December 2010

Current, the newspaper that has covered the public broadcasting business every two weeks for three decades, is leaving the hands of its longtime owner, WNET.org, the New York City public broadcaster. The board of WNET.org last week approved an agreement to sell Current to the American University School of Communication, whose board has also approved the move.

The change is expected to take place in the new year, once a final contract is signed. The trade publication, which is based outside Washington, was founded in 1980 by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, but in 1982 it shifted to the Educational Broadcasting Corporation, the forerunner of WNET. American University Dean and former Benton Foundation President Larry Kirkman said the school had “become a laboratory for the future of public media,” helped by initiatives like the Center for Social Media and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, which produces for PBS’s “Frontline.” He added that he hoped students would become more engaged with public media with Current at the university.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) told the Federal Communications Commission that the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal could have a detrimental impact on consumers and competition.

Using terms such as "worry," "fear" and "concern," the senator warned FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that the deal could result in higher rates, fewer programming choices, and the blocking of competing online content. The lawmaker urged the agency to carefully scrutinize the transaction, emphasizing that "a merger of this magnitude has the power to reshape the media landscape."

Pay-per-use broadband pricing will create new opportunities and drive new technology breakthroughs. Here are some thoughts on such a future:

• Fewer Ambient Applications. Less passive push, more active pull.
• Truth in Labeling. Apps and content may need to disclose total data transferred or peak data rates. Drugs need to disclose potential side effects (may cause congestive heart failure), apps and content may need to do the same (may cause congestive network failure).
• Certifications and Guarantees. Programs may be developed to certify “bandwidth-efficient” endpoints.
• Real-time and Projected Monitoring and Billing. Providing ubiquitous access to your current data consumption, rated to provide visibility into your projected bill, is next.
• Price Caps.li>
• Network Enhancements and Trade-Offs. Usage-sensitive pricing will drive enhancements in compression algorithms, less chatty protocols, and less predictive caching.
• Application Design Changes. Higher interactivity demands lower latency, therefore greater application dispersion.
• Increased Caching and Premises Appliance Sharing. Expect more caching, subject to laws and DRM. And, expect players from various manufacturers to query each other.
• Congestion Pricing. Simplified congestion pricing might mean free nights and weekends.
• Security. Expect more users to turn security on, and more access point vendors to focus on simplicity and usability of security administration.
• Peer-to-peer. If letting your neighbor uncontrollably increase your monthly data bill is unwise, perhaps neither is letting everyone on the planet using your peer-to-peer client do the same.
• Intelligent, Policy-Based Optimization. Better to cache that movie now or download it tonight, when the forecast is for a twenty percent chance of lower data transfer rates?
• End-to-End Open Interoperability and Integration. Expect device manufacturers to increasingly support interoperable control so that a streaming media player doesn't rack up charges when no one is watching.
• Conservation Culture. Reduced consumption is a well-known effect of metered pricing.
• Cost-Based Adaptivity. Technologies such as Scalable Video Coding degrade gracefully to smaller screens and lower frame rates and quality due to network congestion. Future technologies may do the same based on real-time network data pricing.
• Return to Ownership. Recent trends have favored on-demand rental over ownership. Shifting breakeven points may cause these trends to moderate or even reverse. Don't toss that DVD shelving unit yet. If you can rent a house with an option to buy, perhaps similar models will emerge where streaming a movie will entitle you to a discount on purchasing it on physical media.
• Shifting Business Models and Ecosystems. People who drive to the video store for a DVD (as some still do) expect to pay for the data transport costs (e.g., fuel, car wear and tear). People who rent by mail expect that the cost of delivery and return postage is borne by the video service. Expect a variety of customer-pays, provider-pays (i.e., bundled pricing), and advertiser or other third-party supported models to vie to become accepted industry practice, although in any event, the consumer ultimately pays with either eyeballs or hard dollars.