I’m blogging the (second annual) futures of entertainment conference put on by the MIT convergence culture consortium. We started with opening comments from Henry Jenkins and Joshua Green. Then things got into full swing with the first panel, on Mobile Media.
The first person on the panel was Alice Kim, Senior Vice President of Digital distribution and Partner Relations from MTV Networks; then Marc Davis, Social Media Guru from Yahoo; Anmol Madan, a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, and Bob Schukai, Vice President of Wireless and Broadband Technologies from Turner Broadcasting.
Bob was by far the most interesting speaker on this panel as far as I was concerned – he’s clearly very expertly steeped in what he does, and has some interesting perspectives that are much less carrier-protective than what you might expect from someone who spent 18 years working at Motorola.
I’ll append some notes here, and some of my own commentary. I usually refer to the person by their company name – this isn’t to imply that this is the corporate perspective, since it’s the individual who said it. Mistakes are my own.
Marc Davis: “what we used to call garage cinema we now call social media”.
Bob Schukai: The us is falling way behind the rest of the world technologically, used to be the leader in broadband and mobile. 100megs is the norm in hong kong, we struggle to get 3 megs. We’re 2 yrs behind Europe and 3-4 years behind Asia. Views it as an opportunity to “learn, translate and catch up.”
Moderator: how did we get so slow?
Bob: when digital cellular was launching, we didn’t have a standard. Let the best tech win. 7 different standards and a patchwork standards. People are putting skype on phones and breaking business models. But people are willing to go try different things, and we dropped the ball.
Isabel: (Obviously I’m not talking during the panel- I’m just presenting my perspective): But what about the monopoly land line companies, working hard not to cannibalize their existing revenue streams and moving as slow as molasses? How much blame do they deserve?
MTV: OK, we agree standards and business models are an issue. How do we provide our content and raise the discovery for our users? Consumer behavior isn’t there yet to watch video on mobile. Let’s make the experience easier to access for the masses.
Turner. We want to drive really cool content on the networks. When you have 4-5 people running slingbox simultaneously, it can break the cell tower. Infrastructure is built for coverage, not quantity.
Yahoo: carriers have a monopoly on paid instant messaging. Paying for that way instead of with ads. (He sounds jealous).
Yahoo – the whole concept of having social media on a phone is you can connect to anyone on any network. So the walled garden model will have to come down.
Bob in the content space we know the walls are coming down, there are “off-set “ plays.
Media lab guy: learning from the open source movement, it’s some 17 year old from Finland who will come up with the next killer app. You are missing the point if you say “you must use our interface”.
Yahoo: Most phones doesn’t have a mouse, so the iphone is revolutionary. Why haven’t the internet and mobile industries made love? There’s a user interface gap. New interfaces now allow web content to be viewed. We’re at a point now where it’s just about to happen.
MTV: we’re waiting for the interactivity to finally come to fruition. Text in via mobile, as opposed to having it on your tv set remote control. You can’t do it today because of interoperability issues, and interface issues.
…
Bob – Virginia tech shooting, first 20 minutes on cnn was from user-generated video.
Yahoo - The London bombing was the seminal moment where people understood what it means to have people on the ground in real time recording the moment. So my photos are being posted to this event automatically. Mapping where I took the cell phone pic from, for flickr.
If I’m thinking about Heroes, I can visit that fantasy realm when I’m there in the physical world. News will be the first frontier. We’ve looked carefully at having viewers creating content. The mobile phone is THE device. Geo-aware.
Bob – but from a social standpoint this is nasty. Your life isn’t private anymore. Someone uses their cellphone to take a picture of you, and what if you are the latest goofball.
Media lab guy – they’re behavior recognition devices, not just phones. You can mine market behavior, but what are the privacy implications? It’s just like any other new domain.
Yahoo – I can see my friends went to this restaurant. Advertising gets better when you know what people want. All phones are moving toward that point, and in a way that protects their privacy.
Turner – people of a certain age are very reticent to get ads – the younger demographic is used to it.
MTV: people who are anti-ads are bypassing traditional advertising, they go to the web just to find what they want. Original content production is becoming the new advertising. We’ve created programming around this. Web junk 20, the best of ugc. Or people submit their videos trying to get on tv with us. The lines are blending between user generated and tv, they’re getting exposure, ina way never dreamed of. And costs often coming down. We acquired adam shockwave, the kid brother for comedy central, was an online-only brand. And they have a budget for the prosumer content.
Yahoo. Media is becoming a collective map of attention, that is what media is coming.upload the picture of where you are, we’ll be able to see those places better.
Turner – I like to see people breaking the business models. They came up with a plan in Europe where you took your data tariff with you when you were roaming. My phone bill was $1700 after 2 weeks in japan, so I was attracted to this. They said, bundle a slingbox, same flat rate. That was interesting to me. Or – call anyone you want anywhere for free, like skype. Innovation needs to break down existing market models. I love watching the battle google is leading with the open handset – attach to whoever you want. Verizon has legitimate concerns about hanging any old device off a network. But if people don’t break down the status quo we’ll never move the market forward.
Yahoo (marc davis): blick’s revenue model is just watch ads. An exploration that’s being looked at right now.
Moderator: let’s talk about google and apple entering the field. They’ve had nothing to do with mobile up until now. What’s the significance… or not? They have customer goodwill and tacit sense of potential.
Bob – last year we did a billion phones. Iphones, relative to that, is nothing. But their importance – they dictated a business model to a carrier. 18 years at Motorola, it didn’t work like that in the past. “you’ll pay us for every phone call made”, Apple told them. Holy night! God love steve jobs for doing this. You have to break the mentality. I don’t know what to say about google. They’re massive, they come across as the champion, but do you ever wonder how good their intentions really are?
Medialab: android is solving the right problem, but I’ll reserve judgment until I see devices in people’s hands. The gatekeepers, how will they handle it? A year down the line we’ll have a better sense.
Yahoo –the iphone is .1% of the mobile phone market, and android hasn’t yet gotten penetration. We’ve done things with carriers that will be on a hundred million phones in the next year. Scale matters. On top of that you can build businesses. Google’s move is great for the industry. We’re exicted to have more OS-es to work with. Making a platform where advertising and services delivery will actually work is wonderful for us – advertising is the brass ring everyone is trying to grab. What does this mean for content companies? You’ll see distribution of professional content through the phone, but the biggest possibility comes from user-generated content.
William Gibson’s point – the future happens at different rates around the world – the events we see in the US, will eventually get us to the places other parts of the world have already reached. Up to a billion people are coming online in India thru $20 phones that are text only. These aren’t multimedia devices.
MTV: the iphone was a wakeup call. For the first time in history of mobile industry in the US, the focus was on the user interface. It’s not a great mobile data experience, it’s slow, but it showed that consumers care about the user interface, and they haven’t taken note of that until now. To label things mms, sms is not user friendly. There’s been renewed interest in user interface since the iphone came out.
Question from the audience: what about metatagging?
Marc: that’s the great thing about mobile, there’s automatic tagging. Phone knows your zip code. Can pick up tags you set earlier.
Audience: but what about the professionally produced content?
Mtv: there’s no network standard for metatagging.
…
Marc Davis: This is a shift from “no one knows you’re a dog on the internet” to “real people real relationships.” We’ve seen it happening over the past few years.
MTV: The definition of privacy is changing. Before, people would not have considered exposing their private lives on their blog.
Bob: 99% of cell phone users will never see a nokia 95. It’s all text. You won’t find video processing power in a cheap phone.
Marc: you can have good voice interfaces, when bandwidth and processing power improve over time.
Bob. Watch how long it takes do enter a url on your mobile.
Yahoo: It’s dialup in the US.
Audience: with privacy, people don’t open up the hood. They’re smart people who should know better. It’s a question of media literacy – should the providers be responsible for helping people learn?
Audience – can you talk about china, telecoms, privacy, the internet? (laughter)
Bob – China is fascinating – they are shooting themselves in the foot, creating their own third-generation mobile phone standard. Hurting its evolution. Had they adopted an existing standard they would be further along. Now they are lagging. When the Olympics come along, there’s a question if they will have phone service. But they add millions a day and are the largest mobile carrier. But for a western company, profiting from that – well, everything will have to be a joint venture.
Yahoo- we were singled out for our practices – other companies have been operating the same way. You want to operate there, the government places constraints. China makes it incredibly difficult. Yahoo’s actions there were done by many other companies – which doesn’t excuse them. As an individual I favor human rights. But from a business pt of view it’s not an option not to operate in china. In terms of shaping technology and mobile, you can’t ignore china as a technologist either. It’s unavoidable to engage with china in mobile. Not long ago it was chairman Mao and grey suits and tanks. Now it’s a Starbucks on every corner. Now they are trying to manage massive explosion without having it all come unhinged. I’m not saying the way they go about things is right, but you have to understand their challenge of trying to evolve. The more we get involved in business there, the more we will like the outcome.
Yahoo: At zonetag we’ve built a database mapping cell phone towers to zip codes. We want to help handset makers have the right tools for deployment.
Media lab – and how you deal with this today if you’re a small size startup – how do you even get your app across these things? It’s incredibly difficult.
Mtv: that’s not just for startups. When it costs $1000 to port to one handset, how do you get an roi? And then how do you have enough left over to be able to innovate and create new apps?
Moderator: what’s the next thing to watch?
MTV: companies like yahoo and google are creating a user environment within the mobile environment. MTV will work with them to provide our content on a much larger scale than if we could only work with carriers. Where media companies have excelled has not come to bear in the mobile space but that is changing.
Yahoo: the ability for developers to get right to the mobile platform is coming. Creating an ecosystem that works for other parties is exciting. The will be value creation by that 17 year old kid in his garage that will help everyone.
Media lab: more sophisticated apps to monitor and comprehend user behavior. Accelerometry. An app knows your walking or standing. So how to display media?
Bob: IMS – internet protocol multimedia subsystem. Devices have an ip address. As more get them, as people share and use content as they move from one device to another, will be massive. ‘were already dealing with drm issues. How can I use that music on my computer on my handheld? Now I have to switch to the tv when I walk over there. It will open up the communication opportunities going forward.
