can be.

Strictly speaking all digital delivery systems - radio, television as well as the IPTV approaches below - are "streamed" media.

- Unicasting is the dominant IPTV streaming model today. The source streams an individual copy of a message to each requester only. It is good for Video on Demand (VOD) as it’s a one to one service. It’s not so great for “broadcasting” as transmitting a separate copy of the same piece video over the whole network to each requester has a major impact on bandwidth.

- Multicasting arose since both Broadcasting and Unicasting are inefficient ways of sending large amounts of the same content in a network. Multicast sends one copy of media as far down the network as it can before breaking it out to its recipient end nodes. It requires major changes to most networks, and today there are no true commercial Multicast consumer services (to our knowledge).

- Peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols let nodes arrange between themselves for media to be sent from those that have it, to those that want it. This prevents the main servers and network connections from becoming a bottleneck, so is very scalable. However, P2P raises many other technical issues, especially legal ones, as evidenced in the Audio industry today.

The Customer Environment

Today, IPTV media ingestion and repurposing is done at server side and sent to a fairly “dumb” client – the IPTV STB (Set Top Box) and increasingly the Personal Video Recorder (PVR). This architecture may be more due to IPTV’s evolution from DTV and Cable however. Home PC’s, Games consoles and the Web itself can all potentially do these roles, plus their other jobs to boot, and as they exist in many homes we can envisage these being increasingly used. In fact we can imagine a battleground emerging between which screen type is used - TV, PC or Mobile.

(Aside - in fact, as we later showed with our MyPCTV experimental rig, it is very simple to use a laptop as a set top box)

The overall trend in the Internet is towards “Webservices” –ie the Web is a service platform - much of the role of the PVR could potentially be done in the Web, and as IPTV standards crystallise it will be easier to take STB functions into the network - with no or just a very small client remaining. Now if that device were portable - say a PDA or high quality video Mobile device - that would be very interesting indeed….

Quality of Service

The 3 key drivers of IPTV quality are:
- Network Quality of Service (QoS)
- Contention
- Latency

The Broadcast Website cannot assume the core network has any QoS, and today nearly all IPTV operating deployments are based on some combination of rapidly scaling available bandwidth, multiple big servers as close to the edge of the network as possible, and prioritising video packets over others.

Contention is the number of other users on the same local node. Typically, consumer broadband is at a 30 – 50:1 ratio, so although early users will see great throughput, as users are added it will degrade the service for everyone unless more capacity is found somehow. A similar problem exists in 3G mobile and Cable (to a lesser extent).

According to most user trials latency is bad news – we are very impatient on our remotes, and a lag of more than a few seconds creates great user frustration, as “normal” TV is instant. Latency is a function of low capacity. If capacity is constrained then either (I) the backbone network will have to prioritise traffic (see QoS above) or (ii) the customer side equipment will have to buffer it as lost and delayed packets increase.

Web 2.0 Impacts


Emerging research indicates people are spending as much time on the Internet at home as they do watching TV. People are used to dealing with websites, and we believe the Broadcast Website of the future must be like a Website that broadcasts, and not a Broadcaster’s Website that points to their broadcast media.

Web 2.0 is a paper on its own, but the core trends for any Broadcast Website design are:

- The Consumer as Producer or “Prosumer” – customers increasingly produce and consume content, typically niche content – leading to the rise in value of the “long tail” of non hit based content so common on internet based services.

- The EPG is just another Search request – Good metadata means better searches, and good search is shown to be very effective in most arenas.

- Identity, profile and social networks – many web applications these days use the customer's voice – rating and tagging content, rating each other, and creating user self help communities for example will all be part of the Broadcast Website. We can imagine this behaviour in fact driving the scheduling.

- Customer Self Service – reduces operating cost, and can increase loyalty (or at least decrease frustration).

- Customer Analytics – Portals such as Google and Yahoo know a lot about their users activities. PCCW’s “Now” IPTV service in Hong Kong reportedly has much better economics due to its customer analytic systems.

Off beam eh ?

From TechCrunch

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, may be extending their crackdown on “Broadly Offensive” behavior to Bestiality, following attempts to remove virtual pedophilia (or Age-Play) from Second Life in March.

The Second Life Herald (NSFW) goes on to ask whether consenting adults dressing up like animals and partaking in virtual sex with each other or with human shaped avatars (virtual bestiality) constitutes broadly offensive behavior.

There is also a wonderful debate going on about how accurately a virtual animal has to be rendered to be a participant in an obscene act - Roger Rabbit not apparently, Jessica Rabbit yes.

The initial thought is that you just can't make this stuff up

However, the secondary thought is that yet again Porn (3.D style) is showing the way..........the issues brought up here point to the future differences in legal niceties between virtual and real worlds (i.e. is what is illegal in a real world also illegal in a virtual one - is a virtual crime like this still a crime, as arguably nothing has happened, and the animal is actually an avatar of a human*), and this is just the tip of it - we haven't even started with religious issues yet, but it will come as early adopter geeks give way to mainstream users.

Over the next few years one can imagine a whole host of virtual situations which will create interesting ethical and legal dilemmas.

The worlds may be virtual, but the issues - as with taxation - are real.

*allegedly

We did our initial research paper on Podcasting in late 2005 for a private high level industry symposium (its now reprinted whole in the book Mobile Web 2.0), and one of the issues then - as now -was whether podcasting will ever make money from direct Advertising (as opposed to sponsorship). We were unconvinced in the main - the "what you had to believe" was just too hard in our view.

Throughout 2005 / 2006 / 2007 we have been doing work for clients on developing interactive advertising propositions, releasing some of our work for public consumption this year in a report written under the auspices of the 3GSM and co-authored with STL Partners.

Throughout this time, we have been fairly dubious that Podcasting would make much money from direct ads. So, it comes as no surprise to see this article today, where podcasters are banding together to make it work:

...about 15 companies, including Apple and NPR, announced last week the formation of a new industry group, the Association for Downloadable Media, that will help executives improve methods for creating, distributing and tracking advertisements in podcasts.

“The idea of creating an association to focus on this is great,” said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research. “It’s going to help companies monetize all this content.”

According to a recent Forrester survey, slightly more than 10 percent of all Internet users have listened to a podcast. e-Marketer, another online research firm, said that advertising on podcasts reached just $80 million last year. Mr. Haven said a lot of growth is possible.

An aside - $80 million sounds high to us as a US only number, never mind the $300 odd they project by 2010 - though we don't have access to the entire report we assume that it includes all advertising including sponsorship plus some generous treatment of other spends?

Using their own numbers, if you assume a c $5 CPM (high in our view going forward), thats 16 trillion ad equivalents served, which - if we assume a 10% total audience - people who have actually downloaded a podcast (c 10m in the US), that implies each of those people must consume c 1,600 podcast ads a year - or (assuming 3 ads per podcast - again high) at least c 1.5 ad driven podcasts a day (that ignores non ad supported podcasts by the way). We submit that as a mean - or a median - across a 10% who are defined as those who have "ever downloaded a podcast", that is a "hard to believe" number.

Anyway, the issues are those that have plagued Podcasting (and other new media) from the get go:

...technology companies, marketers and publishers need to agree on standard methods for packaging and delivering advertisements, and tracking the number of times an advertisement is heard. Also, there is no consensus on how best to design an advertisement within a podcast. As a result, marketers, advertising agencies and publishers cannot efficiently implement big campaigns across multiple sites.

No change there then...there is still experimentation with pre-rolls, post rolls, mid rolls etc etc - but clearly no consensus has emerged, thus forcing this coalition play.

So.....mid 2007, are we any more +ve about commercial podcasting than we were 2 years ago?

Good news is more people with broadband, MP3 devices, used to sideloading etc. The major difference between now and 2005, however, is that today the market is increasingly becoming a Video game, so audio (the original) podcasting is losing early potential advertisers who will be more attracted to making video work - in essence a mapping to the Olde Media Audio / Video structure.

(Strictly speaking we differentiate between audio podcasting (for the original iPod / MP3 device ) and video vodcasting, but not everyone is this precise.)

However, before one shouts hallelujah, the other thing about Podcasting (audio certainly, and increasingly video) is, like blogging and unlike radio (and video/TV to a larger extent), it has got to the point where the economics make it a good medium for user generated content, so there is a lot of potential for "freecasting" via enthusiastic amateurs, as well as businesses funding the podcasts/vodcasts from other revenue sources (or for e.g. the BBC just repurposing its huge range of content as a public service).