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Give
a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him
and he's warm for the rest of his life.
- Terry Pratchett
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May
17 , 2004
| For
the past six months I have been attached to the Australian Film
Television and Radio School in Sydney. I was invited there as a
consultant, with a brief that allowed me to redesign the curriculum
of a venerable film school, and place it squarely into the middle
of the 21st century. Note, I did not say the start of the 21st century
- that wouldn't be very interesting, or very helpful. Students at
AFTRS will be practitioners well into the middle of the 21st century
- certainly through to 2030 or 2040. So it's my job to look forward
a bit, and incorporate that forward view into my teaching…
In the earliest days of television,
writers like George Orwell in 1984 and Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit
451 projected television as the instrumentality of a totalitarian
future - a monolithic entity dispensing propaganda. And, if any
of you occasionally watch Fox News, you can see they weren't that
far off the mark. But here's the thing: the monolithic days of television
are numbered. Actually, they've already passed - though, as yet,
very few people realize this.
To understand why, we need to
go back to first principles. What is television? Here's a functional
definition:
Television is the capture,
encoding, transmission, reception, decoding and display of moving
images.
This definition applies to the
Golden Age of television, and to the present era. Yet the definition
of every word in the definition of television has changed, because
of the introduction of digital production, encoding, transmission,
reception, decoding and display technologies.
First, let's talk about image
capture: the means of production have changed. A decade ago you'd
need a million dollars of camera, sound editing and broadcast production
equipment to create television programming. Today you can capture
DTV broadcast-quality content with a $6000 HD camera from Panasonic,
which you can then bring into Final Cut Pro and edit on your $5000
Dual G5 PowerMac. For a little more than ten thousand dollars, you
can create television programming that would be absolutely indistinguishable
from anything created by Warner Brothers or Fox.
Just because you can produce
television programming on the cheap doesn't imply you'll be any
good at it. You're still going to need a cinematographer who knows
how to handle a camera, a location sound recorder who can give you
something intelligible to listen to, a sound designer and sound
editor, a film editor, a set designer, a broadcast titles designer,
and so forth. If you don't have these practitioners, you'll simply
create programming that looks as cheap as the equipment it's been
produced on. Although equipment has gotten cheap, film and television
production remains a craft tradition, and this means that the AFTRS
and institutions like it, which teach the craft of film and television
production, will continue to have an important role to play.
Next, encoding. Australia and
Europe use PAL; North America uses NTSC (which evidentially is an
abbreviation for Never The Same Color). Both are analog standards
for the transmission of moving images. Analog television of either
variety is like the vinyl album - something which you've no doubt
heard of - and perhaps even seen a DJ use in a set - but many of
you won't have handled them, at least not often. (Here I am at age
41 and I feel like I hail from the era of steam locomotives and
buggy whips.)
CDs came along in 1982 and digitized
audio, quantized it, turning a continuous waveform into a discrete
stream of zeroes and ones. The same thing has happened to television
with the advent of digital TV. ATSC - (an abbreviation for Another
Television Standards Catastrophe) -specifies the transmission format
for television signals in the USA, while DVB is the standard in
the UK and Australia. These standards are very similar, though not
interoperable. (This represents a missed opportunity which will
have grave consequences for broadcasters.) The moving images themselves
are encoded in MPEG-2 format. This means that the encoded data stream
for digital television is identical to the standard used on DVDs,
in almost every respect.
This encoded digital TV signal
can be transmitted in any number of ways, and that's where the definition
of the word transmitted has changed radically. You can beam it through
the air using ATSC or DVB - as they do in the USA, the UK, and here
in Australia. So you can buy a digital TV set - an HDTV set, as
they're more commonly known - and connect it to your antenna, and
receive broadcasts in standard definition - 720x576 for PAL, 720x480
for NTSC, but the signal can go all the way up to 1280x960 - which
is very high-definition indeed! A digital television broadcaster
can choose to allocate this digital signal bandwidth any way they
see fit; they can send you four channels of Standard Definition
programming, or a single high-definition stream - each requires
the same amount of broadcast bandwidth. The broadcaster could eschew
video altogether, and they can transmit a stream of data - pictures,
text, sounds, etc. - in place of a video stream. Because the stream
is digital, it's got all the flexibility and programmability we've
come to expect from digital technologies.
Because it is a digital stream,
the MPEG-2 video encoded within the ATSC/DVB digital TV signal can
be copied and reproduced faithfully, an infinite number of times,
with no loss in quality. We'll come back to this point, but just
for the moment let it linger in your minds - and think of all the
MP3s you have sitting on your hard disks, iPods, etc. And keep in
mind that MP3 is another subset of the same MPEG standards used
for digital television.
Ok, so we're halfway there.
We've gotten moving images encoded and transmitted. Well, sort of.
We conceive of television signal transmission as radio waves moving
through the ether, but bits are bits are bits. They could be sent
over the air, or they could be a stream of bits on a digital cable
system, as with FOXTEL Digital in Australia or any of the major
cable systems in the US, or the AUSTAR or DirectTV satellite broadcasting
services.
But I overlook the obvious.
Yes, I could get my transmission over the airwaves, or over a digital
cable hookup, but this ignores the fact that I already have a very
high-speed digital data stream coming into my house - broadband
internet. Back in Los Angeles I had 1.5 megabits of ADSL, for which
I paid the princely sum of $72 a month. (In Sydney I have 1 megabit
of wireless broadband in my home, from BigAir, for which I pay $100
AUD a month - about the same amount in "real" dollars.)
Back in 1987, when I was working full-time in data communications,
that much bandwidth would cost a business $10,000 a month. Minimum.
So I guess we could say that the same thing has happened to bandwidth
costs that happened to computer costs; we've gotten more and more
for less and less.
And that brings us to the discussion
of the receiver. The definition of the television receiver has changed
as well. If you go to an electronics retailer and buy an HD television
set you're paying for two things - one of them is the oversized
high-resolution display, and the other is a sophisticated computer,
inside the set, which decodes the received digital television data
stream and puts it onto the display.
[A side note: the price point
of HD television sets is about to plummet because of some chips
introduced by Intel earlier this year. It's expected that by Christmas
2004, they'll be selling for under a thousand US dollars. HD sets
are already outselling analog sets, in dollar volume (because they
cost a lot more than analog sets) but in 2005 or 2006 they'll begin
to outsell analog sets both in the USA, in raw numbers of sets sold.]
An HD set is just one alternative
if I want to receive digital TV. A few weeks after I arrived in
Australia, I purchased a $300 card for my PC (DigiTV
PCI) that plugs into a $15 pair of rabbit ears I bought at Woolworth's,
and which gaffer taped to the top of my monitor. (It makes for a
very pretty picture, let me tell you, because everything old is
new again.) With this card I can now receive the five free-to-air
digital terrestrial broadcasters in Australia: ABC, SBS, 7, 9 and
10. If I've got the antenna adjusted just so, I get crystal clear
moving images on my 17" computer monitor, with incredibly rich
stereo sound. My little home experiment in geekdom - more about
that in a moment - proves an important point: an HD set really is
very closely akin to a modern PC.
Because this DTV tuner card
is in my PC, and because my PC has a fairly large array of hard
disks - about 300 GB, all told, with about 35 GB reserved for my
MP3 collection - I can use my digital television tuner like a VCR,
and record the digital stream to my PC's hard disk. (These digital
recorders are more commonly known as personal video recorders, or
PVRs.) Because the signal is digital from reception to storage,
there is no loss in quality, ever. When I record "The Sopranos"
- which is transmitted in high-definition on Channel 9 - I can play
back in the same high-resolution image transmitted by Channel 9.
It is, in fact, the same image, bit for bit.
Even better - and here's where
it gets a little worrying, if you're a producer or broadcaster -
I can burn a DVD of that episode of "The Sopranos" and
it will look as good as if I'd bought the DVD from HBO. There is
no difference - the video on HBO's DVD contains the same
bits as were transmitted by Channel 9 and recorded by my PC.
This fact is in fact so worrying
to the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America, that they've
lobbied for the inclusion of a "broadcast flag" which
will be sent within the DTV signal and which all DTV hardware must
read and honor. When the hardware reads the broadcast flag, it must
refuse to share that DTV stream across the Internet. (Whether the
broadcast flag will forbid burning to a DVD is another question
altogether - an open one.) The USA's FCC threw the MPAA this little
bone, but it's being contested by public interest groups and is
currently spiraling its way through the American court system. (You
all know what that means.)
The trouble here is that the
MPAA is the motion picture association of America. They have
no control over what happens in Australia, Europe, or, rather more
significantly, in China. The broadcast flag must be in all DTV receivers
purchased in the United States after April 2005. But plenty of people
- such as myself - are buying DTV receiver cards well in advance
of that date. Those cards won't see or acknowledge any broadcast
flag. I'll never have to obey the dictates of the MPAA, in America
or not - unless the MPAA manages to convince the WIPO to make the
possession and use of these cards illegal - which, given the current
state of affairs in the war over digital copyright, isn't entirely
unthinkable. After all, they could be used to promote terrorism.
Or something.
So while the MPAA is trying
very hard to put its thumb in the dike of digital television, the
rest of the world will do as it pleases - at least until Free Trade
Agreements ties all of us so closely to the USA that we're bound
by the same copyright law that rules America.
For now, in Australia, I can
do as I please. I can record my favorite programs on my PC. That
PC is connected into my home network. When my iBook is at home,
it's on the same network. There's also an old Sony laptop at home,
running Linux, which serves as the home firewall, gateway and web
server. That machine is my interface to the internet, and it utilizes
the Windows file sharing on my PC to gain access to the recordings
on my PC-based digital television - which it then makes available
over the web for everyone else to see - if they know the URL.
Right now those files are so
big - about 2 GB per hour for a DTV broadcast in Standard Definition
- that it's unlikely anyone would bother to download them. But there's
more than one way to skin a cat, and more than MPEG-2 can be used
to encode video programming. If I used Windows Media 9 Series, for
example - an excellent compression standard for video - I could
compress an episode of "The Sopranos" into about 150 MB.
It wouldn't look quite as nice, mind you, but with the bandwidth
I have at home - and the bandwidth I have at the office - I could
watch any of my recorded television shows from my desk at the Australian
Film Television and Radio school.
If I didn't mind sacrificing
a bit more quality, I could probably get the whole hour of television
down to a tidy 50 or 60 MB. Hardly anything at all, these days -
it could easily fit onto one of those key-chain sized USB drives.
At AFTRS, I'd be able to download the program from my home web server
in about seven minutes. That means I'd be doing better than real-time:
it means that wherever I go, my TV can follow.
And that brings us to another
aspect of the redefinition of TV. If a digital TV is simply a computer
that is capable of receiving, decoding and displaying a DTV signal,
isn't my computer on my desk at AFTRS a TV too? It doesn't have
the card that allows it to receive and decode free-to-air DTV broadcasts,
but it can certainly receive a DTV signal that's being transmitted
by my web server.
Wait a minute. Wait just
a minute. Doesn't that mean, in the context of the definition
that we've been tossing around, that I've become a television broadcaster?
Now you start to see where I'm
going. Every computer - from the desktop PC at work to my lovely
Macintosh iBook, to a handheld 3G mobile phone, to the just-announced
Sony PSP handheld gaming and video platform - every one of these
devices is potentially a DTV receiver. All they need is the proper
software to decode the proper data stream.
Now that I know that I'm a television
broadcaster, I've decided make it easier to get to my recorded DTV
programming. So, in my vanishingly brief moments of free time, I'm
working to string together a suite of open-source software which
automatically takes all of the DTV programming I've recorded and
makes it available at a variety of resolutions, on my web server,
so that anyone can access it, at any time, from anywhere in the
world.
Ok, I may be a bit of a geek,
in that I'm going to roll-my-own, but that's only because I want
to have a thorough understanding of how these pieces work together.
You can buy off-the-shelf software for Windows that does all of
this. (SnapStream is just one of the many programs in this fast-growing
segment of home "media server" software. The transcode
package is its Linux equivalent.) You can do it today. You don't
need to be a computer geek. You
just need to spend a few hours learning how to configure everything
to your own satisfaction. And then, you too can be a television
broadcaster.
The first thing that flows from
recognition of the reconfigured nature of broadcasting in the age
of digital television - the thing the became clear to me as I workshopped
these ideas with a group of film producing students at AFTRS back
in March - is that I have disintermediated the terrestrial
broadcast networks. They're simply not needed any more.
Why would I tune my DTV receiver
to Channel 9 to record "The Sopranos," when it's simpler
and more efficient for me to grab the program stream from the HBO
web server or download it from one of my friends who has been to
visit the HBO web server?
Once the broadcast networks
moved to digital, they became entirely obsolete, because I can get
a stream of bits from anywhere in the world that I can get a high-speed
connection to the internet - and that means most everywhere in the
world. Since I only care about the program, not about the broadcaster,
I'll abandon the broadcaster as quickly as I possibly can.
I'm not telling you broadcasting
is going to be obsolete. I'm telling you that it's already
obsolete. It's a done deal. We've seen the lightning strike, and
all we're doing now is waiting for the thunderclap. The only thing
holding broadcasting together today is inertia, marketing, and copy
protection. Once a programming producer figures out that they can
distribute their programming via broadband, it's all over.
Well, guess what: AOL has already
started distributing Everwood, a Warner Brothers TV series,
via broadband. And the BBC has just announced a test of "flexible
TV" - which will allow broadband users in the UK to watch BBC
programming when they want, wherever they want to watch it, over
the Internet.
That's not to say that I think
the broadcast networks have no future whatsoever. But that future
is radically different, because, when we redefine television, we
create a need to redefine broadcasting. Here are three basic ideas
that I've had - which are by no means intended to be exhaustive
- about the future of broadcasting as a business. These are the
some of the new rules for broadcasting in the age of digital television.
Rule One: Live Rules
Beyond anything else, television
is a live medium. Whether it's a footy game, Big Brother Up All
Night, the Academy Awards, or the latest terrorist tragedy, TV performs
an irreplaceable function as reporter of events-as-they-happen.
And although the viewer can and should be able to watch the digital
television data stream from any compatible receiver, the broadcaster
is, in this case, the producer, creating value by producing the
live event. As drama, comedy and factual programming become freely
available for download, the broadcaster will transform into the
producer of choice for live event coverage. Channel 7 in Australia
tried to do this as they switched to a mix of mostly sport programming;
but they were a bit too far ahead of the curve - and they didn't
make their broadcast content available over broadband.
Rule Two: Aggregate the Advertisers
Historically, broadcasters have
functioned as aggregators of eyeballs for advertisers. There's no
reason they can't continue to do that. After all, a program's producer
will still need to get paid for the programming they create, and
they're going to be at a bit of a loss in this brave new world where
the broadcasters have all vaporized in a puff of bits. Broadcasters
should shift their focus from being aggregators of eyeballs to becoming
aggregators of advertisers - they can get Fox together with Ford,
for example, to sponsor a series like "24". There's a
problem, however: global advertising agencies already do this. Today's
broadcaster is going to begin to look more and more like an ad agency,
and will be working within that much more competitive market. That
said, the inside advantage that a local broadcaster can bring to
a global product like "The Sopranos" or "24"
is the precise mix of advertising that needs to be cut into a particular
package of programming. If Fox or HBO are going to make their programming
available, free for download, they're going to want to ensure that
they maximize their revenue streams by precisely targeting advertising
sales for every potential viewing market. That's a job that the
local broadcasters are uniquely suited for.
Some of you might be asking:
without audience aggregation, how will we know what to watch? That's
what the broadcasters will ask, and will point out that you'll have
to winnow through a lot of chaff to get to the grain. (Obviously
they haven't been watching their own programs.)
There is an answer to this as
well. More and more, the internet functions as a high-quality filter
to help us find what we want; I see something and I email my friends,
and they email their friends, and on and on and on. The rise of
"social software" such as Friendster and Orkut means that
it has become increasingly easy to disseminate my likes and dislikes
among my circle of friends (who will tell their friends, and so
on, and so on). A TV producer can still do a press tour and raise
awareness of upcoming programming, but even in the absence of PR
junkets, social software ensures that television viewers will have
little trouble finding the best of the best. Social software, directed
toward media choice, that's something I want to call peercasting.
How does a producer realize
revenue in this new world of digital television? When you've got
bits on a disk, you can fast-forward through the commercials at
the touch of a button. Or perhaps one of your friends will edit
them out before he posts the program to his server - and only one
person on Earth needs to do this for everyone to have access to
a commercial-free version of the program. So commercials will need
to change radically. We're already seeing the more advanced advertisers,
such as Procter & Gamble and BMW, offering up short films by
major directors as a new advertising vehicle. The commercials will
need to be more interesting than the programming, or they'll be
left on the digital cutting-room floor. Product placement - which
is used extensively in "24" and "Survivor" -
is another possibility. The road ahead for the producer is unclear
- and that means it's prime time to be inventive, creating new forms
of revenue generation for television producers.
Rule Three: Respect the Audience
With the advent of the PVR and
store-and-forward television viewing, the program schedule is freed
from the tyranny of the programmer, empowering the viewer. PVR owners
watch 71% more television, on average, because they're watching
programs which they're most interested by - not just the programs
screening at a particular moment. (They also watch 35% less advertising.)
But a program schedule is only useful to the PVR insofar as it is
adhered to by the broadcaster. And, sadly, this is absolutely not
the case in Australia. I've been asking everyone I know why television
programmers here do not begin their programs at their scheduled
times - why "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" can run fifteen
minutes into the scheduled start time for "Sex in the City",
for example - because this cavalier attitude toward television schedules
makes it nearly impossible for a VCR or PVR to be used to record
programming. This is going to become a more pressing problem when
the FOXTEL Digital PVR is rolled out later on this year. (Unless
that PVR can adapt to the sudden changes in program schedules -
which is not impossible, and given the attitude of Australian television
programmers, probably necessary.)
If promptness is a virtue -
and it is, in my book - Australian commercial broadcasters (it's
curious that all three commercial broadcasters do this regularly,
while the two public broadcasters do this only rarely) have been
doing little except anger their audiences. When the audience didn't
have any alternatives, the broadcasters could get away with it.
But now, in the new era of television redefined, they have an alternative.
When broadcasters upset their audiences, they'll drive those audiences
into alternate forms of delivery - and they'll be cutting their
own throats. Respect is more than a nice idea - it's going to be
the only way that broadcasters will be able to maintain an audience
in the age of digital television.
All of this can be summed up
in a very neat phrase: as broadband succeeds, broadcasting will
fail. And nothing, short of the economic collapse of Western
civilization, is going to impede the uptake of broadband. It will
continue to transform our culture, and the delivery of our cultural
products. That's very good news, because it opens up a world of
possibilities which have nothing to do with the politics and economics
of broadcast licenses, and everything to do with creativity.
bio:
A decade ago Mark
Pesce
unveiled the first 3D interface to the internet - the Virtual
Reality Modeling Language (VRML) - to the attendees of the First
International Conference on the World Wide Web. After five years
working to create a sustainable ecology around VRML (with limited
success), he founded the Interactive Media Program at USC's School
of Cinema-Television. In 2000, Ballantine Books published Pesce's
The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination,
which explored the world of interactivity through a detailed examination
of the Furby, LEGO’s Mindstorms and the Playstation 2. In late
2003, Pesce was invited to the Australian Film Television and
Radio School, with a mandate to redesign the curriculum to incorporate
the new opportunities offered by interactive media. He lives in
Sydney, hoping against hope that Bush goes down in flames this
November.
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