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"Holy
Grail already here" - Response
The document “Holy Grail already here” sparked a lot of discussion. The most extensive discussion of it was on SOS-relay, another e-mail forum. To read the entire discussion, go to http://groups.google.com/group/SOS-relay and scroll down to “Discussions”, or click “Discussions” in the R H panel. The best response by far came from Indra de Lanerolle, who has his own blog at http://indradelanerolle.blogspot.com/. Here is Indra’s contribution in full: Dear all I have tracked this very interesting debate. I think though that the positions expressed so far maybe talking past each other... here's my thinking... 1. We all agree on some things - my go at summarising is that what is worth defending is informational, educational, news and other services accessible and relevant to all South Africans (in their diversity). If public broadcasting does or can deliver this it should be supported, though that is not necessarily the same as defending or protecting the Public Broadcaster. 2. Broadcasting (not just public broadcasting) is not only a technology; it is a business model and a set of social and political relations (regulation, business activities etc). And we are living through a period when those business models and social and political relations are changing rapidly - globally and also globalising... 3. Some 'facts' regarding how South Africa is changing already... at almost the same time as free to air television is reaching almost the entire population, it is also loosing it. Mike's figures on pay television are very out of date, largely due to the introduction of the 'compact' bouquet. Around 90% of the population now have regular access to television, but over twenty percent of all television viewers now have access to DSTV (around two million households). Around 10% of South Africans have access to the internet but the rate of growth of access is increasing rapidly. In other words we may get to 30% much more quickly than we got to 10%. 4. Broadcasting consumes significant resources. Globally there are only three ways these resources are paid for: advertising, public subsidy (taxes or licence fees) or subscriptions. 5. Advertiser-paid television has worked as a business model from the late 1950s to now. There isn't a CEO of a broadcaster in the world who believes it will work for the next five decades. The reason for this is (regulation based) monopolies or oligopolies. Advertisers paid for the costs of broadcast systems because those systems delivered massive audiences. In South Africa those audiences have now peaked. As fast as new people connect to television, others move to pay television where they watch many channels and so watch each channel for much less time. The result is much lower audiences per channel. The impact on the income of advertising-based free to air broadcasters is proportionally much worse than their loss of audience. In their heyday, free-to-air broadcasters were able to exploit their market power and charge a significant premium on the cost of each viewer because they were the only way of reaching most of them with pictures and sound (which itself enabled a premium over other media like radio and print). 6. This gave public broadcasters that utilised advertising a particular advantage. They could leverage the audience that advertisers paid for while delivering services (for 'free') to audiences the advertisers didn't pay for. This 'sweet spot' is evaporating before our eyes. Once broadcasting is only one of many methods of delivering sound and pictures and once there are many broadcasters, the market power of broadcasting in general and individual broadcasters in particular collapses. (Notice - not just evenly declines, but collapses). 7. The debate below about when this happens... of course we don't know. But it will happen. 8. What are the choices? One choice is to protect the Public Broadcasters through regulation and policy so as to slow down these processes as much as possible. Don’t introduce new entrants on DTT for example. Don’t increase broadband access. Don’t licence mobile broadcasting. To me this is a bad choice in the light of point 1 above. There are many ways (some known and some we haven’t yet thought of`) to most South Africans that new information technologies can offer in providing information, education and entertainment. And maybe more important than that there are benefits in communication. Broadcasting is a centralised network: one-broadcaster-to-many. That’s what we mean by 'audiences', and largely it puts most of the population in a passive role. Communication is active. The internet and other new technologies offer many-to-many communication. In a project I worked on last year, I met a fifty-year-old man, a single parent, in Free State. He had an eleven year old son who had never been to school because neither he nor his son had IDs. He worked (in the informal sector) doing odd jobs in the township earning about R300 per month. The cost of travelling to the nearest municipality to try to sort out his ID was R70. Would he appreciate the benefits of online communication so that he could do this cheaply without incurring that (physical) communication cost? And (to answer a previous point) care about whether that service was provided for profit or not? I don’t think so. He needs the communication capacity (by the way he has a cell phone). 9. Re Toby's comments (and Rehad’s and Mike’s) , (and as someone who worked for the BBC for a decade, the only public broadcaster in my view that actually works, at a very significant cost to the British public), I would ask the following:
10. On this last point, what I have seen over the last fifteen years is SABC demanding massive protection - from new broadcasters being allowed to broadcast. To even maintain the status quo which it’s clear almost none of us in the SOS mailing list believe in, that protection is vital. But it comes at a massive and increasing cost. Increasing because each year there are more innovations that have the capacity to offer new services to more people - and we are blocking that innovation. I'm going to stop at 10 points. Maybe we should be thinking about a wider forum to debate these very important issues... Indra de Lanerolle Holy
Grail already here
On RT’s technology
update programme there were two items shown over the weekend that
together demonstrate that the Holy Grail of electronic communications
is already here.
One is a super-fast 4G
service, already rolled out in St Petersburg and in Managua, Nicaragua,
that can, for example, show movies without noticeable buffering. This
service is provided by the “Yota” company, established in 2007. Yota
has developed a “device” (i.e. a smart-cell-phone equivalent, similar
in outward appearance to an iPod or a Google Nexus) that maximises the
advantages of the 4G wireless broadband.
The other is a
Russian-developed “Wi-Di” capability, which will be built in to such
“devices,” that can wirelessly display what is on the “device” on a
flat digital TV screen.
Add to this the
already-existing wireless keyboards, mouses, and printers, plus “cloud
computing” storage, and you have a full kit.
You no longer need a
PC, laptop, television receiver or decoder. The device is
self-contained and comprehensive, but with the option of input-output
devices of your choice (keyboard, mouse, big high-definition screen,
printers et cetera) for home and office. No more lugging laptops around.
Public service
broadcaster no more?
The above means that
public service broadcasting as at present conceived is about to become
as dead as the dodo. The only way to maintain it and to support the
investment of the businesses that depend upon it is to try to impose an
artificial monopoly, or monopolies, plural.
The imposition of a
monopoly by the State depends upon political support and some
more-or-less spurious rationale.
Such monopoly has been
there since the time of Marconi and Tesla, or shortly thereafter, but
can it be sustained, now that their dreams are being actualised with
hard systems?
The Yota company has
already purchased a vast library of movies. You will be able to get the
movie of your choice, any time. That blows out the broadcasting of
movies by television. What remains? The category “News” if it means
“fresh information”, is already far better served by Internet than by
broadcasting. So what’s left? Soapies? Sorry, that’s covered, too, and
surpassed. The soapies can be published at a fixed time, and from then
on be available to view at any time, with no need to record it. Just
like the Keiser Report, for example, on the same RT, now.
Who needs TV as we
know it?
What happens to
politics when communications are no longer controlled, or controllable,
and full communications capability, as both producer and consumer, is
available to everyone, through a pocket “device”?
The above discussion
was first published on the Facebook group “Press the Press –
Protect Free _expression_ For All”
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