The Power of an Automated Internet Content Delivery Mechanism

Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group (formerly Forrester) often has some very interesting stories to tell - not surprising, really, because he's been watching the industry for quite a while. I used to read his comments on the semi and systems side when he was at Giga (and prior at Dataquest). I've always found his comments good food for thought (even if we don't always agree)...

In chatting about media-ready devices, we got onto the subject of the difficulty of creating content. We both agree that building a set-top device is pretty easy given some of the new hardware coming along, but making an interesting service without having good premade content (like getting a Hollywood deal, and that's hard to get when the studios already have their content delivery channels) is hard. He thinks education is the first target - I think journalism - but content is the key to all.

Interesting about education content. I did a paper on that topic - video serving educational content per a test run in a local school district. Short creative works by kids on California Missions, etc. Webinars for teachers per school district. All automated, secure, simple, centralized. Content trackable / licensable. Focus on project basis - not process. But education is very conservative - while it was fun, it definitely was not first mover from my perspective.

Lynbrook High School and Los Gatos High School both had in-school closed broadcast TV stations once upon a time. Turned out the hardest thing was production (plenty of students for scripts / story / newscast / labor, but not a lot of experienced help). Some districts like Santa Clara are now trying out district-wide newscasts, but they're very high overhead because to do a pro job it adds up to about the same whether it's a short network broadcast newscast or a short school broadcast newscast in terms of time / tools / equipment (no, not facilities, staff salaries, licenses, and so forth like a real TV station, but they're not close-circuit either).

It never is cost-effective enough, the same as 20 years ago at Lynbrook, even though costs for tools / equipment has seriously dropped because you can't buy back enough of the time expended unless you really are doing an ad-based broadcast business with a big budget (and news organizations are often the loss leader for networks to grab eyeballs, too). Schools don't have big budgets, big sponsors, or big schedules - they're just trying to have some fun with TV and teach a bit of TV journalism - nor are they in the biz of teaching pro video production like USC - except maybe for cities that are dedicated to the arts like Ashland High School (my oldest studied there).

Companies are different, though. Rob remembered how IBM had their own full-production facilities, as did Tandem. They had the money and the bandwidth and the staff. But as Rob sagely points out as a object lesson on the need for good content, IBM spent "millions for a product no one wanted - even I went out and turned the TVs off regularly so I could work". To sum up, "we had full studios at ever major site and broadcast internationally 24 hours a day of single channel programming. Only problem was, as far as anyone could tell, no one watched it...".

Yep. Just like Tandem. To book time on the satellite for Tandem was reportedly tens of thousand of dollars for a single broadcast - often more than one satellite was required. The production crews were hourly. According to one former Tandem insider, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer arrived late for a shoot, everyone sat around waiting, and the product manager was charged for double the amount of the late time. Since they'd already prebooked the satellite, they had to find the person who had the slot after, pay them off, and get that slot. The slot spent in waiting was wasted. Can you imagine what all this cost?

The nice thing about end-to-end Internet video production and deployment with instantiated metadata is we can tell when someone pulls the slider bar, where they watch, where they skip, where they replay. So we can not only prove someone is watching, but what they watch and what they don't watch. And we can do it without all that rigamarole. Kind of nice to know something really did hit or missed before you gamble more.

But why do that when you can pay lots to crews and satellite vendors and charge biz units for lost time, blow budget...after all, isn't that showbiz? :-)