DOES DR. ANDY LIPPMAN know the future of communications?
He’s been studying media for more than 30 years and has headed up the MIT Media Laboratory for 20. He has created research programs on interactivity, entertainment, networking, radio communications, personal computers, and graphics. He is also director of the Media Lab’s Viral Communications Program, co-principal investigator for the Television of Tomorrow Program, director of the Digital Life Consortium, and co-director of the Communications Futures Program
Clearly, he’s got some serious knowledge about the future of broadcasting – and he’ll expand on these topics next week as the featured keynote speaker at the 79th annual Canadian Association of Broadcasters annual convention next Monday in Winnipeg.
One of his messages: Everyone’s a transmitter.
What follows is an edited transcript of a recent chat between Dr. Lippman (right) and www.cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien.
Greg O’Brien: Viral Communications were the two words that came up most often when I was researching you. What is it and why should Canadian broadcasters care about it?
Andrew Lippman: Let me put it like this. I’m at the Media Laboratory and we’ve been around here for about 20 years. What we did back then had to do with digitizing media – sound and pictures and movies and the like – into computers and making them accessible to people.
When you do that there are two outcomes. One is supportive of the current way of doing things and one is potentially disruptive.
A supportive example is I can make digital music and make CDs which are functionally the same as an LP but happens to be a smaller disk. Or, I can digitize television and turn it into HDTV, which, as conceived in 1990, was nothing more than television five times prettier.
The broadcast vision of HDTV in those days was quite literally that nothing in the world would change about television in any regard with the exception that somebody like Santa Claus, in the middle of the night, snuck down your chimney, stole your regular North American standard television set, slipped in one that’s a little bit wider and a little bit clearer and the entire industry would be the same in every other dimension.
So, that’s the supportive view of making digital the bits of media.
The potentially disruptive uses are more what we’ve concentrated on – which is to say that if TV or music become bits, then suddenly it goes through any channel. Suddenly, it’s divorced from real-time and suddenly it’s in the domain of computing, which the end-user owns. And so you explore what it means when you’re your own creator, publisher, author or distributor of these bits.
And that’s not even to mention the deeper., fundamental concepts in that what makers digital different from analog in media is that the program or the content could have a sense of itself.
GOB: What do you mean by that?
AL: Today you would use the term meta-data, but when we were thinking about these things that didn’t exist, the point was that bits could describe what was in it rather than just carry the facsimile of it. In other words, in digital music you can certainly analyze the notes in a different way. If it’s digital text, you can search it in the way you can’t search a facsimile.
If it’s digital video, you can put all scenes together which have Cary Grant in them. Not only are the bits amenable to carrying descriptive data with them, the bits themselves are inherently interpretable by the receiver.
What does a record player know about the record it’s playing? In 1975, it didn’t know anything except that it was 12 inches or 10 inches. In 1985, it knew the song and duration and artist and could list the music and synchronize it with your light show. That’s a deep, conceptual difference and it has nothing to do with better fidelity.
I know this is a long story but I’m setting the stage.
GOB: Okay.
AL: So, if that’s what you could do with media 20 years ago, now wind the clock forward and what’s different now?
Well, computers are by three orders of magnitude faster. My storage capacity is four or five orders of magnitude larger. So, whereas I could think about synthesizing sound and text and pictures then, I can now synthesize the entire broadcast television band in one computer.
The RF (radio frequency) – not the pictures – but the radio of it. I can attach a wire to my computer and literally be a broadcast television station. That’s how fast the computer is. Computers are now processing at the rate of radio, not at the rate of pictures.
GOB: Can you explain that a little bit more?
AL: Well, we use computers to draw pictures, right? And then if you wanted to draw television, you still put it into a transmitter to put it on the air. The computer is now the transmitter – it’s that much faster. It can do not only the pictures but can be the transmitter. It can be the radio, not just be the thing that the radio feeds.
Now let’s take the same fork we had 20 years ago and now let’s examine what that implies. Well, if a computer is a radio, what does that mean?
Sure, there are constructive things it can mean. It can mean I can build a radio receiver that’s probably better than one you could build out of components. Maybe it means I could build a telephone where you could download into the phone – whether it’s GSM or CDMA or something else. Maybe I could download into my computer the way to receive normal television over the air or the way to receive HDTV over it.
In other words, now I can make that radio mimic another radio with a re-load as opposed to a rebuild. That’s a constructive use of a computer that’s fast enough to be a radio.
But that’s not the real thing that it means, because the disruptive uses, the potentially disruptive uses, are the ones that are more interesting. And they’re answering the question of “wait a minute, if my cell phone gets that smart, maybe it’s a tower in addition to being a cell phone. And maybe I can build a cell phone network where there are no towers.”
If my television or radio receiver is so smart that it can be a transmitter, then maybe there are no transmitters any more. Maybe everybody who watches television is a transmitter. And that’s the point of what viral communications is about.
With viral communications, the work that we do asks: “How far can we go to build communications systems that have no infrastructure?”
TV without transmitting. Cell systems without towers. How far can we go to build those where the phones themselves create the network or the TVs themselves create the network.
GOB: So, how scary is this – or should it be – to Canadian broadcasters or cable companies.
AL: There seems to be a fork in the industry where there shouldn’t be, between people who are telecommunications types and people who are media types. So, if I tell a cell phone company that every phone can be a tower, then there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that if the tower is that cheap, then I can provide service in elevators and basements just by dropping a cell phone there.
The bad news is that if the intelligence is in every phone, then I don’t own a monopoly over the services. So, all of the things you think about like whether you can call your dog with your phone or pay for your Coke or parking, or to send a message across a room from one phone to the other, without going through the phone company which costs a quarter – suddenly I’m a service provider,
If I’m a store owner and you walk in, maybe I communicate directly with you as you walk down the aisle (via a message to the handset) – as opposed to communicating with the phone company. The point is everyone has the potential to be a service provider. And when I say that, I don’t mean a phone call, I mean the ancillary services one associates with.
The monopoly over that is lost, so why not apply that reasoning to broadcast and say, “well, if everybody is effectively a transmitter, either over the air or through a wire, then that wonderful licence that I’ve had for over 50 years which guaranteed me exclusivity with respect to spectrum, I don’t have anymore.”
Now, from a broadcaster’s perspective, is that scary or is it not? Well, in some measure yes, but in another measure, no.
First of all, they already got slapped with that (realization) 15 years ago when cable started getting past 35 stations. The notion that a broadcaster exists because of a technical monopoly, I don’t think any broadcaster really thinks that any more and if they do, they’re a victim of history.
Take a look at Google and take a look at iTunes. Both of those are large enough to almost be a monopoly but are they resting on the protection of a license in order to have that monopoly? No.
What’s blindingly clear though is that broadcasting is a social phenomenon and not a technical one and I think everyone in the industry understands that.
What they haven’t internalized is what that means.
GOB: So, what does it mean and how do broadcasters change to adapt?
AL: I haven’t got the numbers to support this but there’s a notion that’s gaining currency which says every thing in life is sort of a power law kind of thing, which means if you plot it on a normal curve, it’s very high at the beginning and tails off at the end. So if you look at television, there’s a small number of programs that have a large, large audience and then the curve goes down where there are a lot more programs that have smaller audiences
If you look at music, it’s the same thing. There’s a small number of hits and it just tails off. If you look at books, it’s the same thing…
When there were three networks in America, that curve is damn steep, where the programs they put on are popular and then there is almost nothing – the curve tails off quickly. Then you get 100 channels and the curve starts to tail off slowly.
But now when you get 100,000 channels – because everybody’s a broadcaster – then what happens is there’s really gold in those tails (of the curve)… The point is, where’s the gold for the broadcaster when he doesn’t have a technical monopoly any longer? (It’s) in understanding what’s out there on the tail and knowing when it’s resonant with society so that he can make it into (a hit).
And that’s what the future of broadcasting is all about. Broadcasting is not going to go away. I don’t think anyone believes that anymore. I did 20 years ago. I visited the 57 vice-presidents of CBS at their monthly meeting then and told them, “tear down your antennas guys, your days are numbered because we have computers now and it will be interactive and under our control – and they had an answer for that.
GOB: Which was?
AL: We’ll be broadcasting television long after you’re dead. And you know what, they’re right, because if we had everyone sitting in their own pod inventing their own television, someone would come along and say “I’ve got a new idea: Broadcasting. Let’s get together and join hands around the campfire and watch the same program and we can talk about something together.”
Broadcasting is an always was a social phenomena, but it was buttressed by a technical monopoly. And, now what’s been done is it’s been laid bare. It’s broadcasting laid bare and now what you have is the recognition and understanding that broadcasting is a social phenomenon and not a technical phenomenon – and that’s been driven home at first with the slap in the face of 100 cable channels.
Now, a deep body blow, is podcasting because podcasting is the next delivery medium. It’s the universal TiVo.
GOB: And some broadcasters are diving into it and some are not.
AL: The only broadcasters who aren’t are either constrained by other things or they can’t see the forest for the trees. Podcasting has taken the 100 cable channels and multiplied it immensely and it is telling you what the next generation of broadcasting is.
And there’s more to it than that. It used to be that the way to get a hit in music was to be on MTV. So, MTV was the gatekeeper.
How do you get to be a hit in music today? You appear on the iTunes web page. That function MTV had has switched to iTunes.
So the challenge to the broadcasters is realizing… that it’s a social phenomenon that the magic is missing from the hits – is also the channel by which those hits are made, may not be the broadcaster any longer.
In other words, if iTunes begins to own the (video) podcasting universe the way it owns it for music, then what decides what’s going to be the next big TV show or radio program is what appears on the iTunes web site and not what appears on channel 3.
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