Monday, April 23, 2012
As users flock to iTunes, Hulu and Netflix, TV stations struggle to survive
Washington Post
By Cecilia Kang, Updated: Monday, April 23, 10:15 AM
As the audience for free television fades, federal regulators are wrestling over the future of the government-mandated broadcasts, which were originally intended to knit the nation’s disparate communities together.
Today, only 10 percent of the nation relies on free, over-the-air TV, which was created by the Telecom Act in the 1930s. To get a license, broadcasters had to offer local, educational and political programming, and to make it widely available to rich and poor alike.
A peek into the future of TVs: Companies are scrambling to be the one-stop shop for Web, media consumption, social networking and gaming with their TVs and accessories.
Now, that viewing audience is becoming fragmented once again, social scientists say. On the Web, where users pick and choose what they want to watch, it’s harder to ensure public broadcasting, local news and political debates will reach the bulk of American households. With options such as iTunes, Hulu, YouTube and Netflix — which can be accessed on TVs and mobile devices alike —communities are no longer bonded by watching the same evening news and prime-time shows.
And as fewer people rely only on broadcast television, stations around the nation are struggling to survive even as some rural residents, elderly and the poor continue to rely on free TV.
“Broadcast has an incredibly important function for community and political reasons, and that programming will need to be delivered to 100 percent of the people,” said Reed Hundt, former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Americans watch about 147 hours of cable, satellite and broadcast television a month, a pretty consistent figure in recent years, according to Nielsen, a media metrics firm. Now they are supplementing that viewing with tablets and laptops, watching an average of 41 / 2 hours of online video each month, double the amount three years ago. Younger viewers are watching even more hours online.
Those who only watch broadcast television, however, comprise a niche audience. In the third quarter of 2011, they totalled 5.8 million homes, down from 6.25 million homes in the third quarter of 2010. In the past four weeks, all four major networks said prime-time viewing declined, according to Nielsen.
That’s made it harder for broadcasters to court advertisers as viewers shift to the Internet, analysts say. Viewership for local television news has steadily declined since 2007, Nielsen said. Six in 10 consumers, meanwhile, now get their news online.
Networks NBC Universal, News Corp. and Disney, are responding by trying to steal away advertising dollars from its local television stations to its online site, Hulu, whose viewers watched about 1.7 billion ads last month.
And local broadcasters are faced with new rivals such as Aereo, an online startup that the networks are suing for alleged copyright infringement. The firm, funded by IAC/Interactive chief executive Barry Diller, offers $12 monthly subscription to get shows from New York city broadcast stations streamed on the Internet. Diller will testify in a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on Tuesday on the future of television and online video.
The business battles being fought for video dominance in the digital age have created an abundance of new options. But not always for the better, some consumers say.
So what revenue stream will getting rid of broadcast TV allow to happen or who wants to buy the airwaves to create a new revenue stream? Most of the decline of broadcast TV has been brought on by the cost cutting of the networks. When TV shows are watched less, local TV news' ratings decline. David Letterman has complained about that since the 90s. No TV and no beer make Homer go something.
We must not forget that satellite and cable both utilize the public airwaves and considerable additional public right-of-way that should result in their continued regulation.
You can't get a signal from a satellite, whether direct to the home or to a cable company's antennas, without having that signal intrude on the public airwaves.
Those airwaves belong to US, We The People. Freedom of the press has been hijacked by the few who own it... and keep us away from controlling it ourselves.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
How to Keep from Failure: Do You Dare Fail?
CBS Money Watch
April 16, 2012 12:49 PM
Do you dare to fail?
By Margaret Heffernan
(MoneyWatch) Everyone knows that to succeed business needs to innovate. Those who've thought a little more deeply about the subject also understand that anything new is inherently risky - it might work, it might not. People could love it or hate it. So innovation has to accept and embrace risktaking and risktakers.
I've worked with numerous companies who understand this and even go as far as recruiting people with a distinctly high tolerance for risk. They don't want want weekend golfers, but avidely search out rock climbers, extreme athletes and adventure travelers. And sometimes they even hire them.
But then something strange happens. The risk-loving employee suddenly goes quiet and isn't the daring character everyone had imagined. Instead these new minted employees become model citizens. What's happened?
The usual scapegoat is culture. Everyone shakes their heads, talks about how hard that is to change - and then moves on. The harder truth is that innovation doesn't just require risk-taking. It requires failure. But how many companies reward that?
The other day I ran into the head of a fantastic school that, every year, runs a Failure Week. The point of the exercise is to encourage the students to dare to fail. Every afternoon, students stand up and discuss - proudly - what they tried, how it failed and what they learned from the experience. The bigger the failure, the bigger the learning, the the greater the kudos. The point of the exercise is to accustom the students to the idea that failure = learning.
In his book, ADAPT, Tim Harford articulates this beautifully, telling story after story about great successes which were the eventual finale to a long series of failures. He argues that we don't want random failure but well-conceived bold experiments designed to elicit clear learning but not guaranteed to solve a problem overnight.
You don't have to look far to find fantastic failures. After all, that's how Twitter started: It emerged after the initial idea - audio blogging - proved too difficult and unappealing. Or look at Change.org, the campaigning platform that galvanized public support for the parents of Trayvon Martin and public anger about pink slime in school meals. It may look an obvious success story now, but only if you ignore the first three-and-a-half years when it wasn't.
"There was a massive amount of failure," Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, recalled.
You can't celebrate success only - because when you do, it sends a signal: We want no failure here. And no failure, no learning, no real innovation. So hiring risk lovers won't save you because most risk lovers only enjoy calculated risks, not stupid ones. In a success-driven company, they quickly see that daring isn't valued as learning, they go quiet and often go completely.
I'm not surprised companies find this hard to understand and embrace. It's highly counter-intuitive. Why celebrate failure? Unless you can see the learning implicit in it, it feels wasteful. But the best boss I ever worked for failed all the time. He also won numerous international prizes for his work. Yes, there was a connection between the two. And he was lucky to work in an organization that understood that.
April 16, 2012 12:49 PM
Do you dare to fail?
By Margaret Heffernan
(MoneyWatch) Everyone knows that to succeed business needs to innovate. Those who've thought a little more deeply about the subject also understand that anything new is inherently risky - it might work, it might not. People could love it or hate it. So innovation has to accept and embrace risktaking and risktakers.
I've worked with numerous companies who understand this and even go as far as recruiting people with a distinctly high tolerance for risk. They don't want want weekend golfers, but avidely search out rock climbers, extreme athletes and adventure travelers. And sometimes they even hire them.
But then something strange happens. The risk-loving employee suddenly goes quiet and isn't the daring character everyone had imagined. Instead these new minted employees become model citizens. What's happened?
The usual scapegoat is culture. Everyone shakes their heads, talks about how hard that is to change - and then moves on. The harder truth is that innovation doesn't just require risk-taking. It requires failure. But how many companies reward that?
The other day I ran into the head of a fantastic school that, every year, runs a Failure Week. The point of the exercise is to encourage the students to dare to fail. Every afternoon, students stand up and discuss - proudly - what they tried, how it failed and what they learned from the experience. The bigger the failure, the bigger the learning, the the greater the kudos. The point of the exercise is to accustom the students to the idea that failure = learning.
In his book, ADAPT, Tim Harford articulates this beautifully, telling story after story about great successes which were the eventual finale to a long series of failures. He argues that we don't want random failure but well-conceived bold experiments designed to elicit clear learning but not guaranteed to solve a problem overnight.
You don't have to look far to find fantastic failures. After all, that's how Twitter started: It emerged after the initial idea - audio blogging - proved too difficult and unappealing. Or look at Change.org, the campaigning platform that galvanized public support for the parents of Trayvon Martin and public anger about pink slime in school meals. It may look an obvious success story now, but only if you ignore the first three-and-a-half years when it wasn't.
"There was a massive amount of failure," Ben Rattray, founder of Change.org, recalled.
You can't celebrate success only - because when you do, it sends a signal: We want no failure here. And no failure, no learning, no real innovation. So hiring risk lovers won't save you because most risk lovers only enjoy calculated risks, not stupid ones. In a success-driven company, they quickly see that daring isn't valued as learning, they go quiet and often go completely.
I'm not surprised companies find this hard to understand and embrace. It's highly counter-intuitive. Why celebrate failure? Unless you can see the learning implicit in it, it feels wasteful. But the best boss I ever worked for failed all the time. He also won numerous international prizes for his work. Yes, there was a connection between the two. And he was lucky to work in an organization that understood that.
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