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Just back from Stockholm. Thanks everyone for the nice time there back again. As talked about in the previous post, here is my Master of Science Thesis report on Strategic Outlooks for European High Definition and IP TV. Enjoy!
I know you may have been wondering where I was hiding or what was behind the (very unstringent) lack of update on this blog in those last few weeks. Well, I was quite a bit busy finishing up my Master's thesis I began back in January when starting my end-of-study internship at Sony in Paris.
After those six wonderful months of discovering, investigating, getting in touch with and living (breathing?) in the European media sector, I 'm delighted to travel up to Stockholm to present and defend my work next week, on Monday June 13th at 13:00 in Kista (have a look at the official announcement posted at KTH).
What will be the topic-of-the-day, might you ask? Quite simply, I have been looking at the structural trends and disruptive innovations that are today appearing in the TV world in Europe - mainly High Definition TV (HD TV) and Internet-based TV (IP TV). What are they influence in the European "big picture" digital TV ecosystem? Can evolution patterns and emerging business models be sketched out of the profound and quicker-than-expected digital switchover we are experiencing today in Europe?
The event is public, so you are more than welcome to attend if you happen to be around (maybe lingering a couple more days in Scandinavia after the Reboot7 conference?). Oh, and expect the report and the presentation slides sometimes soon on this blog. Stay tuned!
Less than a month after Yahoo bought new-generation photo-sharing site Flickr, Google has just unveiled it own vision of content-sharing ... for videos. Through its Video Upload Program, it is adopting the same concept of a publication website (powered by its video search engine) and an uploader (or should I say Uploadr? :-) ). The interesting twist is that as a user you can set a price for the homemade videos you have uploaded, thereby opening the commercial doors to the content at the further end of the Long Tail. What seems to be currently missing however is the ability to enforce a specific form of copyright to one's own videos (such as Creative Commons).
Is Google thinking of turning itself as a search-powered, C2C platform - just like Ebay did for auctions and Craig's List for classified, albeit this time for searchable and indexed content? Only time will tell as the service is in its early stage, but as the technical barriers around videos on the web are disappearing one after the other (codecs, hosting, bandwidth...), this is the logical next frontier...
In the blogosphere, one of the latest focus of interest has been around podcasting, the innovative way of publishing, aggregating, syndicating and enjoying music online. As it is riding on both the wave of the booming digital audio player market (over 5 million iPods sold by Apple in its 2005 second quarter, and the strong competition with the 70% market leader driving the market even upper), and the ever-increasing readership and overall credibility of blogs as a content platform (just ask Rupert Murdoch), it is not surprising to see large media companies and content owners beginning to embrace the phenomenon: for instance, the BBC has been doing podcast trials and the "three podcasts were downloaded as MP3 files a total of 270,000 times in the first four months of the trial".
Again in the UK comes up Podshows, which I discovered this morning through DMeurope: two UK DJs, Paul Gambaccini and Tony Blackburn have started what is supposedly the first commercial podcasting service. Basically, it is an hybrid concept at the crossroads between a radio and a podcast repository. For roughly the same price as a legal download at one of the digital music stores out there, radio segments can be streamed on-demand or downloaded to digital players (through audio aggregators like iPodder). While the library is still in early stages, there is definitely potential in bringing both the niches at the end of the Long Tail along with households names and the top charts.
With such a service breaking the traditional barrier of instantaneity of radios and reconciliating broadcasting with downloading, I can but look forward to seeing more radios jumping on the bandwagon and adopting this concept. And what about a cross-over of Podshows and Last.fm?
Update (via Loïc): speaking of the BBC, it has just announced that it is expanding its podcasting trial to 20 more radio shows.
That's the title of an interesting article I found on Thursday's edition of The Wall Street Journal Europe. It highlights the increasing issue of music metadata, i.e. information on digital music files, like track name and number, artist(s), album title, genre and so forth. Back in the now old days of physical medium like LPs and CDs, one didn't have to look very far to find those information printed on the disc cover.
Today, music metadata has become as important, if not more, than the actual music they describe, a fact taken early on by grass-roots efforts like CDDB (CD DataBase - acquired since then by GraceNote) doing a great job at giving information on CDs. But while CDs were still providing some structure, the proliferation of "non-physical" music sources such as homemade rips, digital music stores, and above all file-sharing, makes it far more complex to organize gigabyte-sized music libraries.
In that sense, I have been positively surprised after several months of using it by the quality of MusicBrainz, a self-moderating metadatabase that helps identify not only CDs but also mp3 and other digital formats through some clever fingerprinting as well as community-powered updating and editing - in short a Wiki for music information. In my view, the next logical step is to have such smart recognition directly integrated into media players like iTunes: as Suw underlines, the comings and goings between MusicBrainz and iTunes are tedious, to say the least. Even better would be coupling such a music recognition tool with a recommendation service like Last.FM: information not only about the track I'm listening to, but on the ones I may also like as well.
Once again, bringing back relevant context to the digital media experience.
In the media world we currently talk a lot about DTT - Digital Terrestrial Television, especially here in France, where "TNT" (the aptly chosen acronym for Télévision Terrestre Numérique) will bring around 15 digital channels to 35% of French TV households starting on March 31st, and soon able to cover more than 80% of the total households. While this move towards affordable and mass-market digital TV is getting in shape, High Definition (HD) is here today as we speak.
No more vaporware. No more promises. After a failed attempt in the 90s in the analog world (HDmac), and after enviously looking for years at Japan, Korea and the USA where HD is a commercial reality, Europe is making strong and concrete moves to push what is the next technological breakthrough and a real commercial opportunity.
The EICTA (European Information & Communications Technology Industry Association) has recently announced the creation of a "HD ready" label. At the national level, industry groups such as the HD Forum in France are jointly driving essential technical standardization, communication and marketing initiatives to build a positive and dynamic framework for HD. Of course, nothing matters without content : the good piece of news is that on satellite, cable, DSL and even DTT, major European operators in France, Germany and UK have announced that they will begin providing HD channels starting the second half of 2005.
HD is putting together innovative technologies (of which MPEG-4 AVC/H-264 is an essential component) and creating a new dynamics for the audiovisual sector by fully taking benefit of an end-to-end digital value chain.
I am a strong believer in the Long Tail theory and observations, as first written in the best Wired article in 2004 and followed up in an eponymous blog, where Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson brillantly shows how the Long Tail - this inverted exponential curve, is driving the digital media industry.
In a nutshell (but I do encourage you to (re-)read Anderson's article and posts), the red part of the curve is the "mass target" content: the few TV channels broadcast by the big national networks, the Top 50 music and book hits available pretty much anywhere. Now with the low-cost entry barriers of distributing, streaming, selling or plainly putting content online, much more focused and targeted content adds to the total media available. Think of this yellow part as the power of the niches. Services like Amazon for books, independent online labels for music, local or special-interest TV channels through ADSL TV all bring us a longer tail, a richer choice, a potentially more fulfilling media package.
Such choice and possibilities is fatally followed by an increased complexity that still today resides on the user side. Of course, PVR (Personal Video Recorders) like TiVo in the USA have attracted hundreds of thousands, but now show their limitation in thin-slicing the offer and smart-filtering content (not to mention the regulatory and legal "gray area" services like that are being pushed to).
Once again, the solution could well come from the Web side: Google recently unveiled its Video Search engine, along with Yahoo's own version, which are not hard to image being soon extended to handle mode media types (think streamed radios and podcastings), should help to make aggregation eventually easier.
It is especially important for TV as it is by essence a passive activity, despite all the attempts to make it glitter with interactivity and active use: feeding a household with the whole chunk of 1000s of channels will not make it spontaneously feel better served, except for isolated groups of very early adopters and technophiles. The key once again is to use those "glue" tools and services to immediately provide a thinly-sliced and carefully filtered choice of channels and content. In short, generalize the iPod Shuffle paradigm, with stripped-down interfaces and smart randomness.
Thanks Pascal for pointing out this interesting video from the Museum of Media History: a polished and graphically impressive retrospective of the major milestones in information construction and diffusion as well as the prediction of its future twists and evolution until a prophetical culmination point in 2014 marking the irrevocable victory of the "New Media" - a decentralized mesh of individual micro-contributions, ratings and content - against the "Old Media" - the Press, Fleet Street and the likes, as depicted in the video by the might of "Googlezon" (Google + Amazon) launching their "Evolving Personalized Information Construct" and the online withdrawal of The New-York Times.
This is good food for thoughts, as I see a strong potential in integrating the multitude of separate and niche nano-publishing and community-based islets that exist today on the Web: think of the synergies that can be created by crossing social relationships (LinkedIn, Friendster, Orkut...), information icosystems (Technorati, Google News, personal RSS subscriptions, e-mails), entertainment (Flickr, Last.FM, Filmtipset in Sweden...), shopping intelligence (Amazon recommendations, ) and many others which I don't know of or not out yet. What stands out is the vast amount of tools and "glue" that have been made available in the last few years to connect content, people, time and location. Far from the Orwellian tone of the video, I thus see such combinations as an opportunity to deepen the meaning and use of the Net, and bring it closer to a collaborative effort.
However, it is important to have the necessary legal (Creative Commons) and privacy frameworks to make such new engine run smoothly. And I seriously doubt that what is seen as the "Old Media" will just let itself wither without reacting, as the video suggests: as already underlined by Loïc, newspapers like Le Monde in France are adopting blogs as a new type of online space, where reader-contributed content has a key role. Soon, I am sure it will expand to other content (photo, video where bandwidth allows) and roles (information, socialization, entertainment...).
Instead of going after the "New vs. Old", we'd rather look at the "Aggregated vs. Isolated" in the media world.
Plenty of fresh updates from Apple today:
- A special-edition 20GB iPod featuring U2 colors, signatures and preloaded tracks.
- iPod Photo, a 60GB iPod with color and photo slideshow capabilities.
- Pan-european iTunes Music Store, now in 9 new Euro-member countries.
One step closer indeed for Apple as a digital media company, while renewing its fashionable and designer appeal with the iPod. Let's just hope that with the photo feature, they have managed to keep the user experience simple and streamlined - as I think that it is what distantiate Apple's player from the rest of the crowd: a superb yet straightforward interface and overall integration between the mobile "on-the-go" and the desktop worlds. Once again, the gap between geeky features and real and palpable customer benefits, which Apple seems to understand pretty well so far.
... well almost: Avex, one of the biggest record labels in Japan (producing among other things Ayumi Hamasaki - the local Britney Spears, and hundreds of Eurobeat CDs - isn't it, Eiji ;-)) will drop producing DRM-protected CDs starting September 22th. It may not sound important, but Avex had been one of the first adopter of this practice back in 2002; while I don't have nothing at all against DRM per se (Apple's Playfair and Real's Helix systems works well), I remember buying such CDs while in Japan and their protection scheme was really annoying, with a very crappy embeded software player, on top of not being that effective at all.
And as a follow-up, Avex has joined with Sony Music Japan and other Japanese labels in the digital music store Mora, a somewhat good piece of news tainted by the fact that the store uses an ATRAC3 codec (which is not that surprising, given the popularity of MiniDiscs in Japan). Still a couple of interoperability lessons for them to learn...
Via Slashdot Japan
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