Communities Dominate Brands

Sky meets Sony in the white heat of convergence

BSkyB has linked up with Sony in a deal that will enable British users of the PSP games console to download films and TV shows.

The joint venture between Sony and Sky will create Europe's first official PSP video download service. It should be available to the 2 million PSP users in the UK and Ireland early next year.

BT already has a deal with Sony to turn the PSP into a communications device offering everything from text messaging to video and voice calls under a four-year deal announced in May. Sony has shipped more than 24m PSPs worldwide, 8m of them going to Europe.

Under the Sky deal, PSP users will be able to download anything from entertainment - possibly including Sky One hit Battlestar Galactica - to sports content.

Via the Guardian

Tomi talks about the "Y" of convergence

and such a deal highlights what we mean. we aslo talk about flowability, with the ability for information and content to flow across different platforms.

A new media ecology? People talk about fragmentation, like its already done, finished, I suggest its only just begun.

Soshana Zubhoff on psychological self-determination

Soshana Zubhoff , tells us why psychological self-determination plays such a key role in explaining what is happening today in terms of the phenomena of social networking and as we call it a WE MEDIA for a WE SPECIES

If you had described today’s world to any five reasonable people sitting around a table in the year 1910–before the real consolidation and diffusion of the then revolutionary new enterprise logic called managerial capitalism– they would have dismissed that description as utopian. The levels of education, health, recreational activity, living conditions and affordable goods that a majority of people in the developed world enjoy today would have seemed truly outlandish. Similarly in today’s world, a support economy seems too good to be true because it is interpreted through the lens of the now outdated enterprise logic of managerial capitalism. People have learned to expect adversarialism from corporations, and corporations have learned that they can get away with indifference, neglect, and exploitation of their end consumers.

Shoshana video on self determination

3G Mobile passed 200 M subscribers, is 100 B dollar industry already

I was there starting my 3G consultancy business in 2001 when almost everybody suggested 3G was the biggest failure and many thought telecoms would not survive this investment (and its enormous licence fees). At the same time in October 2001 the first 3G network did go commercially live in Japan by my customer NTT DoCoMo.

Today the GSM Association reports that we've passed the 200 millionth 3G mobile phone subscriber. For those interested in the technological variants, 131 M are on the GSM evolution path basic 3G or WCDMA ie UMTS; another 5 M on its 3.5G variant, HSDPA. Meanwhile 65 M are on the CDMA2000 variant of 3G called EV-DO (and its faster cousin, Rev A). Note that CDMA2000 1x RTT is not considered true 3G by most 3G tech experts, but if you like that included, then there are another 288 M more.

But what does it mean? First, that out of the 3 B mobile phone subscriptions in the world, already 6.7% have migrated to 3G. Or more practically, out of the 1 B mobile phone owners who live in the industrialized world where almost all 3G subscribers are (China with its 500 million mobile phone owners hasn't even issued 3G licenses yet) already 20% of mobile phone owners have upgraded to 3G.

The leading countries are the usual suspects, South Korea has over 75% of all subscribers migrated to 3G and Japan has over 60%. But Italy is well along the way as well, with some 35% of its population using 3G phones.

It is important to note that just having a 3G phone and subscription doesn't mean we surf the wireless internet madly and upload and download videos etc. Most of the traffic on 3G is still basic voice and text messaging. But about 30% of 3G service revenues tends to be data, where it is about 20% of 2G networks. And a strong segment of the 3G data (and 3.5G data) is the use of 3G data cards/modems.

And talking about the revenues. My estimate of a 42 dollar ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) of 3G users worldwide gives us a global 3G revenue level of 100.8 B dollars (at annual service revenue level). Since 3G subscriber numbers keep growing, and this level was reached at mid-year, it means that 2007 is likely to have total 3G service revenues hit the 100 B dollar mark.

The total license fees paid by 3G mobile operators six, seven years ago was about 100 B dollars. Now only six years later the industry earns that amount every year (and growing fast). Typically 3G licenses are 15 years in duration. I hope this puts to rest any lingering rumours that 3G licenses somehow crippled this industry.

200 Million 3G phone subscriptions worldwide earning 100 B dollars. Not bad for a 6 year old..

Trust the most precious thing and the BBC waves it goodbye for now

Its a bad day at black rock

Public trust in the BBC has fallen sharply in the wake of the scandal involving fake phone-in competitions on high-profile programmes and wrongly edited footage of the Queen, a Guardian/ICM poll shows today. The poll also reveals a wider crisis of public confidence in the broadcasting industry as a whole, with viewers strongly sceptical of what they see on television, even when they are told the scenes are real.

Fifty-nine per cent of those questioned say they now trust the BBC less than before. Only 37% say their opinion has remained unchanged, despite the BBC's admission that it had made mistakes and would ensure that they were not repeated.

As we commented earlier on the unfolding scndal

If the BBC come out of this in bad shape their global reputation will be severely dented, repairing that will not come easy, and the Government will use this as crucial negotiating leverage when they next come come to discuss the fate and role of the BBC in our society and culture.

Engagement Marketing is predicated on trust. And like all abuse of trust the backlash can be painful.

And it does not get worse than this

The BBC has long-prided itself on its reputation for accuracy and honesty, but the poll suggests that viewers think its channels are no more honest than those of commercial rivals such as ITV and BSkyB.

Asked whether they think the BBC is more likely to tell the truth than its rivals, only 37% agree. A clear majority of viewers and listeners - 58% - said they thought that there was no difference between the BBC and other channels.

The organisation, which promises that it aims to be "independent, impartial and honest", has been battling to defend its reputation for accuracy after a series of embarrassing admissions.

Heads rolled at the BBC after it was revealed that Children in Need, Comic Relief and Sport Relief had all featured fake competition winners and that during an episode of Blue Peter a studio guest had posed as a competition winner.

And concerns about trust run much wider than the recent Beeb fiasco 74% of the recent poll agreed that many things on television are made up, even when they may appear real.

With Only 22% of viewers said that they trusted what they saw.

And there is a litany if issues to be cleared up BBC apologises to Treasury over Newsnight film as but one example.

We are huge supporters of the BBC here at CDB. We cannot ever, I believe, be without Auntie as we call the BBC, as it does have a remit which I think stands in the way of outright commercialism. Look at the USA and the use of VNR's here and Fake TV News: Widespread and Undisclosed

VNR's are what are decribed as Video News Reports submitted to US TV news platforms but are highly mediated, and weighted in favour of the companies, issues etc., that that news excerpt covers. And why is this bad? Because

1). VNRs are aired in TV markets of all sizes

2). TV stations don't disclose VNRs to viewers

3). TV stations disguise VNRs as their own reporting

4). TV stations don't supplement VNR footage or verify VNR claims

5). The vast majority of VNRs are produced for corporate clients

6). Satellite media tours may accompany VNRs

So the BBC should be a beacon of light and perhaps a ray of hope in a highly mediated world. It no wonder therefore that OhMyNews for example the Korean news platform is so successful. Written by Citizen Journalists, some 70,000 of them. And why, OhMyNews has been described by the Guardian as one of the worlds most powerful and influential domestic news platforms.

Founded on the premise that "every citizen is a reporter," OhmyNews is accredited for having a tremendous impact on the news production, distribution and consumption habits of citizens across the world. By promoting an inclusive online forum for news reporting, OhmyNews encourages online global collaboration and features over 40,000 contributing journalists worldwide, generating over one million hits daily. OhmyNews president Oh Yeon Ho reflected on the importance of online social movements, “Being acknowledged by institutions such as Infosys and Wharton confirms the arrival of citizen journalism as a catalyst to create an egalitarian media.

Its all down to the need and in fact demand for unmediated news and information. That is seperate from the needs, both financial and political of other news and media organisations and those companies that apply external pressure on them, both financial and, political.

As Robert McChesney writes in the Problem with the Media

The symptoms of the crisis of the U.S. media are well-known: a decline in hard news, the growth of info-tainment and advertorials, staff cuts and concentration of ownership, increasing conformity of viewpoint and suppression of genuine debate. McChesney argues that the problems are due to more than the effective concentrated corporate control over the media system with its obsession with maximizing profits regardless of the consequences. The core problem is that the public policies that have created this media system were made corruptly, behind closed doors, with minimal or nonexistent public awareness or participation.

So in a world where for £2.50, you can plug into a network, use some open source software, and become your own media platform. It iseems insane to destroy trust. Especially in an organisation that has many other competitors gunning for your demise.

But we have sympathy for the Beeb and that is becase it has suffered at being exposed to the market via government policy, beginning with Margaret Thatcher. Her decision has in many ways, driven a venerated institution into this whole sorry saga. Add a little media fragmentation, outsourcing to RDF combined with dwindling audiences and the need for ratings, BBC 3's Teens addcited to Porn and My Man Boobs and ME and there you have it - a recipe for disaster at some point.

The leader article in the Guardian put it quite succintly

The essence of a national institution is that everyone feels they have a stake in it. For the BBC, even in the multi-channel environment that diminishes its dominance as a broadcaster, this sense of ownership is particularly apparent. So the loss of faith revealed in our poll today, showing that 59% of those questioned now trust the BBC less than they did before its recent troubles (the figure is worse among older viewers), represents a very personal kind of betrayal. But it has much wider implications. Just as the point of the gold standard was to keep currency honest, the BBC's is to keep broadcasting honest. Its integrity is its core purpose. Any damage to it is lethal ammunition for its enemies in the rightwing press and the Murdoch media empire who have been revelling, for their own (unstated) commercial reasons, in the corporation's public embarrassment. Dishonest picture editing and rigged phone-ins are unforgivable, as every senior BBC figure from the director general down acknowledges. Everyone who values a strong independent broadcaster and good journalism must ensure Auntie emerges stronger from her humiliation.

The question is what comes next?

Whats on TV? 102 channels and nothing to see

Found a funny stat from the Economist (21 July 2007). Apparently the average American TV viewer has access to 102 channels.

102 channels? So when you look at the Electronic Program Guide, and you read whats on any one channel, in 30 minutes you spend about 17 seconds per channel - and it takes you the full half hour just to scroll across all 102 channels. By the time you decide what program to watch - its already over...

So the number of channels is splintering even with the 5th Mass Media (TV) so we have ever less time to devote to any one channel. Then we fast-forward past the ads and the boring bits of our shows, and rush to spend ever more time with interactive mass media..

Living in the wealth of networks and technologies of co-operation

In our book, one of our major insights way back in the distant days of 2005 was the notion that we must move from interruptive communications to engagement.

And that takes many courses, but social networking plays a key and central role to engagement so welcome to the network of scientists.

Shall we have a meet-up in Halifax? Discuss blogging, science etc? types Jason. "I'd like to find an easy method to study the interaction of a known peptide with other unknown peptides, taps Carol.

Is the opening lines of an article by Jessica Shepherd

And she is referring to Nature Network

So what's it all about?

The site, which started only in late February, in Boston, already has more than 10,000 users in the UK and hundreds of thousands across the world.

Here scientists discuss how best to conduct experiments and whether to post their research findings online. Debates that might have had to wait until the annual microscopy conference in Auckland rage online from university laboratories in the UK.

It is all for strictly professional use, of course. Except that, like Facebook, the scientists who use it are mainly in their late 20s and early 30s and may be hoping to discover a life-, as well as a research-, partner online.

Then we have Talent in in a virtual world (subsciption required)

Faced with a would-be employee who had visited its offices under an assumed identity, loaded company information on to their personal computer and picked the brains of staff, many recruiters would be tempted to call in security. Fortunately for Alexis Kingsbury, PA Consulting’s response was to offer him a job.

The reaction of the UK-based management consultancy is explained by the fact that the covert encounters took place at its virtual offices in Second Life, the computer-generated world in which people interact through alter egos known as avatars. Mr Kingsbury, who graduated from Loughborough University this summer, says that his virtual visits made him more eager to become a consultant, and helped him come across as know ledgeable and confident in his real-life interview.

So whats happening with 3rd mass media ie Cinema

Reports of its pending death have been quite premature..

Cinema was once a new media (the third, after print and recordings. After cinema came radio, TV, internet and now mobile the 7th mass media). There was a time experts of the era suggested this new media would kill books. But obviously cinema introduced a whole new industry worth 30 billion dollars in the box office and a further 25 billion dollars in after-sales from airlines to cable TV to rentals to DVD sales. Usually a new media will not kill of its predecessors, they tend to adjust to the new media.

Also cinema itself was under death-threat. TV was supposed to kill of cinema. Well, its 50 years since TV burst onto the scene. Today 1.5 billion homes have a TV set yet cinema did not die away.

Alan and I often discuss the latest media - 5th being TV, 6th being internet and 7th being mobile. We occasionally touch on print, sometimes radio. But rarely do we discuss cinema.

The Economist in its 14 July issue this year had a couple of stories relating to cinema. That old mass media channel has plenty of life left, even in a digital age, even amidst increasing competition from the internet and mobile.

One fascinating part is simulcasts of stage performances. We've discussed the use of cinema simulcasts for rock concerts - Robbie Williams pioneered this idea a while ago when he released a new album in Berlin and simulcast it to ten cities in Europe.

Now the Economist reports on a newer variant on that idea. The New York Metropolitan Opera offered a live simulcast of the production Barber of the Seville which was shown in 300 cinema screens across America. An additional audience of 324,000 was able to join in and experience the New York City performance without having to travel to the Big Apple.

Coincidentially Formula One is doing something similar in the UK. F1 Racing, the monthly F1 magazine reports in this current August issue, that F1 will be showing live races on selected cinema screens on Sundays.

So while Hollywood blockbusters do bring in most of the mass audiences, there are clearly plenty of opportunities to capitalize on the cinema experience and bring new types of audience experiences in them. There is still some life left in the 3rd Mass Media channel.

Another fascinating development is the resurgence of 3D movies. In the USA already 7.5% of all cinema screens have been upgraded to the technical ability to show 3D movies (thats 3,000 cinema screens). It requires for example a projector capable of displaying 144 frames per second where a normal movie is shown with 24 frames per second.

One of the reasons Hollywood loves 3D is that home projectors are not able to show 3D, so it is one way to make sure the given content has to be viewed in the cinema, rather than waiting for the DVD and watching it at home.

But the other reason is perhaps even more clever. It is currently almost impossible to make pirate copies of 3D movies using digital camcorders in the cinema. When a 3D movie is recorded, you don't get a viewable film, you get a badly distorted discoloured film, ie rather than being full colour, it is only "red and white"

With all that, its no wonder that over the last ten years Cinema has been making a significant come-back to popular culture. The total number of cinema screens in the USA has grown by 30% and is now at 40,000.

And remember, if you want to understand all 7 Mass Media in context, read Alan's excellent White Paper.

Women and soap operas

Thought provoking post by Abigail Derecho at Henry Jenkins blog , who is completing a dissertation at Northwestern University in the Comparative Literary Studies department, specializing in digital culture,

She talks here about action movies and TV soaps and the role of women

Daytime drama has undergone a serious decline in ratings over the past decade, and I attribute this mostly to network executives' lack of investment in, and lack of knowledge of, the soap genre. As a result, soap fans (of which I am one) have engaged in more heated battles, meaning mail/e-mail campaigns, phone campaigns, and massive flame wars online, over the last 10 years, than I have ever seen in any other fandoms. Soap fans fight TPTB (producers, writers, network execs) for story changes, and they fight with each other because they feel that no one is really getting the quality or kinds of storytelling that they want, so fan groups that have different interests are mutually regarded as "competition" for the networks' attention. So far, the networks haven't responded to fans' demands for improved (i.e., better-written) stories and for more respect for show history.

The decline of quality

The soaps continue to go down in quality, and viewers continue to tune out. Meanwhile, all of prime time has co-opted the technique of seriality which daytime dramas spent decades developing and enriching - all reality shows are soaps, most prime-time dramas are soaps or have some serial elements, and many prime-time sitcoms (Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother) have multi-episode, sometimes multi-season story arcs.

Harnessing collective intelligence

Millions of women fans spent years and years contributing to writers' knowledge of how to make seriality work. Their input and feedback, manifested in a multitude of activities from their mere viewership to their fannish activities, helped to build up that store of knowledge, helped to program those data banks. Not only do those fans get zero credit, but the soap-y shows that women now watch on prime-time - Prison Break, 24 - are much more geared towards male audiences and male interests than towards women audiences and women interests. Again (see my above point), it isn't that women can't or don't enjoy male-oriented programming. But women fans lost good soap operas, which were dramas dedicated to women's enjoyment, and we did not gain the equivalent in serial prime time.

You can't embrace what you don't create

Boys with ther toys

In the latest issue of WIRED (July 2007), Optimus Prime, my favorite character from my favorite cartoon ever, Transformers, is on the cover. Here are some excerpts from the article about the new Transformers movie: "They started as toys for boys," "Boys ages 5 to 11 -- and it *was* boys -- faithfully tuned in week after week to watch the saga of these doughty bots," "For nearly two decades...sons of Prime waited for Papa Bot," "Thus [with Transformers] began the cyber-outsourcing of masculine heroism, a process that would eventually, inextricably, link Y chromosome to Xbox," "man-children of a certain age look to this Transformers movie...for redemption, as men." So, I, a hard-core fan of Transformers ever since I was a little girl, am excluded over and over again by this article. It's not just this one article or writer that concerns me, it's the way this environment of geeky, technologically-themed, toy-oriented pleasure is often assumed to be a 100% masculine domain. I don't think the statement "Girls like robot characters" would surprise anyone. Girls like all kinds of characters; they play video games; they watch sci-fi/action/adventure movies and TV, they read comic books. And then they grow up to be women media-studies scholars ;). But the mainstream press, written by non-academic fans, consistently associates certain media - and I don't just mean films, here, but technology of all sorts, from Blackberries to C++ to robots - with masculinity

we look for sterotypes and then we create them?

Big boys moving into social networking: Now Nokia buys Twango

We've seen the trends for a while with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp buying MySpace and Google buying YouTube, etc. Now another giant snaps up another social networking site. CNN reported a moment ago that Nokia has bought picture sharing site Twango.

Watch this space. Nokia has been pursuing social networking and communities for many years now and there seems to be a focus to this activity. If there is a radical change happening in the world that "communities dominate" and if mobile phones will increasingly become the primary tool for accessing and sharing social networking services and user-generated content - then Nokia seems to be headed full steam ahead into the epicentre of that strategic direction. Watch Nokia..

Problem with YouTube CNN presidential debates: its interaction but not engagement

I've just finished watching the first CNN YouTube presidential debate from America (for those who might not have known, this was of the 8 Democratic presidential candidates only; the Republican candidates will have their CNN YouTube debate in September).

I've always been interested in foreign policy topics and coming from the small country of Finland, American presidential politics have always been of interest to me as one of the two global superpowers when I was young, and now the only superpower left. And with four years doing academic debate myself for Clarion in America as well as two years of coaching debate for St Johns at the university level in America, presidential debates have been a particular interest to me. There were times I was so into it, I would actually "flow" (take meticulous debate notes) the debates and rate each candidate as if I was judging them in one of my rounds, ha-ha. I'm not quite that into debate anymore..

But yes, to be clear, the so-called presidential debates are not real debates (there is no clash of arguments) they are more like parallel press conferences, with candidates answering questions from panels of journalists or today, from questions posed by average viewers on YouTube. A real debate means that the debaters can ask questions from each other, and respond directly to each other - ie to have what is called "clash". These structured parallel press conferences are not real debates. The original American presidential debates - the Lincoln-Douglas debates over a hundred years ago - were real debates. So just to set the basics - yes, I know fully well this is not "real debate" and the term debate is poorly served used in this way. Yet these press-conference "debates" have become a staple of American presidential elections, and they do provide good presidential election theater, plenty of fodder for the campaigns and while nothing as revealing as a real debate would be, they do give glimpses into the personalities and oratory abilities of the candidates.

And obviously being part of the role of TV in politics, the candidates need to do well on TV. Famously the Nixon-Kennedy debate on TV in 1960 was broadcast on TV and on radio. People watching on TV saw Nixon sweating and looking uncomfortable or unreliable, while Kennedy looked cool and reliable. TV viewers clearly gave the debate to John F Kennedy. But radio listeners - who obviously didn't see Nixon looking so bad, thought Nixon won the debate, he was better in arguing his case; he was better in content while JFK was better in style. Kennedy went on to win and the TV debate was seen as one of the biggest reasons why Nixon lost that time. (don't get me started on Presidential debates, ha-ha..)

But lets turn to this innovation. YouTube meets CNN meets live presidential debate. Did it liven the discussion? Yes. Was it refreshing compared with months upon months of eight or ten candidates lining up to take the same predictable questions again and again? Yes, this was refreshing.

But here is my beef. This was CNN imposing its control over the YouTube video submissions. Some 3,000 videos were submitted and I think it was under 50 questions that were shown.

Someone did some editing. Wait. Someone at CNN did TOTAL editing. There is no way that the under 2% of all videos submitted would accurately reflect the mood of the country and the scope of what was sent to YouTube, in particular as CNN was still accepting new videos up to last night.

So the big gripe. Why wasn't this given the full user-controlled element? Why NOT let the YouTube community vote and select the videos. Yes, its possible that five of the top questions would have been all on Iraq, but then - that would reflect the mood of the (YouTube) audience and their actual desire to get a reply. CNN could have shown a set of questions like they did on the healthcare question, if there is a cluster of questions that get top interest.

But now we get what looks like user-generated interview questions, but were in fact almost managed by CNN, they could definitely select - and indeed they did select - given questions to address given topics that CNN (and only CNN) wanted to run in this debate. Such as the question about is Obama black enough, or is Clinton woman enough etc. With 3,000 questions to select from, CNN could very easily "manage" the questions and tone down all the user-generated reality out of it. Now it was mainstream questions, on a very predictable balance of topics, without any real emotion coming from the audience.

To me it sounded like the "soundbyte" questions of journalists were only replaced by very "mainstream" questions from YouTube viewers. Two questions on healtcare, then two questions on taxes, then two questions on gay rights, blah-blah-blah. Very predictable. To me the difference in the scope of questions was almost none compared to what traditional journalists present. And my guess is that if the YouTube membership was given the chance to vote, we'd have had a dramatically different experience.

Ok on practical sides. If you see the votes beforehand, the candidates could have practised on the popular questions. Fine. Hide the vote numbers. So don't show the votes before the debate, release the vote numbers as the debate happened. It would be a very compelling participation - and voter passion - measure, to see what questions came on top, and by what kind of margin.

This is I believe the same issue we - Alan and I - see in most early interactive experiences. Interactive is easy, engagement is difficult. Engagement means relinquishing control - to the masses. That is frightening, yes, it is dangerous, yes, it will result in suprising results, yes, but remember Alan's line - nobody is as clever as everybody. If the YouTube community learns that the top questions get shown on TV, based on their votes - it would generate more interest in both participating - AND in generating good questions to begin with.

If it means a few of the questions are hostile (eg against the current Bush administration and the Iraq war in particular) that would be only reflective of the mood of the American electorate today - even more so when its a debate of Democratic candidates.

Could there be "vote-stuffing" and block-voting and manipulation of the system, by which a given candidate would try to get supporters to go vote for a given video question that is against a given candidate, sure. But that would mean that the candidate and his/her staff would slowly start to get to grips with digital communities and social networking.

This next Presidential Election in America will be the first social networking election, the first SMS text messaging election in America, and will certainly be a landmark in how the power of digital communities will be used in politics.

But for CNN's YouTube debates? I am disappointed. Yes, it was mildly more entertaining than the panel of three journalists asking quesitions, but only marginally. And it certainly reflects the attempts by legacy media - TV and CNN - trying to impose control over a digital community. It is participation and interaction, but not engagement. It is at best a half-step into where this format should go.

Mind you, I do applaud Anderson Cooper for doing a great job at a horribly difficult task, trying to keep these 8 candidates on topic. The biggest danger is that the candidates have standard prepared speeches they want to present, and to ignore the question presented. There were many times a given candidate was steering away from the posed question and Anderson did a great job in keeping the candidates in line.

But CNN and YouTube, this is a journey for you two. Lets develop this concept further. The next stage is to allow the YouTube viewers to vote on which exact questions get selected, ok? Even if that introduces added unpredictability? I think the value of the community's current state of mind, what they really want to ask, is more important than a strictly balanced or complete coverage of topics (and candidates even). This won't be the only debate format, so there is ample time for the traditional journalists to do their balanced questions in subsequent debates.