Jennlog

Who knew that calling someone a Canadian in Texas could be comprehended as a racial slur?

View from Pekoe Sip House, location of this morning’s meeting

Located in Boulder’s Ideal Market plaza, Pekoe operates one of just 200 cool looking $11,000.00 Clover coffee makers, featured in last week’s New York Times story on expensive gourmet coffee machines. I had their Maté Chai w/skim milk though.

I got out of the shower this morning at 7:35ish AM and noticed my answering machine light blinking. I thought it was weird, because no one ever calls me this early.

It turns out there were two calls, both from FIA Card Services telling a Jennifer Wright that SunTrust was sending her account off to a third party. I guess the loan business has gotten so bad the collection agencies are calling me first thing in the morning to pass on their messages.

So, if your name is Jennifer Wright, and you used to have a SunTrust account, FIA Card Services called to say SunTrust is almost over you and asked for you to call them back at 1 (800) 215-6955.

And just like those fancy VoIP services, here is an audio recording of your messages:

Messages for Jennifer Wright from Sun Trust and FIA Card Services

I was in Canada over the holidays and hoped to keep my Curve off the entire trip so I wouldn’t be charged the infamous AT&T International roaming fees.

I happened to need to turn on my Curve twice on one day to look some old email and negotiate a meeting place over several voice calls. The bill for this extravagance was over $30 + “regulatory” fees. Voice was $0.79/minute and god knows what they were charging per byte for data.

I dream of the day when handheld wireless IP devices will enable an international traveller to send and receive voice calls and send and receive data without the telcos smiling at you while they explain how they absolutely must charge you $0.79 a minute to transport less than 4 kb/s around the neighborhood or they’d go out of business.

A new network protocol for authenticating/authorizing wireless IP roaming devices is likely needed before cell phones can be replaced. Requiring a person to actively submit credentials every time their VoIP device passes between wifi networks will drive even the most technical savvy device owner over the edge so the protocol would have to be passive and seamless. This protocol needs to be aware at both the network layer (Registry based DHCP on steroids?) and at the application layer (SIP? H.323? Something new?) and tied to distributed subscription access-aggregation service.

With such a solution in place, taking into account administration expenses and roaming deal overheads, a VoIP-aware international IP hotspot aggregator could be profitable while making it worthwhile for hotspot owners to participate in such a service.

Is a fan someone who likes hearing a song on the radio?

Is a fan someone who records the song off the radio or downloads that song off of bittorrent for their ipod?

Is a fan someone who buys a copy of that song on iTunes Music Store or Amazon.com?

Is a fan someone who buys a CD that includes that song from the Internet or a record store?

Is a fan someone who buys a used copy of the CD for $0.99 on ebay or in a used CD store?

Is a fan someone who buys the artist’s entire back catalog of CDs, used, on ebay or at a used CD store?

Is a fan someone who pays $5 cover charge to see an artist in a bar?

Is a fan someone who pays $1000 to a “Broker” to see an artist in a stadium?

Is a fan someone who pays $40 for a screen printed t-shirt featuring the artist?

Is a fan someone who evangelizes an artist to other people but has never purchased the artist’s music?

What is a fan?

If I ran a Record Label, I’d make sure that everyone who worked for me read Courtney Love’s speech from the Spring 2000 Digital Hollywood conference in New York. This is probably the single most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard or read about the music business in the digital age. Read it.

If I ran a Record Label, I’d understand that artists were successful before labels existed and will remain successful after labels disappear.

If I ran a Record Label, I’d realize that the product I had been successful in selling until digital distribution harshed my world was not music, it was a container — and we were great at making, selling and distributing containers but mostly suck at understanding music as an intangible medium.

If I ran a Record Label, I’d understand that the businesses of manufacturing and distributing music containers were essentially commodity businesses that relied upon scarcity and/or saturation in the marketplace. If an artist didn’t have access to containers, the odds of them ever having their art available to the world were slim — and container listening folks were only able to to access the containers presented to them in their local record/cd store.

If I ran a Record Label, I’d go out of business before demanding or requesting ISPs and Countries support my quickly disintegrating business propositions with blanket subscription fees. I’d know that in most “blanket” music levy situations, only a select few highly promoted artists (and subsequently their publishers and labels) are disproportionate recipients of the collected funds. Recipients of 50% of the Canadian blank media levy are identified by their presence in an annual 14-day sample of commercial and state-operated radio stations across Canada.

If I ran a Record Label, I’d understand that the only music-related business to improve it’s control over the consumer in the digital age has been the ticket scalp^H^H^H^H^Hbroker. I’d work with artists on improving or optimizing the ticket-buying experience of people attending their live performances.

If I ran a Record Label, I’d forget everything that I and my industry had ever done to control the productization, packaging and distribution of containers and focus on helping my artists connect to and maintain a relationship with people who appreciate their art. There is no such thing as a “used” relationship.

I just realized that the pages and code on jenn.com are older than at least one of the recent visitors who signed up for an Honorary Canadian Citizenship Certificate*.

This is clearly a sign that I need to find something to do with jenn.com — or maybe redesign some of the pages.

* The Honorary Canadian Certificate Generator was something I wrote while I was learning perl for a project in 1996.

I was walking to the Boulder Open Coffee Club meeting this morning and saw the fresh snow on the Flatirons and foothills. The fact that it was 4F outside probably made the snow crystals extra shiny — much more alive than this photo.

This proposed service has so many vertically integrated layers of wrong it is nearly impossible for me to believe HBO is the creator of this service.

I suspect the real brain trust behind this service is Time Warner and I suspect HBO was selected as the Cable Producer-Programmer launch partner because of its familial relationship with Time Warner Cable and an obligation to participate in corporate-mandated “innovations”.

Time Warner Cable and the other cable operators who could sign on to this service have the most to gain if this this service becomes successful. It will enable cable operators to extend the influence of their walled garden infrastructure onto media distributed over their Internet services.

In the world of cable television media production and distribution, there are five roles that “touch” a piece of media before the consumer sees a picture in their home:

1. Producer - creates the content for a
2. Distributor - sells the content to a
3. Programmer - orders the content into linear channels for a
4. Packager - prices the channels for distribution by an
5. Aggregator - sells subscriptions to consumers

HBO is the Producer of its own award-winning shows and series and also the Programmer that positions these shows amongst the many channels it operates between films and other content it purchases from Distributors.

Time Warner Cable packages the HBO channels into tiers and aggregates the content in the tiers to set top boxes leased/owned by subscribers.

The Time Warner Cable subscribers who will be eligible to receive this service are required to also subscribe to the Time Warner-owned HBO premium pay TV package and pay for the Time Warner-owned Broadband Internet service.

This announcement is less about a customer facing media product and more likely the proof of concept for a middleware solution created for cable operators, enabling them to tie the monetization and delivery of Internet media to their legacy conditional access/CRM databases.

In an optimized Internet-based media production and distribution ecosystem, there are fewer roles:

1. Producer

There is no need for ordering and positioning of media as these are roles assumed by the consumer and the distribution of media is negotiated at the transport layer like all Internet communication.

There is no reason why an Internet-focused service should demand a subscriber presence and investment in a non-Internet infrastructure. A small number of highly technical HBO subscribers may find this service useful, but with so many restrictions and conditions on the media, the average family will probably just rather find media through the Internet with the least resistance.

Why is this service ultimately going to fail? It relies upon obfuscating the efficiency of transport-layer distribution with application-layer legacy cable conditional access technology (and infrastructure). The service is marketed to cable systems rather than consumers as a solution to reduce the churn of premium HBO subscribers. Ultimately, this service requires that a “Packager” role be reconstituted by MSOs on the Internet, and that’s just messy.

I predict this service will die within a year.

During the last few days, much has been written in the popular tech blogs about the throttling actions of Comcast vs. the proposed metering actions of Time Warner — suggesting that metering might be the preferred and fairer approach to restricting subscribers’ growing bandwidth usage habits. That discussion only focuses on a small part of the bigger picture, however.

From the network operator perspective, degrading service and metering service are mutually exclusive actions that create opportunities for monetization on each side of their operation at the application layer.

In the media distribution food chain, cable companies and telcos have always monetized either side of the communications relationship they are facilitating — at the application layer. Connectivity and access at the transport layer are not monetized by legacy communications infrastructure as it is with IP networks.

Cable companies charge, demand ad revenue opportunities or otherwise negotiate remuneration from television networks requesting availability to their subscribers and then turn around and charge subscribers for access to the television networks.

“Network Availability” (what AT&T and others are suggesting they need, in opposition to “Network Neutrality”) is about restricting and monetizing media availability to subscribers.

“Conditional Access” and DRM are about restricting and monetizing subscriber access to media.

In an application layer monetized world, if an operator can’t negotiate a revenue stream from a media producer or aggregator, availability of the media producer’s product is degraded or disallowed — If revenue can’t be obtained as a result of a subscriber request of a media product, access is prevented.

With the Internet, network operators have been left out of the media delivery monetization pie, other than deriving income by supplying “Naked” transport in to and out from their infrastructure.

Comcast and Time Warner are approaching the monetization of Internet-delivered media completely differently.

If Comcast can successfully negotiate frees from media producers and aggregators in exchange for not degrading their Internet-delivered media, Comcast has successfully generated a huge stream of perpetual income that didn’t exist until that deal.

If Time Warner can successfully implement fees from subscribers in exchange for delivery of their Internet-delivered media, Time Warner has successfully generated a huge stream of perpetual income that didn’t exist until those subscribers signed on.