AR&D Reinventing Local Media

I can’t watch a single major network on my “rabbit-ears” TV any more, at least, not without some serious picture breakup. The Digital Deadline has passed, and if anyone’s experience is like mine, the bunny has serious problems.

Think back to the ancient days of analog. We saw some fuzziness on my TV, but since I wasn’t paying for a cable box, it was fine. “Good Enough” beats “Nothing.” Now my bunny ears are sad. The picture is great – when I receive it – but the digital breakup is frequent and annoying.

I’m even amplifying the damn signal. I bought a Phillips HD powered antenna. These are bunny ears that should outrun a greyhound. Yet – there is little difference in the reception between the Phillips and nothing.

It’s not like I’m far from the broadcast towers, either. I Google-Mapped the distance and came up with 3.3 MILES. A signal should travel cleanly a lot further than that. I have state-of-the-art equipment, and a practically unusable TV.

Now, I do have cable in the other rooms, but I didn’t want to spring for a FIFTH box. Call me cheap. And in those good old analog days, I could see a picture clearly or, at worst, a little fuzzy.  I’m not going to stick an antenna on my roof, for crying out loud (this is progress?) and so I’m stuck with a useless monitor.

Or so it would seem.

Because the TV wouldn’t “work,” I decided to take another route: I turned it into a big laptop monitor. With an HDMI cable hooked from my laptop “out” to my TV “in,” suddenly, I have free TV. (Or, at least, I have TV off the broadband I’m paying for.) Thanks to Hulu, I can watch nearly any show I wish. With iTunes, I can download even more shows. Programs like Boxee contribute to my choices, and YouTube absolutely thrills my kids on the big screen. (That’s right – I said YouTube is one of my kids’ favorite “channels.” Take that, “high-quality-or-nothing” broadcasters.)

What does this mean for local broadcasters? It means yet another way around you. This time it’s actually worse – HDTV reception is actually forcing me away from you. Unless you’re live streaming, I can’t see you. This is big, big trouble for local media. And it’s another reason why, as Terry and I have said, you need to create original content and put it on the Web.

Yes, it’s true, I’m one of the digerati. Most people in the bunny-eared set won’t bother with my workaround – yet. But devices are out there that let you stream to your TV from the Web without a computer. We early adopters are usually about 18 months ahead of the curve. Inevitably, the new tech (think TiVo) catches up with everyone. The HDTV switch has downright forced me to go past the locals. This is sad, but it’s also as loud a cry for help as they come. Create programming I can’t get anywhere else. Put it online. The rabbit ears have gone down the bunny hole.

A report from BIA’s The Kelsey Group should be a kick in the rear for local media to get its mobile plan in order.  At the same time, another report from the same group empahsizes the importance of having a strong mobile ad plan in place — it projects the local online ad spend to start dropping.  InternetNews.com writes:

Local mobile ad revenue will grow to $3.1 billion in 2013, up from $160 million last year, while mobile search will reach $2.3 billion, according to the firm’s forecasts. Local searches made up 27.8 percent of all searches in 2008, but are expected to hit 35.1 percent in 2013, according to the report, “Going Mobile: The Mobile Local Media Opportunity.”

In another recent study, “U.S. Local Media Annual Forecast (2008-2013),” BIA/Kelsey forecast U.S. local advertising revenues to decline from $155.3 billion in 2008 to $144.4 billion in 2013, representing a negative 1.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Only the local interactive segment will show growth throughout the forecast period. All other local media will experience marginal to rapid declines in the next 18 to 36 months. A small number of traditional media will rebound with a revived economy beginning in 2011, though most traditional media will continue to decline, albeit at a slower pace, according to the report.

We have had plenty of opportunities before to shift our efforts to where the money is going, but as an industry we’ve simply been too slow to change. Here, again, is an opportunity. Terry Heaton is right when he writes that our local news applications will need to be free downloads because  “There may be hard-core fans willing to pay for access to special applications, but as a general brand-extension play, paid mobile applications are just wishful thinking.”

No more wishful thinking. Follow the money.

Advertorials have always been on the dark side of shady. But, thanks to some product called “Reservatrol,” we now have a new low: an advertorial made up to look like a (non-existent, thank God) TV news website:

Fake TV Station Ad Used to Sell "Health" Product

The links at the top (Weather, Entertainment, etc.) all go to an order page for their “miracle product.” It claims to be rich in antioxidants, blah blah blah. Does this stuff work? Who knows? The Better Business Bureau says beware of the company’s misleading sales practices.

The site is at news 3 news (dot) com (which I write intentionally so as not to give them the Google Juice power of an actual hyperlink. In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, they can Cramitol.

Where was this appalling piece of work linked from? NewsBlues says it found it on Drudge.

I just picked up a wonderful book for inspiration, and I strongly recommend it to you. It’s called “The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation,” by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky. It’s not a new book, but it is terrific. Among the many quotes that caught my eye deal with disruptive technologies. Here’s a taste:

The Telegraph: “[I am] not satisfied… that under any rate of postage that could be adopted its revenues could be made equal to its expenditures. – U.S. Postmaster General rejecting an offer by Samuel Morse to sell the rights to his telegraph to the U.S. Government for $100,000 c. 1845.

Cinema: “My invention… can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that it has no commercial value whatsoever.” -Auguste Lumiere (Co-inventor of the motion picture camera) 1895.

The Telephone:

“Well-informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” – Editorial in the Boston Post on the arrest of Joshua Coopersmith who had been arrested for fraud for trying to raise money for his work on a telephone.

“That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” – President Rutherford B. Hayes after participating in a phone conversation demonstration.

Radio: (The U.S. District Attorney prosecuting the inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, Lee Deforest, for fraud in 1913): “DeForest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice over the Atlantic before many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements, the misguided public… has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company.”

Television:

Lee DeForest (remember – the guy who was prosecuted for raising money for his own work on radio tubes) said of television in 1926: “I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.
“People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” – Darryl F. Zanuck (head of 20th Century Fox Studios), c.1946.

The Computer: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, president of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977.

(Need I point out that he was running a computer company?)
Special Credit to Thomas Edison, for dismissing lots of inventions, including the phonograph – his own.

• “The talking motion picture will not supplant the regular silent motion picture.” (1913)
• “The radio craze… will die out in time.” (1922)
• “The phonograph is not of any commercial value.” (1880)

Now, you can always find people with opinions that turn out to be wrong. But note how many of these come from pioneers themselves. Edison and the Lumieres developed inventions and didn’t immediately see the value. DeForest was prosecuted while working on his radio tube, but saw the prospect of TV as an impossible waste of time. The president of DEC couldn’t imagine a reason for us to have computers. And the U.S. Post Office was practically handed its own Western Union, only to turn it down because it didn’t see Morse Code as a profitable way to send messages. These are the classic fears of disruption Terry I and write about frequently.

What’s important to learn from this terrific book is that there will be plenty of people who will tell you something can’t be done. There will be those who don’t even recognize the value of what they have. Learn from history (and have some fun with it). Stand by your work and your vision. Besides, who wants to be remembered for saying a bunch of things won’t work?