Up in Ontario

3POs in 10 Years Time

This past Saturday the Duck and I packed a picnic lunch and spent the afternoon basking under the glorious sunshine out at Lighthouse Park. We hiked out to a ledge high above the ocean, read and ate our lunch while the boats passed by and the eagles flew overhead. As they say out east, it was some nice.

Between reading and eating we talked about whatever crossed either of our minds. Sometimes this was nothing. Other times we made a remark about something we had read or a boat passing.

At one point I read an article in a magazine about iPods and I got to thinking about an essay I'd read last week by Tod Maffin entitled Vertical Listening. The basic premise of the essay is that the current way listeners consume radio, through a radio, tuning in to a linear stream of programming organized by time and broken up into smaller segments called stories, was being disrupted by recording devices that extracted radio programs from the linear stream. An example online is PodCasting: recording audio programs and posting them online for download to personal digital media players over the Internet. Kind of like recording TV programs with a VCR but different because some gee-whiz technologies like Rich Site Syndication (RSS, which I've gone on about in Reading RSS Feeds) make it easy to subscribe to programs so that you're notified when new shows are available. So instead of having to make an effort to record the show, subscribers find out when fresh shows are available and grab them if they're interested. It's kind of like shows on-availability and then on-demand.

Alright, so now we're getting to the interesting part. Or, interesting to me at least. And since the last time I went on about technology like this, my brother called me a "Neeeerd!", I'll keep it snappy.

I thought out loud to the Duck on the rocks out at Lighthouse Park that in 10 years, when all content is transmitable over the Internet - all text, images, radio, TV, webpages, telephone calls, all of it - I imagine we'll all have Personal Private Players. 3Ps, if you will. The 3Ps will have a wireless Internet connection and you'll be able to send, receive and store all the content I've referred to above - text, images, audio, TV, etc. - on your own 3P. Through the same device you'll have telephone conversations, you'll record movies and take photos, you'll write stories and you'll read / listen to / watch stories. It'll be like an iPod or cell phone for everything. If you extend the buzzword logic a little further, you could even come up with a better name: 3POs (Personal Private Players On-demand Streams), a catch tag for the Star Wars generation it will target.

So what will that look like? Well, all the ways media exist today will continue to exist. Books will still be published. Broadcast radio and television will not go away. But the stories will be decoupled from the linear stream of production, distribution and programming. The go-live date for a story or program will become more gradual. Early, test or bootleg versions of programs will be released or leaked and archives of past programs will be opened up and made available. Overall, more programs will likely be consumed, though the entrenched powers will not see it that way and will need to be wrestled along with the innovations, kicking and screaming and trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle, to put lipstick on the tired, old pig of a system they know and trust just as it erodes under their tightening grip.

Subscribers to programs will also be able to have greater control over what you read / listen to / watch since their 3POs will be able to customize the presentation of the stories, the same way that you can customize the presentation of a web page in your web browser. In a way, we all become creators, even though many of us will not want to be creators. On the other hand, producers will be able to work a whole new angle for their creations. They'll know more about their audience, track usage better and offer more value to the sponsors and advertisers footing the bill. They'll also be able to create new subscription revenues from original release and then from access to archives. Copyright will be a mess, but then, smart people like Lawrence Lessig have been saying that copyright is a mess for over 10 years now.

So why is any of this interesting and why was I thinking about it instead of enjoying the view as a beautiful, maroon-sailed schooner cut past in the waves below us? Well, with these crazy new 3POs people will want new types of programs, new stories. The usual ones produced for the evening news, 1 to 2 minutes long, spliced with live or archival footage and a reporter on the scene, won't be much good if people want more details on a part of the story. At the same time the half-hour or hour-long sitcom or drama will be too long for the small snippets of time and attention available for 3PO users.

I think a new type of programming will emerge, about 8 - 10 minutes in length, with supplementary information interlinked with the story. Perhaps longer segments will be serialized and bundled together but still broken out as 8 - 10 minute segments. This length is consistent with both radio segments, TV personality segments and the time it takes readers to get through the usual newspaper article (800 - 1,000 words). Somehow it seems like the right size for conveying most stories and I think a whole new genre will be devised to fill the need for stories to be told in a way that combines all the best qualities of the various media with audiences' preferences.

Imagine audio stories with companion texts and images that commuters could subscribe to for delivery twice a day, just in time for the ride in to work and the ride home. Imagine a stock report just for the stocks a subscriber tracks, a weather report for the days and locations of concern to a subscriber, a columnist who can make reference to source material (an interview with a celebrity, a historical event, a quotation from a text) and if the reader is unfamiliar with the source material they can see it / read it / hear it right then and there so the rest of the column makes sense. All kinds of possibilities seem possible.

As a public service announcement, the key buzzwords for this new way of consuming media are, in no particular order:

• Place Shifting: taking media out of its linear stream, as in the Vertical Radio example cited above, and recontextualizing it. This may also apply to Time Shifting.
  
• PodCasting: "A podcast is like an audio magazine subscription: a subscriber receives regular audio programs delivered via the internet, and can listen to them at their leisure."
  
• Rip, Mix, Burn Culture: originally coined in an Apple TV commercial (Quicktime movie, 2.7 MB), the concept of Rip, Mix, Burn is that all media (text, photos, video, music) is now available in digital form and in digital form it is subject to enless recombination and remixing, such as DJs with records, hip-hop producers sampling riffs from old records, film producers splicing in archival material. The original Apple ad ran until the Disney legal cabal filed cease and desist papers against them, just setting the tone of the discussion and the means of suppression.
  
• PVRs (Personal Video Recorders): devices such as TiVO that mediate a digital-TV signal and record programs for rebroadcast and recombination
  
• Personal Grid Computing: all your devices working together to share content, bandwidth and computing power, enabling the smaller, less-powerful devices to do larger tasks
  
• The Long Tail: originally the title of a wired article entitled, The Long Tail, the idea has proven immensely popular and spawned a book deal for its author and a blog detailing the writing of the book. Basically the article lays out how millions of micro markets in aggregate have overtaken the mass markets and the mainstream in sales and interest.
  
• DRM (Digital Rights Management): "an umbrella term for any of several arrangements which allows a vendor of content in electronic form to control the material and restrict its usage in various ways that can be specified by the vendor." The latest example court case: MGM vs. Grokster
  
• The Architecture of Participation: an idea that participation equals existence, that without participation things stagnate and die out, that minimal hierarchy exists to hamper participation (an idea from anywhere is as valid as any other idea) and that participation is implicitly built into the request-response architecture of the web; certainly debatable

Now you can impress your friends and acquitances at cocktail parties. Like good red wine, please use responsibly.