Digital Anxiety in Amsterdam

The IBC first opened in 1967 in London as a showcase for broadcast technology. The buzz, forty years ago, was FM stereo. The show has since moved permanently to Amsterdam where ‘buzz’ takes on an entirely different connotation. As all the technologies of content creation and distribution have moved on to new platforms so has the IBC. It’s exhibition halls are neatly laid out in ‘zones’ to concentrate specific interests and their salespeople. Imagine; 40,000 techno-sales people in one place.

Coincident with the IBC’s 40th anniversary is the 20th birthday of the mobile phone. IBC’s ‘Mobile Zone’ doubled in size for this year. Space for ‘zone’ display sold out early.

IBC’s conference panels and speakers have remained true to broadcasting. The movers and shakers come out to share their thoughts; some original, some not. And the IBC conferences tend to reflect the current tone of the broadcasting industry. This year the tone is anxiety.

ftm background

HD Radio Goes Alpine
Interest in HD Radio received a boost from Swiss broadcasters after a successful demonstration in and around Luzern. Over 200 broadcasters, technical specialists and regulators from six countries attended the two days of discussion and explanation. Swiss technical consultant and broadcaster Markus Ruoss, a strong proponent of HD Radio, organized the event as the first public HD Radio demonstration in Europe.

“Staggering” Increase in UK DAB Listening
Radio listeners are making the digital switch in 2005 according to a special RAJAR survey. Total hours listening increased to all digital platforms – DAB, DTV and internet – increased from a comparable 2004 survey. The number of hours listening to DAB jumped 165%.

DAB Catching On With Commercial Broadcasters
Danish and Swiss private, commercial radio broadcasters announce new DAB plans. But a UK broadcaster resists more multiplexes.

Digital Legislating
Governments are attacking the digital media problem and warming, again, to analogue shut-off dates for radio.

Berlin Troglodyte Exposed! Civilization Threatened!
When the Berlin media regulator said it was dumping DAB, icy scorn rained down from WorldDAB.

Broadcast technophiles celebrate all things digital at IBC
The IBC opened and closed last week in Amsterdam. Most than 40 thousand visitors and exhibitors stoked the flames of the digital media revolution, 12% more than 2003 according to the IBC. As usual, it’s a visual – as in TV - event.

"Broadcasters no longer enjoy a monopoly on content delivery," began Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) CEO Gary Shapiro’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ keynote address. "Ears and eyes once devoted exclusively to broadcasters are now being drawn in by new forms of content and new methods of delivery."

Paying homage to content (“Content is King”) is as empty as “the check is in the mail.” The real money is in distribution; getting that content to consumers certainly, but selling new, quick and clever tools to broadcasters and telecoms anxious about distrupted business models is the key to cash. So long as bandwidth appears unlimited the capital to finance trial and error distribution experiments will be endless.

The internet’s rise as distribution channel of choice has not at all devalued content. People are spending more and more time looking for and looking at content. They are also spending less and less time looking at any one particular distribution channel, save search engines.

As the internet made access to content free and easy consumers of that content reacted quite normally. Yes, they want to accumulate this content where, when and however they want it…and more all the time. But, no, they have a limit on paying for it.

Apple’s Steve Jobs has made an important point about content and pricing, made clear when he rejected NBC/Universal’s demand for ‘more flexible’ pricing (i.e. higher pricing). More movies or TV shows, in this case, will be purchased at €1 than €5. Content owners and producers hold onto the notion that demand for really compelling content should drive price.

That only works in the old and nearly dead advertising model which pushed up ad prices based on the gross reach of the surrounding content – movies, news, music, sports. Ad spending – the provider of free content – continues to rise. But media buyers have a ‘grip’ (sic) on their reality. Lot’s of ears and eyes are on lots of content. The only pay-off is connecting those ears and eyes to spending on the advertisers goods and services.

Having shaped much of the media disruption in the 21st century, Google people were on hand at IBC to bend surviving television troglodytes out of shape. Fragmentation is good, said Google’s head of technology Vincent Dureau. Revenue is there, he said, “one click at a time and that model will apply to TV as well.”

“There will be pain,” Dureau said as he described the necessary transition in broadcasting to the assembled broadcasters much like an oral surgeon warming up a patient for that first root canal procedure. “TV is a closed network today controlled by gatekeepers,” he said. “But with TV over IP this business is becoming open.”

For many attending IBC the conferences with messages of anxiety and the future are nice but the real business is in the exhibition halls. Though not the science-fair futurism of the consumer electronics shows, it is the place for broadcast gizmo sellers to size up each other, meet the buyers and occasionally sell something. Hot on the market this year, much like the last, are digital devices to make digital devices go faster and simpler. Not a word is spoken about cheaper.

One hop on the list for TV technology actually takes a slight step backward. With user generated content all the rage in the YouTube age new tools are necessary to make marginal quality home generated video compatible with top-level content processing. Accumulating, brushing, cleaning, re-sampling, saving, sorting, re-sorting, tagging and sending the finished product on its merry way can all be accomplished with one not-so-tiny and not-so-cheap box. And there are dozens of them. Can I have one in green?

Digital Anxiety in Amsterdam

Anybody who is anybody in the broadcast technology biz was in Amsterdam for the IBC. The International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) opened with more mobile (everything) and HD (anything) buzz than the casual geek can capture on a memory stick.