Remember that famous scene from the movie, The Graduate, where a suit pulls Dustin Hoffman's character aside and tells him that the new word for business is “plastics?” Now, plastics is over. The new word is “distributed.”
One example is “distributed journalism,” and it has the potential to diversify the voices of the media, where the current dearth of diversity is a problem. Dan Gillmor, a established journalist who had a cushy, high-profile job at the widely-read San Jose Mercury News, has recently quit his job and staked his career on his “grassroots journalism” blog. In a book he published in 2004 called We the Media, Dan gives this very colorful example of how a grassroots media organization, Indymedia, challenged the established San Francisco Chronicle newspaper:
When the United States invaded Iraq in the spring of 2003, protesters took to the streets of San Francisco, and by many accounts just about shut down the city. Deploying digital cameras, laptops, and Wi-Fi, Indymedia—a self-assembling newsroom—captured the events brilliantly. “Indymedia kicked our ass,” Bob Cauthorn, former vice president for Digital Media at the San Francisco Chronicle, told a group of online journalists in April 2004. in particular, he said, the independent journalists revealed several cases of police brutality that the major media had missed. [p. 145].
Indymedia both runs on open source software, and is an experiment in using a “disruptive technology” to offer a service formerly controlled by a few industry leaders, in this case, the news media in the nine-million person San Francisco Bay Area media market. As with open source software, the “disruptive” element in “distributed journalism” is the participation of the community. In the same way that companies like Microsoft can't figure out how to kill open source software, big media can figure out how to stop distributed journalism from eroding big media's role as the funnel through which all entertainment and news flows.
We'll come back to this idea of distributed journalism in a moment. Soon, it won't be just production of the news which often is done in a distributed manner, but also movies, TV shows, radio shows, you name it.
Disruptive technologies give us new leadership
In coining the phrase, “disruptive technologies,” Harvard biz prof Clayton Christensen has created a whole new business theory that can illustrate how the former media audience is now in a position to take over greater control how news is broadcast, and what is in the headlines.
Christensen began to develop his disruption theory sometime in 1996, when he noticed that between 1955 and 1995, 95% of the companies on the Fortune 50 list stalled to the point where their revenue growth was little better than the rate of return that investors would have received from putting their money into a bank. Most biz pundits blamed the problem on poor management, but Christensen wasn't buying it. How could all of these managers of big, successful companies suddenly turn stupid once their companies had hit the top?
Christensen did some digging, and figured out that there was a common theme among these stalled giants' industries. Companies' had innovated to create the latest and greatest products to sell them to their best customers at a premium. The race to innovate caused these companies to “overshoot” the demands of the middle market tier. Then those big companies were sandbagged by a cheaper, usually smaller product (or service) which was “good enough” for those “overshot” customers.
Christensen called these cheaper, smaller products (or services) “disruptive technologies,” because those technologies “disrupted” the business models of the then market leaders. How come the market leaders didn't just swat down the challengers like flies? Because they didn't care. At least not until it was too late. The accounts were too small. Big companies need big accounts to grow. Small markets usually don't hit their radar screen.
The telephone as a toy?
The classic example that blows everyone's minds when they first hear about it is the telephone. In 1870, Western Union was THE market leading telecommunications company. They earned big money by sending vast amounts of data (for the time) across the US. Their best customers were banks and railroads. The president of Western Union called the telephone a “toy,” because it could only move small bits of voice data a short distance: just one mile! The WU president thought that important discussions would take place face to face; he thought that no one would pay the relatively considerable costs to chat with someone with whom they could have a more meaningful face to face conversation by walking or riding a few minutes.
As a result, Western Union rejected the opportunity to buy the exclusive rights to the telephone, and has never recovered its past glory or market share.
Now it's big media's turn
If I were an exec with ABC, CBS, NBC, etc., I would be having nightmares about Sony's new Location Free TV product. This device lets you get both TV signals and Internet signals with the same device. Although there are many other computers that will do the same thing, the striking thing about this device is that it runs on GNU/Linux; and it will allow you to program for video signals from the Internet!
This should be very bothersome for the major networks. They are nothing more than assemblers and distributors of content, once you get down to it. Up until just 2003 or so, it was a very “hard problem” to create and distribute quality video feed to the masses. Now, that has changed.
The December 26, 2004, earthquake and tsunami were media watersheds in many ways. For the first time, an event of global significance was caught by the self-assembling distributive journalists around the globe. Wikipedia has assembled the videos of that event, and most people either caught the original videos of the event online, or subsequently turned to the Internet for detailed narratives of the event.
The effects of the Tsunami were so widespread that the traditional media simply couldn't keep up with the reports of devastation emanating from locations as far flung as Kenya, South Africa, Somalia, Thailand, and India. People with contacts or business in South Africa might not have been as interested in reports about India, and vice versa. In light of those facts, consider this passage from the book, The Innovator's Solution, by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor:
We noted previously that when the functionality and reliability of a product becomes more than good enough, the basis of competition changes. What becomes not good enough are speed to market and the rapid and responsive ability to configure products to the specific needs of customers in ever-more-targeted market segments. (2004, p. 169, emphasis added).
Bingo. We all knew that the tsunami had occurred within hours of the event. For that purpose, the mainstream media served its purpose. But as Dan Gillmor and Steve Weber noted in their interviews for the Digital Tipping Point documentary film, even the vaunted BBC news relied on text messages from the affected regions for detailed descriptions, because the devastation was so total that many places were inaccessible to reporters for hours or even days after the event.
It doesn't take a genius to see that the media's role as a distributor of content was usurped by the Internet with regard to many aspects of the reporting on the tsunami. With the advent of devices like Sony's Location Free TV and other similar computers, the audience was free to switch back and forth from broadcast TV to the Internet. Sony's Location Free TV moves us one step closer to channel surfing between TV and the Net back on the same device. Once the camel get his nose under the tent... look out.
This kind of cross-platform cruising is the stuff of the collapse of empires. Clayton Christensen recently said that Microsoft could find itself in a very tight bind if it doesn't buy or build a device like a Blackberry, and run Linux on it!
“Where Linux takes root is in new applications, like Web servers and handheld devices. As those get better, applications will get sucked off the desktop onto the Internet, and that's what will undo Microsoft.” - Martin LaMonica, 2004/10/18 CNET News.com
Today radio, tomorrow the world!
It's not only the code that will get sucked off the desktop, but also the content itself! Motorola, Sony, and Linspire have both announced initiatives to let you play your music on your mobile phones. Motorola is teaming up with Apple's iTunes stores, and is going to allow only DRM'd music. For that reason, the more open Linspire and Sony offerings are more disruptive and more interesting. The Sony deal won't be announced until March, so for now, let's take a look at the Linspire deal.
Linspire has teamed up with the world's first Linux-only computer store, Sub300.com (aka Sub500.com in Canada), to produce a product called the MP3 Beamer. Linspire has signed a number of new artists to provide music for its MP3tunes store. The MP3 Beamer will use GNU/Linux to beam your music wirelessly around your home, and will allow you to access it over your browser from your music locker at MP3tunes.
This MP3tunes store is the really disruptive aspect of Linspire's bet, because like the Creative Commons, and many similar stores, it lets you use a relatively open format, MP3, to play your music. Sure, MP3 ain't Ogg Vorbis, but Ogg is going to get a ride on the up escalator as it tags along behind MP3, and will eventually overtake MP3. With some nightclubs offering patrons the opportunity to play their own iPods' playlists, it won't be long until people are grooving to OggCasts in local bars globally. Soon, bands will be using this format as a marketing gimmick, and there goes another couple hundred million dollars in sales for big record labels.
In the video world, the Creative Commons already links a small but significant library of video which can be downloaded legally free of charge. These videos are offered to be watched, ripped, mixed, and burned according to the needs of individuals viewers, who can then become producers and broadcasters in their own right, even if only on a small scale. Multiply those individual little remixes by 20 or 40 million, and all of a sudden you are talking about people getting lots of content in distributed fashion. Big media has just lost lots of eyeballs.
Now add in podcasting as an aggregator, and big media is really starting to sweat. On February 9, 2005, USA Today's Byron Acohido (who wrote the big Munich story for USA Today) authored a front page article asking, “Is podcasting the next big thing?” In that article, Byron traces the recent history of podcasting, and tells the story of 20 year old UK podcaster Michael Rundle “tapped into the raw power of podcasting:”
“The Cambridge University history student on January 24 began hodting a 40 minute audio program...in which he introduces original songs performed by British musicians, including himself. Rundle didn't need the BBC or an PR firm to help him reach an audience. He simply posted his show on the Internet.... Rundle's inaugural podcast drew more than 300 downloads, and song submissions poured in.” Byron Acohido, USA Today, 2005/2/9, “Radio to the MP3 degree: Podcasting.”
As the producer of the Digital Tipping Point documentary, I have seen first hand how the tools of the Internet will permit our small community to coordinate shooting schedules; receive video submissions from the community about their own digital tipping point stories; email audio clips to community volunteers for transcribing; planning the production and post-production with volunteers all over the globe; translation of transcripts into my native language (English); and market and distribute the final product. Previously, all of this would have taken a vast budget and much more time.
As video compression gets better, it will become increasingly trivial to send gigabytes of video over the Internet. Think of the decennial plays on the death of Jesus of Nazareth in Oberamergau, Germany, or of the Shakespeare fests in Ashland, Oregon, USA, and many other places. Think of the San Francisco Film festival, Sundance, the Jewish Film Festival, etc. Imagine how those events might be filmed, mixed, ripped, burned, and distributed globally.
Produce locally, and burn globally
Did you miss the New Orleans Mardi Gras 2006? No big deal, google online reviews of the best clips. Want to get updates on the buzz about where the hottest Carnival celebrations are going to be next year? Consult your RSS aggregator. Excited about showing your prize rabbit but can't afford to travel to the big annual rabbit show in your country? That's okay, the online rabbit shows are becoming more popular anyway.
Moore's law and the arrival of powerful open source video editors like Jahshaka mean that the cost of owning a “good enough” production studio are going to decline very rapidly in price, lowering the barriers to entry that are guarding Disney's palace. Skeptical? Consider Jahshaka.org's tag line: "Powering The New Hollywood." Michael Eisner's troubles have only begun.
Podcasting + Location Free TV = Trouble for Hollywood
Byron Acohido thinks that big media should be scared of British podcaster Michael Rundle:
If only Microsoft, Apple and Hollywood could muster Rundle's panache. Big tech suppliers and media companies have fumbled for years trying to tap deeper into the potentially vast market for delivering digital content across the Internet. The best they've been able to do is legitimize by-the-song music downloads and squabble over who has the best technology for enforcing copyright restrictions moving ahead. Now, Podcasting has arrived with the potential to rewrite the rules of the game.
Soon, we will see online communities producing, creating, and distributing their own video feeds. I personally don't think that Google news will ever push the New York Times into irrelevance, as is the premise of the very cool and very slick flashmedia video, EPIC 2014. Much of what is found on the Internet is of questionable value, so there will always be a need for professional reporters, editors, producers, directors, and actors, and commercial entertainment aggregators like the major broadcast news networks. But as time goes by, their control of the news and entertainment industries will certainly shrink, and open source once again will have radically changed the way that we see the world.
