Technovia

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Roly Keating appointed as Director of Archive Content

Roly Keating has been appointed as Director of Archive Content at the BBC:

"Within Vision, Roly will have editorial responsibility for the release and management of BBC Vision's catch-up and archive content on all platforms, including the BBC iPlayer, UKTV and other on-demand or commercial services, working closely with Simon Nelson, Controller, Portfolio & Multiplatform."

Two and a half cheers for this. What also fills me with a modicum of happiness is the way this is phrased:

"Roly Keating said: 'Unlocking the value of broadcast archives is one of the great opportunities opened up by digital media – and the BBC has the greatest archive of them   all, with untold potential public value.'"

I'm hoping that this "public value" means "released to the public" rather than "used as a method of gaining more money by selling old content, thus reducing the need to increase the license fee".

And Roly's first task should be to talk about what the heck happened to the Creative Archive project, last seen lumbering towards its public value and market impact tests...

Good for Elgato

EyeTV does not support broadcast flags or other DRM measures:

"EyeTV doesn't support any broadcast flags or other methods of restricting the use of television programs.

Such methods have been encouraged by the television and movie industry - to prevent recording or sharing certain shows - but they are not required by law. Legislation does vary country by country, but at the present time there are no such restrictions in the locations where EyeTV is available.

Therefore, EyeTV and other Elgato software will ignore any flags or other voluntary DRM methods - if you can watch a program, you can record, edit or share it as you see fit."

Good for Elgato. Broadcast flags are noxious, ineffective, and stupid. A much better way of moving forward for the TV industry would be making content available to buy immediately after transmission - as with music, the only people who will choose to pirate when content is easily and cheaply available for sale are those who couldn't afford it anyway.

(We have a Mac mini set up in the living room, using EyeTV to record shows, which are then archived into iTunes linked to a 1Tb drive. Even though we also have an excellent Humax PVR, we use the EyeTV much more.)

(Via TUAW.)

Is Apple TV a success? Compared to Tivo, it certainly is

Chuq beats me to the gun with a humdinger of a post comparing sales of Apple TV with those of Tivo:

"For the quarter ending October 31, TiVo recorded 69,000 new subscriptions (down from 101,000 year previous); they lost 65,000 subscriptions, giving them a net increase in units added to the install base for the quarter of -- 4,000. That's 1,350 a month, or 2% of what Apple TV sold.

At a gross level, TiVO is selling as many units in a quarter as Apple TV is selling in a month, so Apple is outselling TiVo about 3X. In practice, since Apple TV is a new product, 100% of those units are increases in the installed base, while TiVo is effectively standing still. In raw unit sales, it'll take Apple about 5 years at the current sale rate to match TiVo's 4.1 million active users -- but the first TiVO shipping in 1999, so it took Tivo 8 years to reach that number."

Don't count Apple TV out. While I decided not to get one, in favour of getting a Mac mini and putting together a custom system, for a lot of people it's a perfectly good option.

Most pertinent media question of the day

Marina Hyde in Binge-drinking in the name of science:

"Do you think there's a department called ITV Science?"

One can only imagine that the answer to this question follows the old media maxim that any headline in the form of a question automatically has the correct answer "no".

NBC’s Zucker to Apple: "Wahhhhhh"

There's so many things wrong with NBC CEO Jeff Zucker's comments on Apple and video that it's almost impossible to know where to begin. Here's a few choice bits.

Just why is the BBC making layoffs, again?

Nate Elliot of JupiterResearch has an interesting take on the news that the BBC is to carry advertising on its web site for users outside the UK:

"The best part of the story is that the BBC's competitors -- namely The Guardian, in the guise of the British Internet Publishers Alliance (BIPA) -- being upset by this decision. The Guardian also gets a decent chunk of its online traffic from outside the UK, so this move will bring them strong new competition. But BIPA claims it's not upset over the prospect of lost revenues, but rather that this move will undermine the BBC's "worldwide reputation for integrity and impartiality." How sweet of them to look out for the Beeb like that."

This makes a point that I've made before quite succinctly: the BBC is constantly assailed by commercial companies which, having failed to compete by producing enough original quality content, think they can complain to the government that it's all "not fair".

Of course, a decent, bullish BBC director general, being a leader (as opposed to manager) would be manning the ramparts and pointing this out. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than for a BBC DG to come out and say "Actually, ITV, The Grauniad et al have spent millions trying to get online right, and none of them have got within a light year of the work we do. Will someone please call them a waaaaahmbulance?" Sadly, Mark Thompson isn't the man to do it.

One of Nate's other comments, though, is well wide of the mark:

"The Beeb, of course, can't run ads in the UK, where they already collect a licence fee on every household with a TV. But despite collecting I think 3 billion pounds in free money each year, the BBC still claims it's got a 2 billion pound shortfall, and they recently cut 2800 jobs. (This seems to be primarily the result of bad planning and silly, wasteful decisions. 18 million pounds last year to have Jonathan Ross lisp bad film reviews on Friday nights? Surely you're joking.)"

Actually, it's got a lot more to do with the fact that the government has shafted the BBC over its involvement in the switch over to digital TV. Not only does it have to bare its own costs (including launching flagship digital channels which it otherwise wouldn't have to create), it also has to spend large amounts ensuring that every over-75 year old person in the UK can get digital TV; finance the body which is doing the marketing for the scheme (Digital UK); and actually build the DTV infrastructure country-wide. It is now even being forced to pay £14 million to cover the switchover costs of Channel 4, one of its main competitors. Channel 4 chief Andy Duncan was, unsurprisingly, "delighted" about this.

The whole lot comes to about £800 million over seven years, and amounts to about a 1% increase on the license fee. The BBC's recent license fee settlement was for 3% in 2008 - which effectively means that the BBC has been given no increase at all once you account for digital switchover costs and inflation, while being expected to introduce new services like iPlayer, podcasts and so on. In future years, the picture actually looks even more grim, with 2% increases in 2009-11 and something between zero and 2% in 2012, depending on the final costs of digital switchover.

A 2% year-on-year increase in the element which provides the majority of your revenue would be viewed by any large commercial organisation as the kind of figure which is unsustainable if you want to grow the business. If inflation increases, it will wipe out that figure entirely - leaving the BBC with no money to fund pay increases, which in an organisation based on a model of collective yearly incremental increases with no money to fund them.

The BBC is, overall, not a great company to work for if you want money - virtually everyone I've known who has worked there has been paid quite a bit less than the commercial rate for their job - and if its pay rises fail to keep in touch with the rest of the industry, it will lose even more of its talent.

And I'm not talking about the Jonathan Ross's of this world here, but the ordinary employees - the ones who have been producing the quality content which The Guardian and others have been complaining about.

Yes, free beats flat fee

NBC Brings the Most Popular Word to TV Downloads: Free - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog.

"NBC today offered a third logical option: free downloads with commercials. The advantage of downloading is that the video quality is better and you can watch shows on laptops or portable devices. The value of free is …well you know.

The service, called NBC Direct, has some limits, of course. The downloads can only be watched for a week after the show airs on the network. And you need to use NBC’s software, which for now only works on Windows PCs. It will begin in October.

The company says it will have a Macintosh version soon, and will eventually allow the programs to be watched on portable devices. But it’s unlikely those devices will include Apple’s iPod."

This is the next step in commercial online video distribution, but it's not the end point: that will come when the time restrictions are removed, something that I predict will happen two or three years down the line.

TV companies aren't learning from the mistakes of the record companies

Looking at the decisions of some of the TV companies, it makes me wonder if they aren't determined to live up to one of the stereotypes of movies: the smart, doomed character determined to undermine their own success and destroy themselves.

Take, for example, NBC's decision to dump the iTunes Store in favour of Amazon. This has been described by some as a power struggle, with NBC determined to curb the power of Apple as a distributor. Yet it also reflects unease with what the TV companies see as Apple's "lax" DRM:

"'Protecting content' is a tip of the hat to NBC's concerns over DRM. Amazon and Apple both use DRM for video, but Apple's DRM policies are considered to be 'too lax' by many players in the TV and movie business. Apple's terms allow for authorized for playback on as many as five different devices. Furthermore, Apple-approved devices can be authorized to play content purchased from five different accounts.

Compare Unbox: Shows bought from Unbox can be kept on two computers max and can be stored on up to two different (approved) media players. Users cannot 'mix' accounts, meaning that a PC cannot have authorized content purchased from two different accounts accessible at the same time. As you can see, Unbox is more restrictive."

The mistake that NBC is making in this context is two-fold. First, it is making the assumption that the reason for iTunes Music Store's dominance is down to its compatibility with the iPod. This is a a massive error.

Flexible pricing is attractive to marketing teams at companies, which is one of the reasons why NBC sees it as attractive:

"While Amazon is still working to determine pricing, Unbox typically charges more for newer releases than for older ones. Unbox also gives consumers more options, including whether to rent a movie for $3.99 or buy a download for $14.99. Amazon agreed to offer promotions, including a 30 percent discount when buying full seasons of television shows."

However, all these things have been offered by music services in competition with Apple - and all of them have failed when compared to iTunes. While iPod compatibility is important, the number of iTunes Music Store songs on each iPod is, on average, very low - Forrester estimated 22 songs last year, and it won't have gone up too much. While there's undoubtedly a degree of lock-in between iPod and iTunes, for the majority of users switching would not be a big issue, if other stores offered something compelling.

The prime reason why the iTunes Music Store has been a success is that the DRM system it uses doesn't get in the way of the consumer. I've used both Windows Media DRM-based systems like the PlayForSure-based Napster and Apple's, and Apple's is far, far more friendly.

In fact, it's effectively invisible to the majority of users - the only time you notice it's there is if you try and use an unsupported platform (ie Linux) or really do want to try giving away your music to someone else (which is a legal no-no.)

Secondly, it is forgetting that the competition includes torrent sites and other which will distribute its content, for free, in higher-resolution and better quality formats than it's expecting consumers to pay for. These sites offer a greater degree of "friction-free" consumption than any DRM-based store, for less money. Unless your DRM system is as invisible as Apple's, or better, you will fail.

The video industry is forgetting the lesson which the music industry is only just beginning to learn: treat your customers as friends, no enemies. If you want to sell content online, this should be the first thing on your mission statement.

NBC to End iTunes Sales of Its Shows - New York Times

Link: NBC to End iTunes Sales of Its Shows - New York Times.

NBC Universal is also seeking better piracy controls and wants Apple to allow it to bundle videos to increase revenue, the person familiar with the matter said.

Better piracy controls? When it's broadcasting things free and in the clear?

Is NBC on crack?