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Re-birthing Radio

October 16, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, Future, Gear, history, infrastructure, Internet | 2 comments

car radio

Radio’s 1.x era is coming to an end. Signs and portents abound. The rise and decline of AM radio just ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, hometown paper for KDKA, the granddaddy of AM radio in the U.S. In AM/FM Radio Is Already Over, And No One Will Miss It,  Adam Singer writes,

Radio advertisements are an awful, intrusive experience and universally despised…

Most passionate music fans have held disdain for radio since the advent of portable music. It’s not just a dated medium, it tries to prop up a legacy generation “winner take all” of the most banal / manufactured “hits” as opposed to the meatier middle and tail of music where the quality content is (and where artists take chances and push the envelope creatively).

AM / FM radio djs and personalities are really the only thing left, and they should abandon radio now because they would benefit greatly by setting up shop online. Whether their own blog / podcast, app, or even experimenting with video (which is still a chance to be a pioneer). Even if they aren’t totally ready to abandon it yet, they should start to funnel their audiences to a digital community of some sort where they can grow over time in a platform agnostic way. This way they’re prepared for a digital future.

The notion of terrestrial analog content via AM/FM is quaint in a digital society and has reached an inevitable end. The technology itself is done. The good news is the personalities and content can not just survive, but thrive in a much higher quality environment. Further, digital provides a better experience for  audiences and sheds legacy baggage / a model that pushes aside quality and creativity for profit. Advertisers and technology providers will benefit here too: the modern device landscape provides a much better experience from a measurement, content serving, customization, and brand perspective (and so much more).

No doubt in our lifetime AM/FM will completely go away, perhaps only existing as emergency frequency. But everyone: consumers, advertisers, artists and personalities win by embracing digital. You’re fighting the future to ignore this and that’s never a way to succeed.

Yet people still listen to streams of audio, which is all radio ever was. Most of that audio is now digital, and comes to us over the Internet, even if some of it also still streams out over analog airwaves. Naturally, it’s all merging together, with predictable combinations of hand-wringing and huzzahs.

In How Tesla Changes Radio, B. Eric Rhoads reports on both:

Most in our industry are responding like any industry that’s challenged: defending the status quo and finding all the reasons consumers won’t change. And it might even be true, in radio’s case. But how likely is that? The questions all radio broadcasters need to be asking themselves now is how they can develop listener loyalty and cement their brands so deeply that listeners will seek out their favorite stations even when they have a choice of 75,000 stations from all around the world. Though you’ll still be available on the local AM FM dial, you need to assume people embracing online radio may only seek out stations in an online environment.

And, speaking of the status quo, dig “Fixing” AM Radio Broadcasting, Parts I, II and III, by Old Curmudgeon of LBA Group. There you will find perhaps the only useful way to bring a 1920’s-vintage transmission system into the next millennium. And it may well work, even though the result will still suffer from a bug what was once a feature. I explain what I mean by that in a comment under Part III:

Last year, after failing to find a useful radio at Radio Shack, my teenage son asked me a question that spoke straight to the obsolescence of radio as we know it: “What is the point of ‘range’?” In other words, why is losing a signal while driving away from town a feature and not a bug? When I explained some of the legacy technical and regulatory issues behind ‘range’, he asked, “What will it take to save radio?”

I like your answers.

In this series you frame the problems well and pose a good solution that I think will work by providing a technical and regulatory bridge from analog to digital and from 1925 to 2015. I hope regulators and broadcasters both take your proposals seriously.

Meanwhile, both the radio industry and the FCC are in denial of what’s actually happening with the “millenial” generation to which my son belongs. These people are Net-based. They assume connectivity, and zero functional distance between themselves and everyone and everything else in the networked world. They are also remarkably unconcerned with threats to the Net and therefore that model, from phone and cable companies, and captive regulators.

Hollywood in particular has known since 1995 that all of broadcasting and content distribution is being absorbed by the Net. With phone and cable companies — with which Hollywood is increasingly integrated vertically — they are desperate to find ways to continue controlling that distribution — preferably on models just as old as AM radio. Billing especially is a key issue. Phone and cable companies are billing systems as well as communications ones. Terrestrial TV and radio are not, which is one reason they care little about saving them.

So, to me at least, the parallel challenge to saving AM (and FM) radio, is keeping incumbent giants and their captive regulators from from stuffing the Internet’s genie back in the bottles of Business as Usual.”

In You Must Be HD to Compete in the Dash, RadioINK interviews Bob Struble (@rjstruble), CEO of iBiquity, the company behind HD Radio, which I love because it cleans beat-up FM and AM signals, more than for its other virtues. An excerpt:

…take my new Sequoia as an example. It has one screen layout that is the same for all audio services — Sirius, Pandora, iHeart, iPod, and analog or digital AM/FM. The screen has all my presets, from any source, on one side, and the content screen on the other side. Like all the digital services, HD Radio technology allows a station to fill that screen. There is an album cover or station logo in the middle of the screen, there are indicators that there is an HD2, HD3, or HD4 station available, there is song and artist info, there is an iTunes Tagging button to store song info for later purchase. Overall, it looks and feels like an audio service should in the digital age.

Hmm: “audio service.” I think that’s Radio 2.0, which here I call the “holy grail.”

All this will be front & center at the Dash Conference next week in Detroit. I’ll be there in spirit while my butt is at IIW in Silicon Valley (which I co-organize). This means I’ll be watching Twitter and blogs for reports on progress. In other words, I’ll stay tuned.

The holy grail of radio

October 2, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Live Web, music, Personal, problems, radio, Technology | 4 comments

[4:45pm EDST  2 October 2013 — Late breaking news: RadioINK reports that Darryl Parks’ blog post — the first item below — has been pulled off the 700wlw site. — Doc]

In A SERIOUS Message To The Broadcast Industry About Revitalizing AM Radio, Darryl Parks of 700WLW made waves (e.g. here, here, here) by correctly dismissing six FCC ideas intended to make life easier for owners of AM radio stations. Those ideas are detailed at that last link (by David Oxenford of the excellent Broadcast Law Blog).

All six, Darryl says, would increase interference. Instead, he suggests, “The answer is not MORE interference. The answer is LESS interference. And you do that by turning off non-viable stations. And before station owners start crying poverty, many of these non-viable AM stations have one thing that is worth a ton of money. The land their towers sit on.”

Well, not all stations own the land their towers sit on. KCBS/740 leases their land from a farmer up in the North Bay. Other stations’ towers, such nearly all of those serving New York, sit in tidal swampland or on  islands that would revert to nature if the towers came down. (For example, WMCA and WNYC, which share the towers next to the New Jersey Turnpike, shown here. Likewise KGO, KNBR and WBZ.)

But Daryyl’s right: there are too many stations, and too much interference — not only between them, but also from electronic thingies that didn’t exist when AM’s base technology and regulatory system were framed out in the 1920s.  Computers, mobile phones and energy-saving light bulbs all play havoc with AM reception.

I see three other solutions, only one of which is likely to happen.

The first is better AM receivers. The old tube and transistor types were much better, on the whole, than the newer chip-based ones. But even the chip-based receivers were better in the early days than they are now. The faults are not just in the electronics, but in the methods used for gathering signals. In cars, for example, the fashion in recent years has been to shorten antennas or to embed them in windows, mixed in with defrosting wires. Radios in cars I drove in the 1960s and 1970s would get New York’s biggest AM signals (on 660, 770 and 880) past Richmond, Virginia, in the middle of the day. The radios were not only better, but served by whip antennas on their fenders. Even portable radios were better. When I was a kid riding in the back seat of our new Chevy, on a family trip in the summer of 1963, I listened to WNAX in Yankton, South Dakota, from the Black Hills to Minneapolis, again in the daytime (when AM signals don’t bounce off the sky, as they do at night — on a Zenith Royal 400 seven-transistor radio. Alas, modern receivers and antennas are studies in cheap-out-y-ness, and don’t do the same job. In the absence of regulatory or market urgings, the chance of improvement here is zero.

The second is moving to an all-digital AM band. In this Broadcast Law Blog post David Oxenford says all-digtial “has shown promise for an interference-free operation in recent tests,” but “would require that there be a digital transition for AM radio just as there was to digital TV. That might be problematic, as it would require new AM receivers for almost everyone (except for those few people who already have Ibiquity IBOC receivers which should work in an all-digital environment).” I have one of those receivers in my kitchen. (That’s a shot of its display, there on the left.) HD on AM sounds like FM. Combine that with better receivers and antennas, and it’s a double-win. Here there is a small amount of regulatory urging, but try to find find a portable HD radio at Amazon or Radio Shack. Not happening.

The third is to develop better ways of getting radio streams on mobile devices. I have a mess of apps for getting radio streams on my iPhone and iPad, and none of them provide the simplicity of radio’s original dial & buttons system. If one app provided that simplicity, radio would move smoothly to mobile along with every other medium already re-locating there. Stations would continue to operate on the AM and FM bands until doing so no longer made technical or economic sense. But the path would be clear.

The one company that might have made this easy is Apple; but Apple has never been interested in improving radio as we know it. For years it buried radio station streams in an iTunes directory most people didn’t know was there — and then created a Pandora competitor with iTunes Radio. Like Pandora, Apple calls its streams “stations,” which also fuzzes things. The old stream directory still exists, for what it’s worth, under “Music.”

So it’s up to app developers. TuneIn, WunderRadio and Stitcher are currently the big three (at least on my devices), but all of them bury local radio deep in directories that are annoying to navigate and often incomplete. For example, let’s say I want to navigate the “dial” for Boston while I’m here in New York. On TuneIn, I hit “Browse,” then “Local Radio,” then find myself in New York. Not Boston. Then I hit “By Location.” That gives me a map I can pinch toward a red pin on Boston, where I find a virtual dial in the form of a list. That’s less work than it used to be, back when TuneIn wanted me to drill down through a directory that started (as I recall) with “Continent.” But it’s also missing all the great discoveries I used to make in local radio elsewhere in the world, such as the UK. (There are red pins only for major cities there.) Over on Stitcher one hits “Live Radio,” then “Massachusetts,” then “Boston” to do the same kind of thing, but the directory is has just three minor AM stations, then a bunch of FMs, but not WEEI/93.7, my favorite sports talker there. Between WBOS/92.9 and WTKK/96.9 there is nothing. All three do offer search, but that’s not easy to do when you’re driving or walking. (Nor is any of the above.)

All of them also assume, correctly (as do Apple, Pandora, Spotify, LastFM and many others), that individuals would rather put together their own “stations” in the form of music types, program collections, or whatever.

Pure optionality is the Internet’s advantage over broadcast radio and TV. And that’s on both the supply and the demand side. (And how anybody can be on either side if they like.) There is no way old-fashioned one-way, top-down, coverage-limited broadcast can compete with that. But it can embrace it.

That’s why individuals being able to do what they want is both the threat and the promise of radio online. Bring back dial-like simplicity to the online world, marry it to “roll your own,” and you’ll have the holy grail of radio.

[December 2021 update] Check out Radio.Garden. It’s not exactly what I describe in that last paragraph, but it’s creative and fun.

Pirate radio lives, big time, in New York

September 13, 2013 in Broadcasting, Geography, infrastructure, Journalism, music, Places, Politics, problems, radio, Research | 2 comments

Last Saturday evening I was walking up Wadsworth Avenue in Manhattan, a few blocks north of 181st Street, when I passed a group of people sitting sitting on the steps of an apartment building. They were talking, drinking, eating snacks and listening to a boom box set to 94.9FM. A disc jockey chattered in Spanish, followed by music. I noticed the frequency because I’m a lifelong radio guy, and I know there isn’t a licensed station on that channel in New York. The closest is WNSH, called “Nash,” a country-music station in Newark, on 94.7. Given the disc jockey and what little I heard of the sound of 94.9, I was sure the station was a pirate and not just somebody with one of those short-range transmitters you can jack into a phone or a pad.

Before I started hanging at this end of Manhattan I thought the pirate radio game was up. After all, that was the clear message behind these stories:

But where I mostly hang is a Manhattan apartment that is highly shadowed from FM signals coming from the Empire State Building and 4 Times Square downtown. (That’s where all New York’s main licensed stations radiate from.) Between those transmitters and our low-floor apartment are about a hundred blocks of apartment buildings. Meanwhile, our angle to the North and East (toward The Bronx both ways) is a bit less obstructed. From here I get pirate signals on all these channels:

  • 88.1
  • 88.7
  • 89.3
  • 89.7
  • 91.3
  • 94.5
  • 94.9
  • 959
  • 98.1
  • 98.9
  • 99.7
  • 102.3
  • 103.3
  • 104.7 (Same as the busted one? Sounds like it.)
  • 105.5

I can tell most are pirates because they tend to disappear in the morning. Nearly all are in Spanish and most play varieties of Caribbean music. (Which I wish I could understand what the disc jockeys say, but I don’t.)

As for 94.9, here’s how it looks on the display of the Teac 100 HD radio in our kitchen:

Estacion Rika

RDBS is the standard used for displaying information about a station.  The longer scroll across the bottom says “OTRA ESTACION RIKA.” Looking around a bit on the Web for that, I found this page, which says (among much else) “La administración de Rika 94.5 FM  Rikafm.com)…” So I went to RikaFM.com, where a graphic at the top of the page says “‘FCC Part 15 Radio Station’.” Part 15 is what those tiny transmitters for your mobile device have to obey. It’s an FCC rule on interference that limits the range of unlicensed transmissions to a few feet, not a few miles. So clearly this is a claim, not a fact. I’ve listened in the car as well, and the signal is pretty strong. Other links at RikaFM go to its Facebook and Twitter pages. The latter says “3ra Radio en la cuidad de New York Rika fm una estacion con talentos joven cubriendo toda la ciudad de NY musica variada 24hrs.,” which Google Chrome translates to “The 3rd Radio in the city of New York RikaFM a station with young talents covering all the varied music NYC 24hrs.”

To me this phenomenon is radio at its best. I hope somebody fluent in Spanish and hip to Caribbean music and culture will come up here and study the phenomenon a bit more closely. Because the mainstream media (thus far — consider this a shout-out, @VivianYee 🙂 ) is just coving a few minutes of the authorities’ losing game of whack-a-mole.

News: Watching Cable Die

August 26, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, News, North Carolina, problems | 24 comments

Now that Al Jazeera English‘s stream has been killed in the U.S., the only two streaming global news organizations available on computers and mobile devices are France24 and RT. They look like this:

In other words, like TV. Talking heads and reports from the field.

Also like PR.

I certainly get that from RT, the initials of Russia Today. Sez Wikipedia,

RT, previously known as Russia Today, is an international multilingual Russian-based television network. It is registered as an autonomous non-profit organization[2][3] funded by the federal budget of Russia through the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation.[4][5]

France24, sez Wikipedia,

… is an international newsand current affairs television channel based in Paris. Its stated mission is to “cover international current events from a French perspective and to convey French values throughout the world.”[1] It started broadcasting on 6 December 2006 under the presidency of Jacques Chirac and prime ministerial term of Dominique de Villepin.

Neither are as interesting to watch as Al Jazeera English was when we could still see it here in the U.S. Nor are they as large and substantive as Al Jazeera.

Yet @AlJazeera‘s apparent disinterest in talking about anything that might not promote its new Al Jazeera America (@AJAM) cable channel suggests the same kind of PR-based DNA. Far as I know (and feel free to correct me), @AlJazeera remains unwilling to talk out loud about why it chose to kill its live @AJEnglish stream in the U.S. — or to cover that move as the real news it was, and still is.

Whatever else it may be (and it’s a lot), Al Jazeera is also vanity project by the monarchy of Qatar. Ideally that would make it an example of what James Fallows calls a way for “this Gilded Age’s major beneficiaries (to) re-invest in the infrastructure of our public intelligence.”

Jim is talking there about Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post. In that same piece, he says, “Foreign reportage, serious investigative or government-accountability coverage — functions like these have always been, in economic terms, parasites that need to ride along on some profitable host body.” In the U.S. the profitable host body in cable news has been its presentation as entertainment, political axe-grinding, or both. One would hope Al Jazeera America takes the high road here, but the fact remains that going cable-only was a low-road move. Especially since the Al Jazeera abandoned the high road it was on — live presentation on computers and mobile devices — along with the infrastructure of public intelligence the company was helping to build there.

On Saturday’s Gillmor Gang, Robert Scoble said he thought Al Jazeera was playing a “long ball” game here. They certainly have the money. But they’re starting way behind. First, they fired — and pissed off — the loyal audience of early adopters they had on the Net. Second, they made the mistake of giving the Al Jazeera name to a wholly new operation in the U.S., where (sad to say) “Al (anything-Arabic)” is certain to be associated by many cable viewers with Al Qaeda, the only outright enemy of the U.S. with a name everybody knows. If they had called it “AJ” (in the manner of Russia Today’s RT) it might have had a better chance. Third, they either got dropped or not picked up by the largest cable companies, while those that do carry it (e.g. DirectTV and Dish Network) have exiled it to more expensive tiers than those CNN and Fox News enjoy. Those operators also run Al Jazeera America’s video in low-def SD instead of hi-def HD. So the new network could hardly be starting farther behind, or in a business with less chance of long-term success.

On that last topic, I have to wonder what the calculus of the “deal” to kill the live AJE stream was. That was not only an awful lot to pay for very little in return; but it isn’t even clear who it was paid to. Time Warner? AT&T? Neither carries @AJAM at all. And the others hardly seem to give a damn about the channel anyway. [Later: see my comment here.] I can imagine this dialog between Al Jazeera and the U.S. cable companies:

AJ: We killed our firstborn so it would not offend you. Will you carry our channel now?

SOME CABLE COMPANIES: No.

OTHER CABLE COMPANIES: Um, okay, maybe on one of our high-priced tiers, in lo-def.

AJ: Okay.

On top of all that, @AJAM and @AJEnglish are apparently different services, serving different audiences: cable viewers and computer/mobile device viewers. I suppose @AlJazeera thought its streaming audience would jump at the opportunity to go retro and watch something else from the company on cable. @AlJazeera might be right about that, but that looks to me like something between wishful thinking and outright delusion.

The cable industry’s disdain for Al Jazeera is one more example of why cable is a dead medium walking. As a big coercive silo that many viewers barely tolerate or actively hate — and stick with only because the shows they want to see are trapped inside the thing — its worst enemy is itself. Consistent with that, cable features some of the world’s worst exemplars of bad customer service.

Meanwhile other traditional sources of high-quality TV news have so adapted to life inside cable’s silo that their live streams are almost impossible to get. Dig this, for example:

What you see there is the futility of trying to watch ABC’s live stream online. Talk about a f’d “experience.” Either the app says it can’t determine one’s location (my experience in New York, the Bay Area and Southern California — wish I got a screen shot), or that it’s only available in those areas and three others where the viewer happens not to be. Then, for  those who want the Compleat Futility Experience, there’s that third page there, a non-responsive Web page squeezed to un-readability on a mobile screen.

Here’s the thing: TV hates the Net. Simple as that. It has hated the Net for as long as it’s known that the Net was a threat to its coercive system. That’s why the MSOs (a trade term for cable+satelite) call video distribution on the Net “over the top” or OTT. And also why it’s no surprise to find only one cable program source (Viacom) among Comscore’s top ten online video companies. The rest are Net-native, starting with Google. (See Tristan Louis‘ Is Google Killing Cable? for more on where this goes.)

Most of what people watch on the Net isn’t news. Or, if it is news, it doesn’t look like what we see in those top images above. Nor should it — any more than cars in 1900 should have looked like railroad coaches.

Video on the Net is wild, crazy and exploding out of anybody’s control, including Google’s. Mostly it is coming from everybody. Not just from the usual suspects.

And it isn’t TV.

Let’s face it: TV is channels. (Never mind that what are now called “channels” and “networks” are neither, in the original senses of those words.) In the U.S. those channels are nothing more than a collection of branded program sources delivered by some of the least caring companies on Earth to an audience forced to watch through crappy gear with a horrible user interface. In the growing ocean of video from everywhere on the Net, TV has the buoyancy of a bowling ball.

It’s just a matter of time before it sinks.

It’s also a matter of cost. Cable is expensive, and not getting cheaper.

The biggest thing keeping it afloat is live sports. In the U.S., that’s ESPN. They’re the life jacket on cable’s bowling ball.

At some point ESPN goes direct OTT and the rest of TV will either die along with cable or moult out of cable’s dead husk. If Al Jazeera America is one of the casualties, we’ll be prepared, because we’re already getting practice at living without it. And it won’t be news at all.

[Later (29 August)…]

In response to a corrective comment by Fritz Mills below I’ve done a bit of research to see how cable and satellite companies are carrying Al Jazeera America. Finding out isn’t too easy, because most of these companies (at least on the cable side) only tell you what’s available at a given address. So I just checked with as many companies as I had the patience and time to visit, and got this:

  • AT&T U-Verse: Dropped, and sued by Al Jazeera for breach of contract
  • Cablevision: Dropped when Al Jazeera bought Current TV
  • Charter: Not there
  • Comcast: 254, in the top tier “Digital Preferred 160+” package, in low-def, and moved there (thanks, Dennis McDonald for that link) from the basic tier that @AJEnglish had been on
  • DirectTV: 215, in low-def, as part of  a higher tier
  • Dish Network: 358, in low-def, as part of the “America’s Top 200” tier
  • Cox: Not there
  • RCN: 326. on its “signature” (second highest) tier, in low-def
  • Time Warner Cable: Dropped back in January, when Al Jazeera bought Current TV
  • Verizon FiOS: On PrimeHD, Extreme HD and Ultmiate HD — a total of six different channels, two apiece on each tier (one SD, one HD)

Meaning you can get it in HD on basic cable only on Verizon FiOS.

There are two fiber-based companies on the list: RCN and Verizon. Fiber is interesting because there is virtually unlimited bandwidth. Bandwidth is more scarce with cable and satellite, which is one reason they carry some channels only in higher tiers (to reduce demand) and in low-def SD instead of HD. They also compress the HD far more than fiber carriers need to, which is why HD channels on fiber tend to look better (provided they aren’t too compressed back upstream).

That’s why Verizon FiOS wins on that list above. RCN could also make AJAM HD, because they have the bandwidth. But instead they make it SD, and put a green $ in lieu of a √ in the checkbox, to make clear that it’s “available at a premium“. Which means it might as well not be there.

On the matter of Al Jazeera coming clean about the deal to kill the @AJEnglish stream in order to be carried by MSOs in the U.S., the closest thing I’ve found to an inside detail is an Email from Marwan Bishara to AJ executives, dated 10 July 2015, posted by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, and featured in his 14 July story, Inside look at the internal strife over Al Jazeera America, subtitled “As the new US network is finally set to launch, serious concerns arise about its brand and intent: especially from within the organization.” One excerpt from the email:

Have we signed a deal where AJAM program/content must be substantially different from AJE? Really!!!! What does substantially mean? Who have we made the agreement with and why? I asked several executives and not a single person can give me a categorical answer about the issue, which by itself is mind-boggling!!! (I have issues with AJE’s formats, and at times perspectives, but we have so much to hold onto).

Does the fear of contractual obligations with carriers etc. mean it’s necessary for some to do whatever they want with Aljazeera, including banning AJE altogether from America and web livestream, just when they themselves try to make the case for a 21st century type television news!!!! . . . .

We still don’t know exactly what the deal was, even the effects are obvious.

I still haven’t seen @AJAM. And, like so many other dismissed viewers in the U.S., I miss @AJEnglish. So, a suggestion to @AlJazeera: make one or both available on a subscription basis. A lot of us might pay for that. Per-stream subscriptions where TV is going anyway, once cable falls apart. Get ahead of that curve.

Breaking news: Al Jazeera kills its live stream

August 20, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, News | 31 comments

If you have an Al Jazeera app on your U.S. mobile device you can no longer watch or listen to live streams. Click on the yellow LIVE button and then on “PLAY” next to “Watch Live” or “Listen Live” and here is what happens:

Go to the Al Jazeera website, click on “watch now” and you get to a page that says this:

The Al Jazeera English live stream is no longer available in the U.S.

Starting tomorrow, August 20th, you’ll be able to watch more of the in-depth reporting and great content you love on the new Al Jazeera America television channel.

Click here to see if your local television provider will be carrying Al Jazeera America. If not, let your voice be heard and please request it today.

Here’s how you can keep in touch with us and get all the latest updates about Al Jazeera America’s launch:

  • Visit the website
  • Subscribe to our email list
  • Follow @AJAM on Twitter
  • “Like” our page on Facebook

For the latest news and in-depth coverage from Al Jazeera English:

  • Read our live blogs
  • Download our mobile apps
  • Follow @AJELive on Twitter
  • Follow @AJEnglish on Twitter

Nice choices, but no substitute for live streams.

And no explanation of why. I assume it’s “due to copyright and distribution restrictions,” which are mentioned here. But a value-subtract of this magnitude deserves a full explanation. As a news organization Al Jazeera should report on exactly why it killed its streams.

Personally, I assume that the big cable companies insist that the streams be killed as a precondition for carrying the new Al Jazeera America cable channel. But, as I said back on 9 August, I don’t know.

Want to see a good model of a news organization covering news about itself? Look at what NPR is doing with news that its CEO is leaving. They (notably @davidfolkenflik) expose the whole thing, cover it as a news event, and open it up for discussion in comments.

Credit where due: Al Jazeera America’s Facebook page has comments and replies. People like me (a veteran watcher of Al Jazeera English on mobile devices who rarely watches cable) are not happy. Examples:

Ruth Arhelger No, I won’t be watching any AJ programs anymore no matter how much I wish I could because I have no way to access it. I refuse to pay more for television than I do for electricity and killing live stream is the worst idea anyone at your network has ever had. I hope at some point in the future you decide not to alienate people who can’t afford cable tv.

John Waddington where is the live stream ? what idiot turned off the live stream ?

Adey Imru Makonnen Shame that AJ English will disappear – goodbye objectivity

Jimbaux’s Journal No, because I don’t have cable and am unwilling to pay for it, partly because I just don’t like spending much time in front of the television, but I have your live feed that you posted in another comment bookmarked and will see posts that you make here on this page. Thanks for giving us options.

Al Jazeera America Jimbaux’s Journal – We encourage you to continue following us and stay tuned for updates:http://america.aljazeera.com/

Thomas Chupein No, I won’t and I am really sad. I don’t have a TV and I refuse to waste money on cable when there is almost nothing that I would watch. It was so hard to lose all the live streaming these past two days – I don’t blame AJAM but I am really sad – I can’t stomach even five minutes of U.S. news programs, and I was really looking forward to this.<

Al Jazeera America Thomas Chupein– We understand your concerns but we encourage you to join us online for Al Jazeera America news coverage to access articles and video content:www.aljazeera.com/america. Also, please continue to follow us for updates!

There are also lots of positive replies from people who like their cable news on TV and won’t miss the AJE live feed on computing devices. Those are the people Al Jazeera is after, obviously. Not cord-cutters like me and a few million others.

But it’s a retro move. And, I suspect, a costly one.

[Later…] Riyaad Minty ‏@Riy tweets,

and to those, our most loyal #AlJazeera viewers in the US, who have lost the live streams. We hear you. We’re working on it.

Thanks, Riyaad. Please make the new streams live and not just a collection of clips and pre-recorded programs. The latter is what the competition does, and you should do better than that.

Here’s more from Janko Roettgers on Gigaom.

News isn’t about cable. Or newspapers. It’s about us.

August 12, 2013 in Blogging, Broadcasting, Future, Internet, Journalism, News, problems, radio | 3 comments

Read Dave’s Cable News is Ripe for Disruption. Then Jay Rosen’s Edward Snowden, Meet Jeff Bezos. Then everything Jeff Jarvis has been writing about lately.

Then listen to the August 9 edition of On The Media. Pay special attention to the history of New York’s newspapers, and the strike of 1962-3. Note how vitally important papers back then were to the culture back then, how the strike (by a union tragically committed to preserving a dying technology that employed >100k people) killed off three of the seven papers while wounding the rest, and how that event gave birth to TV news and launched many young journalists (Nora Ephron, Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, et. al.). Listen to other interviews in the show about the history of media, from telegraph to telephony to radio and beyond.  Note also how structural separation assures that the past will have minimal drag on the future, and how laws (e.g. antitrust) learn from bad experiences in the marketplace and society. There’s a lot of other meat to chew on there.

Then, if you’re up for it again (I’ve improved it a bit), read what I wrote here about Al Jazeera giving up on the Net while it goes after CNN, et. al. on cable.

I have only one complete, though provisional, thought about all of it:  TV news is ripe for complete replacement and not just disruption. What will replace it is up to us. (Note: radio is different. I’ll explain why in a later post. On the road right now, so no time.)

Bonus link.

Al Jazeera isn’t covering some big news about itself

August 9, 2013 in Broadcasting, Future, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Live Web, problems | 11 comments

Right now if you want live streaming of TV news, 24/7, on the Net, here in the U.S., from a major global news organization, you have just two choices: Al Jazeera and France24.

Soon you’ll have just one, because Al Jazeera’s stream is going away. That’s because the company will turn its stream off when it fires up its new cable channel, Al Jazeera America, on August 20.

Which means this will go away from the Al Jazeera website…

… along with this option when you open up your mobile app:

… and you’ll get no more live video like this:

Or so I gather.

Everything I just wrote is a provisional understanding: the best I can do so far. Some or all of it might be wrong.

Here’s what I do know for sure.

First, Al Jazeera bought Current TV from Al Gore and is re-branding it Al Jazeera America. In Al Jazeera America: A Unicorn Is Born, Joe Pompeo of New York Magazine calls this move “arguably the biggest American TV-news launch since Fox News and MSNBC more than a decade ago.”

Second, if you go to http://america.aljazeera.com/get-aljazeera-america, you’ll see this:

In case you can’t make out the small print, it says “When Al Jazeera America launches on August 20th, Al Jazeera English will no longer be available on TV or as an online stream in the U.S.” That means gone completely, right?

Maybe not. Al Jazeera English isn’t all of Al Jazeera. If you click on the “Watch Live” button here…

… you’ll get a page with the URL http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/, where there is this set of choices:

Click on “Al Jazeera Mobile Services” and it lists apps for a variety of mobile devices. All talk up “free access to the live stream” (or equivalent copy) as a main feature. Are they just late to removing or qualifying that copy? Or will the live stream be gone only from the website?

Click on “How to watch Al Jazeera English online” and you get this copy:

How to watch Al Jazeera English online

View our network through the internet via websites, online TV providers and mobile apps.

Last Modified: 12 Jul 2013 14:50
Watching Al Jazeera English via the internet is now easier than ever. The network is broadcast around the world to over 220 million households, but don’t worry if you can’t find us on your television.A range of websites, online TV providers, and mobile apps now offer a live stream of our channel. Browse the list below to discover the best way for you to watch and click the links on the left for specifics.

Websites
Al Jazeera English Watch the broadcast on our website.
Livestation Our UK-based partner streams AJE live.
YouTube See our live stream, programmes and news clips.
Facebook On the social networking site, stay tuned with AJE.
Dailymotion Watch programmes and news clips on AJE’s channel.
Connected TV 
Samsung Smart TV Watch the live stream and video-on-demand from the app.
LG Smart TV Watch the live stream and video-on-demand from the app.
Roku In the channel store, access the Newscaster.
Google TV See the AJE feed through the Google play app.
Boxee Watch AJE on your box through the Livestation app.
PlayStation 3 Open up the Livestation AJE feed through your console’s browser.
Mobile
iPhone/iPad/iPod View live news from AJE on Apple devices through the iTunes app.
Blackberry Open your internet browswer and watch Al Jazeera live.
Android Use our new app to watch AJE on your smart phone.
Symbian/Windows Live stream Al Jazeera English on your mobile through Mobiclip.

Due to copyright and distribution restrictions, not all viewers will be able to access all of our streaming video services.

Are they killing off all of that stuff in the U.S. or just some of it? What exactly are those copyright and distribution restrictions, and how are they involved in this new move? They surely aren’t killing off the live Net streams for no reason, so obviously they were forced to make trade-offs. What were they?

Hey, they’re a news organization. What they’re doing by going all-cable with no-Net, is sacrificing the future for the past, seems to me. At the very least they should be transparent about what they’re doing and why .

I’ve been trying to get answers out of @ajam (Al Jazeera America), @aljazeera (Al Jazeera PR), @ajenglish and facebook.com/aljazeera. Here’s one Twitter conversation that began with an @ajam tweet:

  1. Attention Al Jazeera fans in the US: Al Jazeera America launches on August 20. Find out how to get it here: http://aljazeera.com/getajam 

@ajam It says “Al Jazeera English will no longer be available on TV or as an online stream in the U.S.” That mean no phone or tablet too?

  1. @dsearls @ajam imho, AJAM will lose credibility if AJE no longer available in US after AJAM launch.

  2. @dsearls @ajam The streets will run with the blood of the infidel.

  3. Credibility a must for terrorists. RT@mwiik: imho, AJAM will lose credibility if AJE no longer available in US after AJAM launch.

  4. @dsearls @ajam have you received an answer yet? I don’t see a reply and I’m wondering same thing

  5. @ajam Let me put the Q another way: does AJAM’s debut on cable turn off all AJ streams in the U.S? Or just some? Please be clear.

  6. @dsearls Al Jazeera English online videos will not be available in the U.S. You will still be able to read articles on their site.

  7. @dsearls Al Jazeera America follows in the same tradition of hard-hitting unbiased journalism so be sure to check us out when we launch.

  8. @ajam Please don’t succumb to corporate/gov pressure and fade into MSM inanity. We need a real adversarial truth2power option. @dsearls

  9. @ajam Does this mean no Al Jazeera streams of any kind in the U.S. except via cable or satellite?

  10. @ajam @dsearls Does this similarly apply to their YouTube channel? iOS apps?

  11. @ajam Am looking forward to the AJAM launch, but was hoping to still have access to both services.

  12. @ceebeth @ajam Asked the same question at http://facebook.com/aljazeera  and it got erased. Guess AJ killing live streams isn’t news. #journalism

  13. @ajam Will Al Jazeera apps for US users on iOS and Android still have the “LIVE” button after 20 August? #VRM

  14. @dsearls One might get the idea @ajam‘s lack of transparency on this first blow on its credibility, even before it launches.

(I have no idea why WordPress puts a strike through the @ sign. I just copied the list out of Twitter and pasted it into the composing window here.)

I also went to Al Jazeera’s Facebook page and politely asked what was going on. I’d quote what I wrote, but it’s gone. I don’t know why. Maybe they erased it somehow. Or maybe, not being as adept at Facebook as I should be, I just can’t find it.

Whatever the story, Al Jazeera isn’t covering it — and, I am guessing, they don’t want it covered.

But it is a story. The world’s most ambitious news organization is making a big move on the U.S. news marketplace by subtracting value from what it’s already doing — and none of its competition are doing.

There is no bathwater in the live news streams Al Jazeera is tossing on the 20th. It’s all babies. Here are four of them:

  1. Leading edge early adopters. Cord-cutters. That’s the audience Al Jazeera already has online.
  2. Advocates. Friends. I was one. See here.
  3. Companions. Meaning everything else on the Net that isn’t on cable, such as YouTube.
  4. A platform for networked journalism. Cable ain’t it. The Internet is.

Cable is still big, but it’s the past. The Net is the future. Hey, just ask James Dolan, the CEO of Cablevision. In The Future of TV Might Not Include TV, the Wall Street Journal begins,

Predicting that transmission of TV will move to the Internet eventually,Cablevision Systems Corp. Chief Executive James Dolan says “there could come a day” when his company stops offering television service, making broadband its primary offering.

But I guess Al Jazeera is a cable channel at heart. And less of a news organization than it aspires to be — or they’d come a lot cleaner about what they’re doing here. And why they’re stiffing their entire online audience in the U.S.

Well, at least we still have France24.

[Later…] According to Janko Roettgers in Gigaom, Al Jazeera is not only getting ready to block its English streams in the U.S., but is killing off access to news clips on YouTube as well.

[19 Aug, 11:23pm Pacific time…] The deed is done:

 

 

What’s CBS worth? How about just the programs?

August 8, 2013 in Broadcasting, Technology | 2 comments

In MediaPost‘s TV Watch, West Coast Editor Wayne Friedman asks, Trick Question: What Would You Pay For Access To CBS For A Month? Here’s my  (lightly edited) answer from the comments below the post:

This is interesting. We have always been consumers of TV channels more than customers of them. First they were free over the air. Then we paid cable for access to over-the-air channels. Then, once cable-only channels came along, we had bundles that masked actual costs. Then we had premium channels that cost an extra $12 or so per month. In the midst of all that the cable companies turned into retailers of bundled channels they bought wholesale. I gather from the news that CBS raising its wholesale price caused Time Warner Cable to opt out of carrying it.

So, if we look at TWC’s NYC basic bundle channels, we see 61 channels, most of which are packing material. The price is $80/mo. There are 8 channels, including CBS, in the first 13. These are your top channels. Among them, the leading brands are the original occupants of those over-the-air channels (2,4,5,7,9,11,13). Of those the ones that matter are 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 5 (FOX), 7 (ABC), 11 (CW) and 13 (PBS). This is also Aereo’s main lineup. Aereo is today’s CATV (community antenna TV, the ancestor of cable). Here in NYC, its bottom price, including CBS, is $8/month. Let’s say CBS, as #1, is worth somewhat more than the rest. We would come up with a price between, say, $2 per month and the full $8 just for customers who want CBS and can’t get it from Time Warner Cable. That’s what people would, and do, pay.

(Note that here in NYC, the new digital signals tend to work only if you can see the Empire State Building. If your apartment windows look elsewhere, good luck with the rabbit ears. Because of this fact, Aereo has a substantial market.)

Here are Wayne’s bottom lines:

While Time Warner says it’s thinking about not profiting from CBS, another senior executive at a big cable operator, Cablevision Systems, is thinking about the day cable operators might not carry TV programmers/networks as part of their product/service line.

James Dolan, president/CEO of Cablevision, noticing how much time he and his children and are using the likes of Netflix — via broaband — for their TV consumption.

Perhaps future generations won’t need TV networks, he says. Not just broadcast, but perhaps cable networks as well. Good news for TV networks, then, in this regard: No more discussions and fears about a la carte programming.

Discussions, yes; fears, no. Because if we go full á la carte, we need to come up with prices for programs.

The phone companies already meter usage, especially for mobile customers. The cable companies are less built for that than the phone companies, but at least keep track of data use. So why not just come up with a pricing scheme for programs? Customers would pay for what they use.

I think that’s where TV is likely to end up, whether it’s over cable or over the top of it on the Net.

A way to get CBS after all

August 7, 2013 in Broadcasting | 3 comments

If you live in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles or one of the other cities where Time Warner has dropped the local CBS station, there may be a free work-around.

Because over-the-air TV still exists. And, if you have a flat-screen TV, it likely has a TV tuner built in. If it does have its own tuner, you can bypass cable and watch old-fashioned over-the-air TV.

Look on the back of the screen and see if there is a cable-like connection for an antenna, such as the one above. It will probably say “ANT” or have a little antenna symbol.  A cool hack: all you need for an antenna is a 4-5″ length of wire sticking out of the middle of the connector. I usually use a twist-tie that’s stripped at one end. Just shove the exposed end of the twist-tie in the little hole in the middle of the connector, use your remote to navigate the menu to over-the-air TV, and go through a SCAN or hunt down the actual channel. In Los Angeles, for example. KCBS/2 is actually on Channel 43 these days. So if you need to tune it manually, that’s the channel you’ll find it on. (For what it’s worth, KNBC is on 36, KABC is on 7, KTTV is on 11, KCOP is on 13, KTLA is on 31, KCET is on 28.) Usually the SCAN function won’t tell you what the real channel is, but rather how each is identified. But they all do it differently. Still, it’s do-able.

If you have line-of-sight to the transmitter, you’re in luck. In New York, that’s the Empire State Building. In Los Angeles, it’s Mount Wilson. In Dallas, it’s the tower farm by Cedar Hill State Park. If you don’t have line-of-sight, it might still work.

Let me know how it goes.

 

Daily Outline

August 6, 2013 in Broadcasting, Business, infrastructure, Internet, Journalism, Links, Photography, Places, problems, Quote, Technology | Permalink

Cool

Personal data and independence

  • The Independent Purchase Decision Support Test, by Adrian Gropper, M.D. Pull quote: ” What I need is an Agent that’s independent of my ‘provider’ institution EHR and communicates with that EHR using the Stage 2 guidelines without any interference from the EHR vendor or the ‘provider’. It’s my choice who gets the Direct messages, it’s my choice if I want to ask my doctor about the alternatives and it’s my doctor’s choice to open up or ignore the Direct messages I send.” (EHR is Electronic Health Record.)
  • Your data is your interface. By Jarno Mikael Koponen in Pando Daily. Pull quote: “Before solving the ‘Big Data’ we should figure out the ‘small’ personal part. Algorithms alone can’t make me whole. Different services need my continuous contribution to understand who I really am and what I want. And I believe that apps and services that openly share their data to provide me a better user experience are not far off.”
  • Jarno is also the father of Futureful (@futureful) which Zak Stone of Co.Exist (in Fast Company) in says “hopes to bring serendipitous browsing back to the web experience by providing a design-heavy platform for content discovery.” Just downloaded it.

Media

  • The rebirth of OMNI — and its vibe. Subhead: Glenn Fleishman on the imminent reboot of the legendary science and science fiction magazine. In BoingBoing. Two bonus links on the OMNI topic:
  • Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post. This is either wonderful for journalism or horrifying. By Sarah Lacy in Pando Daily. Pull quote: “John Doerr…described an entrepreneur with uncommon focus and discipline around what the customer wants. I guess the future of the Post will ride on who Bezos sees as ‘the customer’ and what’s in his best interest.”
  • Donald Graham’s Choice, by David Remmick in The New Yorker.
  • Here’s Why I Think Jeff Bezos Bought The Washington Post. By Henry Blodget in Business Insider. Pull-quote:
    • First, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that owning the Washington Post will be fun, interesting, and cool. And my guess is that, if that is all it ever turns out to be, Jeff Bezos will be fine with that. This is a man who invests in rockets and atomic clocks, after all. He doesn’t necessarily make these investments for the money. Or bragging rights. Or strategic synergies.
    • Second, I’d guess that Jeff Bezos thinks that there are some similarities between the digital news business and his business (ecommerce) that no one in the news business has really capitalized on yet.
  • The Natives Are Feckless: Part One Of Three. By Bob Garfield in MediaPost. Pull-quotage:
    • Well done, media institutions. You have whored yourselves to a hustler. Your good name, such that it remains, is diminished accordingly, along with your trustworthiness, integrity and any serious claim to be serving the public. Indeed, by bending over for commercially motivated third parties who masquerade as bona fide editorial contributors, you evince almost as little respect for the public as you do for yourself.
    • There’s your native advertising for you. There’s the revenue savior being embraced by Forbes, the Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Business Insider and each week more and more of the publishing world.
    • According to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, sponsored content of various kinds was a $1.56 billion category in 2012 and growing fast.
  • Future of TV might not include TV. By Shalini Ramachandran and Martin Peers in The Wall Street Journal. It begins, “Predicting that transmission of TV will move to the Internet eventually, Cablevision Systems Corp Chief Executive James Dolan says ‘there could come a day’ when his company stops offering television service, making broadband its primary offering.” And wow:
    • In a 90-minute interview on Friday, the usually media-shy 58-year-old executive also talked about his marriage, his relationship with his father Chuck and his after-hours role as a singer and songwriter. He said his rock band, JD & the Straight Shot, toured with the Eagles last month.
    • Mr. Dolan said that on the rare occasions he watches TV, it is often with his young children, who prefer to watch online video service Netflix, using Cablevision broadband.
    • He added that the cable-TV industry is in a ‘bubble’ with its emphasis on packages of channels that people are required to pay for, predicting it will mature ‘badly’ as young people opt to watch online video rather than pay for traditional TV services.
  • Making TVs smart: why Google and Netflix want to reinvent the remote control. By Janko Roettgers in Gigaom.
  • Hulu, HBO, Pandora coming to Chromecast. By Steve Smith in MediaPost. Pull-quote: “A battle over content clearly is brewing between Google and Apple. Apple TV has recently expanded its offerings of content providers to include HBO Go, Sky TV, ESPN and others. The two companies are pursuing different delivery models as they try to edge their way onto the TV. Apple TV is a set-top box with apps, while Chromecast relies on apps that are present on mobile devices to which the dongle connects.”
  • Setting TV Free. By yours truly in Linux Journal.

Tech

Retail

Legal

Handbaskets to hell

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