Jennlog

In my recent post about not attending CES, I referenced an idea I have about a conference I’d love to attend, but doesn’t exist — sort of a “Whole Communications Show and Conference.” Later, I shared a little of my philosophy about media relationships and how devices and infrastructure play a facilitating role rather than a central role.

Media relationships are rare in today’s communications environment — In fact, media producers seem to have been actively trying to avoid them. The cable system operators and telcos have amplified this inclination, by locking media and communications products behind Walled Gardens.

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However, both audio and visual media have reached the point where their consumable and broadcast formats are universally available on one hand and universally usable on the other. This optimal state enables the media products to escape proprietary devices and networks and exist wherever the format is understood.

The recording industry has been very slow to adapt to this development and the motion picture and television industries appear to be a little more cognizant about their future, but seem to be hesitating when it comes to fully embracing change.

There are several high-profile examples of television networks developing Windows-only media download services and film studios still encourage the formation of operator-based exclusive content deals.

Tethering media products artificially restricts media’s availability to consumers and conversely constricts a consumer’s access to media — this is why “Network Neutrality” is important. However, if media producers were truly invested in neutrality, they would be enthusiastically pursuing the formation of media relationships, and they aren’t — yet.

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Under the misnomer of “Convergence,” media producers have been sold on a vision of the future that advises them to adapt their existing products from one old media device or infrastructure onto another old media device or infrastructure.

The “Triple Play” concept invented by the incumbent infrastructure operators is a perfect example of the linear thinking and tunnel vision behind “New Media”.

Media producers are best to forget about Triple Plays and start conceptualizing media products for features that exist across platforms and networks — there are no more televisions or stereos, there are players.

The days of remonetizing assets across and upon new platforms are also over, as demonstrated by the fact that everyone has re-encoded their music collections for use upon audio players — it’s only a matter of time before consumers start re-encoding their film and television collections for use upon video players.

“Mobile Video”, “Mobile Web” and “Mobile Commerce” do not exist — short of operators obfuscating access to their platform to inflate the size of their Walled Garden. There will be no logical reason why IP video, web or commerce can’t exist natively within a mobile environment as it does on any other Internet-connected device.

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There are a couple dozen media industry conferences produced worldwide. Most have been around for decades, begun as their respective industries took shape. Until the 90s, most of the media industries were segmented along proprietary infrastructure — For example, cable television shows were all about the newest set top box, largest head ends and widest coax cable and mobile telephony shows were focused on how to deliver more voice calls, of a higher quality through a matrix of smarter cell towers from smaller portable telephones.

As the Internet gained users and growth, an avalanche of digital media applications were tacked onto the formerly-proprietary networks and devices courtesy of IP-inspired technologies. The trade shows however, remained very linear in their focus. Even their “New Media” context was all about identifying and segmenting off the newest digital services within their old, proprietary business models.

I believe there will always be a need for shows for device manufacturers, for media producers and game developers to meet separately amongst others in their field to formulate standards, discuss best practices and whatnot.

Infrastructure operators across platforms need to begin thinking of meeting together at a large IP Network shindig (less NetWorld + Interop, more outward-facing) or else become naked transport against their will. Whole Media will commoditize incumbent infrastructure into raw transport, they will need to become the best, most efficient transport they can to compete effectively in a Whole Media economy.

The Whole Communications Show will give media producers a place to spend a little time at the 50,000 foot level with device manufacturers and work on products that create media relationships independent of infrastructure and allow for license federation across devices — Whole Media.

Producers that ignore Whole Media will find their existing and planned business models and partnerships disrupted — and eventually, their assets outside of their control.

Consumers are quick to understand that they can move abandoned media wherever they desire with or without the producer’s participation. Whole Media is about grabbing hold of the media relationship with consumers and actively working with them to facilitate a relationship wherever it may go.

Whole Media is a relationship without segmentation — concerning products without boundaries.

If you read a lot of blogs, you have been inundated by pixel-to-pixel coverage of the annual gadgetfest happening right now in overpriced and highly annoying Las Vegas.

A couple my CES badges from years past

When I started attending CES, a show created and managed by the consumers electronics manufacturers association (CEA), it was largely a “Buyer’s Show” produced so retailers and integrators could hang out near shouts of “WHEEL OF FORTUNE” and do some deals that would affect what the general public would find in their local stores for the next calendar year.

As the years went on, the number of retailers shrank as Walmart square footage grew — and in 2008, the majority of electronics are purchased in “Big Box” stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. The content industry changed too — as the digital and Internet-delivered media avalanche landed quicker than you could say “ubiquity”.

There will always be a room full of neon tube lit Ferraris and their 400 speakers at CES but virtually every other consumer electronic category has evolved to the point where you wouldn’t recognize them as they are now, fifteen years ago — let alone four decades ago when CES began.

The CES of today attracts a very different crowd than the CES I remember. The quickest growing classes of attendee fall within the prosumer and fanboy group. (the bleeding edge of early adopters who want to own or “review” the latest and greatest toys).

Is CES at the crossroads of turning into a direct-market show, where the retailer and integrator filters are removed from the value chain? Is it morphing into a new entity all together like Comdex evolved from PCs to Internet (before imploding) and NAB has survived and stayed relevant from RF through the inclusion of Cable and now IP.

I don’t think CES or NAB or any of the other shows quite represent what I’d like to see in a Media-Communications-Content-Electronics show today — looking forward to a “Whole Communications Show and Conference” sometime in the future.

Update: My next post will share some ideas I have on what the “Whole Communications Show and Conference” would be like.

I missed last year’s Hackers because I was in or on my way to Australia. This is one of the coolest groups of folks I’ve ever had the pleasure of skipping sleep with to have mind blowing conversations. I’m going to do everything I can do to make time this year.

Yesterday, the annual National Association of Broadcasters show began in Las Vegas and this is the first year in more than ten that I haven’t spoken, shown or attended in some capacity. I also didn’t attend the annual Consumer Electronics Show in January this year, because my professional focus has been off IP media management and delivery and on Yallery.

I’m probably different than 99% of the participants with ten years of NAB attendance because I’ve never experienced the NAB show in a capacity that, in some way, didn’t involve IP-based media management or distribution. In the mid-to-late 90s, it was difficult to raise even an eyebrow on the show floor or in the sessions about IP — Internet Protocol.

In 1999, this changed a little. I was leading a technical consulting team at INTERVU in San Diego to help design and build-out their network. And, as a little extra for their marketing folks (to bring some thunder to NAB), I introduced them to IP Multicast and architected a video service delivery demonstration that featured the distribution of a live CNN feed to both NAB show floors (LVCC and Sands).

The CNN feed was encoded in San Diego from satellite and sent through an INTERVU MDC, in multicast tunnels to the convention halls where it was shown on television sets within the booths of INTERVU, Microsoft and AT&T. I felt it was important to place the full screen steaming video on actual TVs because they were the native video frame of the typical NAB attendee. In addition to our TVs, anyone with a Windows PC and Microsoft’s media player connected to the show networks could tap into the Multicast feed.

We had some issues with the show networks getting saturated with random traffic from other exhibitors, but after contacting the venue network engineers about our needs and goals, we were able to negotiate a good chunk of their network to ensure the quality of our IP Multicast tunnels for the duration of the conference. The show floor opened to the public on Monday and the IPTV demo worked as expected (not especially crisp, but “good enough for tv”).

The next day, April 20 1999, I flew to Chicago at 6am because I was chairing a panel discussion on “Integrating Voice, Video and Data on IP Networks” at COMDEX Spring. We had a wonderful session and within 15 minutes of the end, I was back in a cab to the airport for the return to Vegas.

I had my phone turned off because of my session and turned it on to get messages during the ride and I had 20 messages — I don’t normally have 20 messages in a day, and this was only three hours. What had happened, was the nation’s worst nightmare and our demo’s best case scenario. An event so newsworthy had occured to place CNN into live coverage mode. Columbine High School was all over the Airport CNN television sets and at the NAB show, where the broadcast television universe had converged, it was on our three TVs. According to my team and the executives at INTERVU, there were crowds formed around our humble IP streams, watching television as events unfolded.

Our demonstration received a tiny amount of coverage from the TV technology and business press, taking a few pages away from “The year of HD”. The pieces compared the value of our Internet video content over the possibilities of crisp HD nirvana. And, maybe we helped a few RF/broadcast people reconsider the power of Internet-delivered video that year.

Over the last few years, the NAB show has witnessed an explosive growth of IP-based video management and delivery solutions for broadcast, cable and IPTV. There are even pseudo-official delineations of IP-based video markets identified by the NAPTE ranks, amongst other broadcast, content and cable groups. The accepted vertical markets are “Broadband Video” directed to computers (aka Internet streaming video), “Mobile Video” directed to portable devices such as PDAs and Cellphones (aka wireless streaming video) and “IPTV”, which is directed to set-top boxes (aka real TV).

I don’t agree with these definitions, because as we showed in Vegas during the 1999 NAB show, any computing device with a NTSC scan converter could be a STB. With WiFi, Wimax, DVB-H, MediaFLO or DMB/DAB-IP (amongst other infrastructure technologies) nearly any wireless device released in the next two years may receive real-time video from IP networks.

Content should be valued and monetized within the context of a consumer’s entire media device+network ecosystem.

Anyway, it will be interesting to learn where the buzz lies this year.