Public Media's Innovation Agenda: A View from CES - Part 2

In my previous post, Public Media's Innovation Agenda Part 1, I gave a quick overview of the trends that I saw at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. In Part 2 I am focused on taking those trends and suggesting some strategic moves for public media. Overall, my position is that the far-flung future is just that, "far-flung", and our goal should be preparing our industry for the next round of innovation/technology that returns both consumer and business value.

CES 2010 pointed us to the emerging media ecosystem. How should public media respond?

Public media has a long and proud history of being innovative in the terrestrial broadcast sphere with innovations like close captioning, and multicasting. This trend of TV innovation has happily not abated with PBS recently earning a Technical Emmy for their work on Mobile DTV workflow. [NOTE: I received an email from John Luff, Vice Chairman of Technology & Engineering Emmy Awards that I got the characterization of the Emmy to PBS wrong. Let me correct the record! PBS won the Emmy for "the important and ground breaking work done on distribution of the multicast and unicast pre-compressed and formatted ATSC streams used by early adopting stations to get on the air." Thank you John for the correction!] I applaud PBS, in particular John McCoskey and Jim Kutzner for keeping us at the forefront of the television spectrum world. However, if we look at innovation in the interactive world we have a different story.

Public media has not invested in innovation to the degree it should be, especially considering the rapid evolution of the consumer media ecosystem. In a previous blog post, The Mogul’s Dilemma, I noted that “public media is better placed as an innovative adopter that takes the best of media advances and applies it to the public service media mission.”

“Public media has not done enough to partner with media innovators. We don’t structure our technology or content plays to be compatible with consumer media manufacturers and providers. Nor do we spend enough time to find common cause with content and interactive companies that are defining the next generation of consumer experiences.”

I still stand by that statement, but would amend it with the following observations: Public media needs an innovation agenda. It needs to be clear, rational and focused on providing short- and medium-term value to the system and the consumer. The good news is that this is not hard. The bad news is that we have to change our ways, especially how we collaborate to get it done.

A Public Media Innovation Agenda

Building value through public service IPTV – while the consuming public (and the press) is getting their heads turned by 3D TV there is a quiet revolution of moving interactivity to the television. On the CES show floor either through direct TV Internet integration or through set-top boxes (check out Boxee’s new form factor) the cutting edge is still weather, sports scores, checking your EBay bid and seeing Facebook photos……………………………………….*snore.* Just as PBS Kids and PBS Kids GO are kicking tail in providing innovation of content and interactivity, we could start enhancing the value and utility of television programming by developing widgets, especially with set-top box manufacturers like Boxee. We should be integrating our public service media mission of informing, educating, inspiring and helping the public to take action. Just imagine an IPTV widget in partnership with Wikipedia or One Economy floating alongside NOVA, Frontline or the News Hour that socializes content, and provides “take action” resources?

Preparing content and technology for the converged mobile/television ecosystem – we produce television, we produce radio, we produce online, but we are producing all three separately. While the world is fragmented along proprietary lines it is no excuse for us not to jump into the marketplace. Let’s build our own partnerships to bring multi-platform content fitted for TV, online and mobile consumption. Heck, let’s make it easy and team up with Blip.TV and Boxee and just run a trial on some of our streams. This could be a low-bar move to get our producers aware and creating content that will fit over multiple platforms.

Investing in education gaming (but not what you think) – I split educational gaming into three separate layers divided by effort and price: Big-Time, those are the huge production games that cost more than movies to produce and distribute (think Halo, or Dragons Age); Environmental, these are relatively straight-line interactivity games, such as World Without Oil (ITVS), or the stuff on PBS Kids or the forthcoming work being done with the STEM collaborative; finally, Small & Disposable, these the quick flash games, the iPhone apps and all of the games equivalent to a disposable Swifter Duster-Upper.

Many people advocate going big in public media. While not on par with Electronic Arts, CPB has been investing in American History & Civics for quite some time with no appreciable output. (To be fair, I had access to a prototype of Mission: America and my seven-year old son played it and really liked it.) I think that the cost and lack of seriousness on the part of public media to build a game publishing enterprise suggests that we are not prepared to go this route.

Our friends at PBS and ITVS have shown how the middle tier of gaming can be done well. (More PBS than ITVS, but ITVS has a solid plan of action and a track record.) At the same time this capacity is not wide-spread; stations are still getting their sea legs and the cost basis for the development/production is the far over the average for the marketplace. While mass production of these games for public media seems unlikely, working with key players to build a production model seems like an appropriate level of investment for an innovation agenda, but this is really a ‘couple of times a year’ type of production schedule.

It is in the lowest tier of games where public media has realized a return on investment. These small games can be agile, fast and ubiquitous. Development of these games has a low barrier, there is a talented workforce and market pressures keep the costs of production low. PBS has shown us the way on how to address these problems. An innovation agenda should be investing in ubiquity of capacity at multiple stations, building the right connections to developers with national producers. We should do this wherever the capacity to produce low-cost educational games as a part of content production can find purchase. (Not EVERYBODY has to be developing games for goodness sakes.)

Creating interactive content for multiple platforms – again, this is staring us in the face so blatantly that we don’t really see it. There is one dominant mobile app platform at the moment, iTunes, but Google’s Android platform is quickly catching up, and everybody is launching an app store. Even our friends at Intel launching an app store for netbooks (brilliant idea, and as I found out recently that my old friend Molly Olson was the lead, go Molly!) Public media has some killer apps out on the iPhone: I love the Public Media Tuner, OPB music and NPR app, my kids love Curious George and my wife on her Android phone follows the NPR app every day. However, development is uneven across the system, and largely confined to radio producers/stations. This is an opportunity to really push the app world with high quality content, innovative interactivity and value to the public. It is another opportunity for low costs and high returns, so let’s really start our engines and make app development an essential part of television production, news distribution and music programming.

Increased accessibility to back catalogs of quality content – I love the American Archive project and this is exactly the platform for us to innovate. While there are big digital rights hurdles that need to be addressed we have to understand that the consumer media world, while awash in content, it is mainly complete crap. Distributors and manufacturers alike are incredibly hungry for good content that does not only drive virility (American Idol), but also drives long-term viewing. They are in competition with the traditional broadcast outlets and – I really sincerely believe this – this could include utilizing public media’s content to round-out a full offering. (Our updating of subject and presentation will only help fuel their interest.) Our content, especially our back catalog, is our key to unlocking a lot of doors, something our friends at Sesame Workshop and Florentine Films know only too well. They are making the moves to get out in front of the market.

Funding & Driving Innovation

Paraphrasing the uber-conference speaker Clay Shirkey “the Internet is the biggest collection of people concerned with words and culture ever assembled in the history of mankind”. However, the funding we dedicate to these channels overall is inadequate, especially in keeping pace with how this audience wants to consume our media.

At the moment CPB has identified funding for research and development purposes out of our digital appropriations. Through the newly created Diversity & Innovation department at CPB we add another million or so dedicated to innovation and my own department, Digital Media Strategies is trying to refocus our digital ‘content & services’ dollars towards future infrastructure roughly to the tune of six to seven million depending on how you count the money. Our friends at PBS and NPR, as well as stations, probably add another ten to fifteen million (this could be low) to work that develops innovation and infrastructure. If you add in production work at PBS for example, as well as the STEM and AHCI projects, you probably add another $15 million or so a year. In total that is approximately $24 million a year to building digital infrastructure and $15 million in the production of new forms of content. Mixed in to all of that is some true innovation development and adoption.

Out of a roughly $2.5 billion dollar system we are spending about 2% on innovation of any kind. And out of that I would guess that we are probably spending roughly 0.25% on true innovation, mostly in Digital TV, Mobile Digital TV and HD Radio.

Now before I have the engineers out for my head, let me be clear: continuing innovation in legacy broadcast is NOT A BAD THING. Under the goal of universal service we have to continue to reach our, albeit dwindling, terrestrial audience. Propelling this innovation forward is the fact that spectrum is still the lingua franca of our nation’s telecommunications policy construct…for the moment. Our decision makers know spectrum inside and out and the endless complexities of power maximization, broadcast compression and the vagaries of “high V versus low V” broadcast can fill the best of cocktail hours. (OK, I know I sound a bit snotty…)

Restructuring Public Media’s Innovation Approach

The times, they are calling for a different approach. As a system we need to demonstrate some collaborative leadership that reallocates our attention and resources to the emerging consumer media ecosystem. Here is my debatable formula for a Public Media Innovation Agenda:

• Reallocate resources to a yearly $10 million dollar public media innovation development fund. This fund would be constructed from multiple players, including CPB, PBS, NPR, as well as the potential for investment by stations and philanthropies. The goal would be joint investment and development of innovative projects across public media. It would be run as a true investment fund, and not a grant pool, meaning that we should get a refugee VC who would construct and manage the internal public media innovation fund just like an external venture or angel fund. (Note that this idea is informed by Ken Ikeda and BAVC’s “Public Pool” concept.)

• Build an open innovation agenda that incentivizes industry & the public. Innovation within public media will only work if we do it in partnership with manufacturers, content distributors and the community of technologists. We need to incentivize their participation, which can be done if we a) allow public media to become an R&D playground for partners, b) put some co-investment money on the table (see above), c) protect their rights and licenses, but at the same time extract value for the public, and d) leverage, wherever possible, the broad innovator community outside of corporate interests to help suggest solutions, develop prototypes that we take into production, and contribute code.

• Create a Public Media Research & Development Council. There are great innovators and technologists in the system, but they are not collaborating. Attending a recent PBS Hack Day there was a lot of code innovation flying around, as well as leveraging software from the private sector, but what was missing was anybody outside of PBS. Ditto over at NPR. And so on, and so on. Public media is too small to have such fiefdoms amongst the ubiquitous 1s and 0s of interactive media. We need to bring people together to develop the open innovation agenda, manage relationships with the same company (e.g. Intel is getting peeved that so many disparate parts of public media are approach them en masse) and coordinate actions.

• Create a centralized Public Media Innovation Library. OK, this is an active project of mine, but is my down payment into the broader agenda. We need to create a community of practice at the staff level that will allow us to disseminate code innovation, development and implementation lessons and build day-to-day collaboration. This needs to be a staffed entity/repository to “evangelize” innovation across the system, and can be the working glue to make sure that there is bottom-up innovation, as well as top-down adoption.

Public media is smart and has the ability to lead. Public media has a strong valuation proposition for consumer media. Public media has brand out the wazoo. Public media has no money for innovation. What a great opportunity for strong leadership…onward!

A Digital Ecosystem & Public Broadcasting’s ‘Silent Soon-To-Be Majority’

I recently had the privilege of attending a small dinner with Jack Dorsey, Chairman and Founder of Twitter. Hearing him speak about how Twitter is being used beyond the likes of Ashton Kutcher and P.Diddy as a tool in “solving the big problems” was thought provoking. He told us about a growing number of unlooked for and unheralded uses, from emergency managers in LA and San Francisco integrating Twitter into their emergency planning, to poets and writers in New York using it as a new distribution network and robots speaking to each other (and the rest of us) in Boston.

The genius is that this extremely simple tool has spawned extremely complex opportunities for consumers, which are further complicated by new sets of relationships, applications and linguistics. (@RT @grrlboy I totally agree! #topeka). Twitter is a good window into our dramatic new digital landscape by the simple fact that it is so compatible with other forms of media. Thus we see the beauty of chaos theory, from simplicity comes complexity.

The world, as it always was, it a much more complex place than that poor relationship.

When we think about digital audiences, the so-called digital natives, we have to engage more dimensions, such that shift our thinking from old-school demographics to more complex lifestyle-centric groupings. As referenced above, the complexity of the digital audience is and was equally true in the broadcast world, but conveniently hidden behind the blunt instruments of media metrics. Today we know the digital natives more often express loyalty to interests, fancies and attraction then they do with the schedules printed in TV Guide or demographer/marketers labels.

Digital natives are breaking new ground on constructing, what my former boss, Rey Ramsey, has called a ‘21st Century Ecosystem’; where digital and traditional media blend with each other, but also have deep connections with offline manifestation of actual human interactions and transactions. A new digital ecosystem is centered on the consumers who now have easy access to the tools that allow them to construct their own universe of information and services, resulting in a complex deep ecology of people, application and the bits of data that trail behind them.

Ironically, the rush to push broadcast content online now only has reinforced the formation of this new ecosystem as consumers mash, remix, share, comment, tweet and post. For many broadcasters they feed video into the digital world thinking that it is a nice sedate house with a television inside. Actually, they feed their content into a saw mill that chops it into hundreds of jagged little blocks that are the fuel for millions of camp fires where diverse tribes of online consumer huddle.

Today people time-shift, place-shift and device-shift all of their media streams to meet not only the requirements of their complex lives, but also their own fancies. This is the essential lesson of the digital ecosystem – that it is a highly personal, highly referential and individual to the person in charge. Some think of this as fragmentation, but in reality it is the creation of a new order that requires new sets of analytics to perceive useful patterns, niches and groupings; a new digital ecology.

Rather than “punching through the din” of media, the future is following the consumer where they lead us. Rather than unifying the audience we need to provide varieties of multiplatform and multi-application content that escapes through multiple rivulets out into the world. And rather than to try to continually experiment to discover the secret formula, the audience desires the high-quality information that PBS, NPR, PRI, APM and stations are already producing, but perhaps not in the containers that are so familiar to the system.

So, what are the elements of a digital ecosystem? While no expert – because really is no expert frankly – the average digital native lives in a continuum of media inputs and outputs. The continuum travels from simple/quick and immediate (Twitter) through appointment (and one-way) media (broadcast). The rise and fall of usage of any particular media stream moves with the rhythm of the individual’s day. A few minutes in the morning yields a Facebook update, watching an episode of The Office on a iPod on the train to work, a shared video out through multiple networks after getting an email at the office, twittering during a business presentation, watching NewHour in the evening on an HD TV while keeping up with your friends via Twittering online, Facebook and email at the same time. (And then supplement that with Hulu, more iPod and Nintendo DS when someone travels.)

And even this picture becomes more complex when we think about the all of hooks that are being created between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, et.al. Content is fungible and as producers we need to respect and understand that it is an opportunity to provide additional user value.

The multiple dimensions of the digital ecosystem may be confusing to some, but one of the core lessons that public broadcasting stations must wrestle with an ecology defined by the combination of bandwidth, device, time/availability, digital skill level and lifestyle-identification.

The goal of programming is not to hand-off promotion to promotion to promotion, rather producing content that comfortably can be distributed within the ecosystem. While editorial may, largely, remain the same across topics, the quality and temperature of the content may undergo significant shifts as it moves from ecological niche to niche.

This is not a widely understood strategic opportunity within public broadcasting, but one to watch is Tom Karlo at KPBS (San Diego) as he merges his television, radio and online content producers into one unit. Rather than forcing the same story out onto different mediums he is weighing lifestyle, access and opportunity to repackage and re-report content out on various platforms and syndication channels. Tom’s experiment in San Diego should be watched by all of us for lessons and good ideas.

The adoption of robust digital ecosystem development is not an easy leap. While many cite a fundamental generational barrier (perhaps also an ego barrier?) to understanding and operating in this ecosystem, there are other obstacles that public broadcasting must address.

A key problem is that there is no effective single package of metrics that allow public broadcasting to pull back to a high enough level to identify clear digital ecology trends and niches. It is not that there is a lack of techniques for this type of analysis. Our friends in political campaigns, business intelligence departments and financial market trackers do a pretty good job of understanding and exploiting trends data. The core problem is that our media metrics have spent too long in front of the TV; they are fat, slow and tired. This is an area of opportunity for public broadcasting to again lead the way.

The new digital ecosystem requires that public broadcasting turn its strategies on it head from a set of “appointment media” programming to variety of engagements – including appointment media - with audience that allow them to break the old rules and formulas of content consumption, distribution and participation. Some implications for public broadcasting include:

• Develop and publish editorial and content policies that recognize the digital ecology of its consumers; provide a range of editorial content delivered on multiple platforms aimed at interconnecting interest areas, but also ‘niche-only’ content;

• Understand the appropriate use of content creation and distribution tools to tell a story, such as layering high cost/static techniques (e.g. documentaries) with moderate/dynamic tools (blogs, social networking) with cheap/immediate opportunities (Twitter).

• Use the opportunity to create ‘digital only’ or ‘digital first’ content as a gateway and starting point for more robust story-telling that may involve multiple future platforms;

• Embrace digital metrics not as a ‘winner or loser’ measure, rather as a guide to refining digital ecology strategies. But also break the traditional model by using a variety of metrics and analytics, such as BBC’s trust measures, transactional data, online and offline focus groups and consumer engagement tools to really understand the patterns and niches;

• Leverage the investment of others to distribute and syndicate your content, whether it is PBS, NPR, Google, Microsoft or other technologies. The goal is branded content playing everywhere, and not ownership of the pathways; (For a more radical view read http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/pbsCouldBecomeACauseForThe.html)

• Accept that your input of content into the world might not be the last say; you are not writing a canon, rather creating high-quality information that will only last if it offers an interesting, important (and dare I say it…entertaining) perspective;

• Leverage the public broadcasting brand by attracting, associating and curating (I still hate that word, let us minimize our brand association with museums) the BEST content on the web. Users want a trusted editor that can help explain the context of the world and provide some sense of navigation and action, a perfect role for public service media!

The new Digital Ecosystem in massive, confusing and shifts constantly and rapidly, which can cause terrible indigestion in anyone who attempts to “own the space”. One of the key lessons that we must embed throughout the public broadcasting system is that we must place more trust and expend more energy in understanding the individual/user/consumer. We must sweep away the days of brilliant minds declaiming from the mountain top out to the wilderness. Time to put on our safari hat and jump in.

A Response to David Sasaki's Very Interesting Post

On November 18th, David Sasaki posted a very compelling post titled "Toward a National Journalism Foundation" on PBS's MediaShift Lab. As I said, I thought it interesting, but I believe it was too narrow for what public broadcasting is (could) become. My response posted on the MediaShift Lab is below:

The premise of David Sasaki's argument is only true if it is viewed through two, limiting filters: that journalism or in a broader sense 'information' is the ultimate goal of public broadcasting and that public media management means institutionalization.

I would urge a broader view of Public Broadcasting in the form of "public purpose media", meaning that public + media could suggest a wider range of roles of different players, especially in realm of digital media. Public media of all stripes is one of the most focused (rigid?)forms of intentional media with a legislated purpose to inform and educate. However, like all things Internet-related, the old formulations are being subverted as technology allows viewers to become users that work together in new ways to take personal and collective action.

A founding principle of public broadcasting that I believe is widely shared is that quality of life largely depends on the quality of information that we can access. Everybody has the opportunity to make decisions and the fundamental question for policymakers and 'public purpose media' providers is how to help individuals become informed decision makers, achieving better outcomes.

Rather than just to be informed, the point of public media has to be how it can materially improve our lives. This takes us well beyond the traditional province of Public Broadcasting. Beyond a goal of an informed citizenry it requires public media to wrestle with the challenge of producing tangible, positive outcomes.

The new public purpose media should look to supporting outcomes that have been referenced in the current media environment, but never truly addressed, such as improving access to financial services (and financial management skills), access to health care, educational attainment, ability to secure a safe and affordable home...namely just addressing the 'should haves' and directly into the 'must haves' of a life.

Beyond broadcast in the digital medium means two things to me; one, we can erase the divide between inspiration and action (you watch, you click to finding a job), and two, the valued providers of 'public purpose media' are wide and varied, and might include folks without a broadcasting license.

Moving beyond broadcast means that content can come in smaller packets of information and action that are consumed across a wider digital universe. The News Hour is truly journalism at its best, but David rightly points out EveryBlock as a valid news source, another example of packetization of media.

However, I think his proposal and viewpoint are two narrow for the true meaning of public media. Where is the place of the financial skills management site in the public broadcasting universe? What is the responsibility for public media to move beyond the 'companion web site' to the the power and authority of public broadcasting to organize a digital diabetes program and into an ongoing resource for helping low-income Americans manage their chronic disease regime?

There are organizations - public organizations, individuals, nonprofits - that are doing this work everyday and using the ubiquity of the web to reach new audiences with new transactions and services, as well as information and education. What is their role in the future of public broadcasting, or for that matter in the proposed National Journalism Foundation?

Open Source the PBS Player

A few weeks ago PBS announced that they selected thePlatform, partially owned by Comcast to create a media player for all online streaming, including affiliate video. This was a solid start in building a system-wide digital strategy and was a nice complement to their announcement that they would be distributing content through the fantastic Hulu service.

The Big Bear in the Room

The strategy obviously bears some comparison to the already established BBCi Player that is gaining great reviews and traction in the UK. While the BBC has a completely different operating environment than PBS, there are great lessons to be learned (to be stolen...um, honor with imitation) from their player. Some highlights ripe for borrowing:

• Cinematic design with a dramatic dark background (or go converse with Hulu's white background) that sets off the videos.
• Good organization of programming, by channel, cateogry and a solid "all channel" line-up.
• Cool use of the iconic buttons in the radio channels, which could be repurposed for PBS on content types.

Frontline Ain't No Slouch Either

However, beyond ooh and aahing over all things British, the folks at Frontline and WGBH have created their own very solid player. The home page of the individual Frontline series is nicely laid out, connects with lots of the high-quality supplementary content (an improvement over BBCi) and the player itself itself is commendable in its simplicity of presentation.


What Do We Want?! Open Source the PBS Player

I don't mean that PBS should create an open source player, but rather let's open up the next generation of video streaming to creative partnering with the broader world of public purpose media entities. Let's stretch ourselves to move beyond lovely display and into concrete action.

What is the next generation?

Simple, it is helping people take the next step. Meaning that public purpose media should lead users to improve their lives, whether it is becoming more engaged in their communities, expanding their education or taking a concrete action in their personal lives. We must break away from the hubris that great art/film is the act in itself. What we want from public media is to be informed and inspired, but also lead to improvement, to action, to the next step.

And to be honest, PBS nor NPR are in any position to make that next step occur. They need help. They need partners. They need to socialize with the rest of the world. Come on, it's only lunch.

The Take Action Widget

A challenge: PBS should convene a small group of savvy public purpose entities, folks like The Nature Conservancy, the Smithsonian Institution, and - if I can humbly submit - One Economy Corporation to design a series of experimental widgets for the PBS player that could be attached directly to a program or category of programming. The purpose of the widget would be to connect users directly to action, as well as broaden the reach of PBS to play a more significant role in the lives of its viewers. For example, you watching a great program about endangered frogs on Nature and the Nature Conservancy widget let's you sign up for their 'Frog Alert' news service, connects you with an upcoming Amphibian Rally and '10 lessons in Saving Frogs in Your Home Town'.

There will no doubt a number of things to consider - how to 'certify' proposed widget creation, how to make sure that the connections are not self-serving, but public service, and so on. However, by allowing the broader world of public purpose media to participate, that is also allowing affiliates to work with their own local partners, PBS can leap frog beyond playing catch-up to showing the world a thing or two about public media.