Reports from the media measurement company Nielsen have dropped one of the features with which the company is arguably most associated: the idea of a television ‘channel’. MediaPost reports:

Nielsen said it had dropped one of its most popular features — data showing how many channels the average TV household receives — because in a digital, time-shifted multichannel universe, there no longer is a “consistent” meaning for the term “channel.”

People watch their television time-shifted through DVRs, VCRs and VoD, through computer screens and smartphones, alongside other media such as their laptop screens and they flick with their remotes whenever the momentum drops. They still watch programmes, of course – and Nielsen’s data will measure those audiences. But they don’t tune in to channels anymore. The ‘how many channels’ statistic, which – as you’d imagine – showed an ever-widening number of choices, makes no sense in a world where to answer to that question is effectively ‘infinite’:

In 2008, the last year for which Nielsen reported the data, the average U.S. household had 130.1 TV channels available to it, but on average, “tuned” only 17.8 of them, according to Nielsen’s definition of channel tuning. That means that the average TV households was only watching about 14% of the channels they had available to them. The percentage of channels the average TV household tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data.

Long Live the Channel

The last sentence there – ‘The percentage of channels the average TV household tunes to had been declining over the years that Nielsen has been reporting that data” – is pretty telling. Creating more opportunities to watch rubbish doesn’t mean that people will do so. Generally speaking, people only want to watch the good stuff, and that’s what has led the popularity of time-shifting and over-the-web television like Hulu and iPlayer. At any given moment, it’s entirely likely that there is ‘nothing’ on broadcast TV but ‘anything you want’ via other means.

That said, the BBC still accounts for 1/3 of the UK’s TV-viewing; it won 13 of the 23 television BAFTA awards last year, with multiple nominations in almost every category. The BBC iPlayer site gets more than 1.4mn visitors a day. Could it be possible that these statistics are related? That a channel that cares about quality and service delivery might actually still mean something as a channel? I think so.

Note that this isn’t the same as digital maoism. Reznor and the rest are still focused on making music and being rock stars, not selling T-shirts and so forth. Masnick also makes the point that getting all the extra “business” stuff done is a useful job for an agent or even a label, and might help justify their existence.

Like other media owners, computer games publishers have a hard time with piracy and other unauthorised distribution. You know this is true because you were a teenager once yourself and you copied disks and downloaded cracks. In my case, it was copying cassette tapes of Spectrum games. It’s really quite a big problem: 2DBoy, the publishers of indie puzzle game World of Goo, had a built-in mechanism for tracking every copy of the game in circulation. They discovered that 90% of those copies were unauthorised, and that’s discounting any versions whose distributors had found a way to circumvent the tracking. While that doesn’t mean that game publishers only get 10% of the revenue they would in a world without piracy, I think we’re likely to agree that it’s probably a fair chunk.

Distribution

When Dragon Age came out, I had several options for getting hold of it.

I could go to a shop

• advantages: I get a box, a disc and a printed manual.
• disadvantages: I have to go to the shop. I might scratch or lose the disks. I have to put the disk in the machine to play. Costs £40.

Or I could buy it through a digital distribution service like Steam (it’s like iTunes for games, basically).

• advantages: I get it right now; Steam looks after the installation and any patches; can’t lose or scratch the disk.
• disadvantage: need to be connected to the Net to play; no printed manual; costs £40.

Or I could download an illegal, cracked copy through PirateBay or similar.

• advantages: I get it right now. No need to jump through copy protection hoops. Costs nothing.
• disadvantages: err… might get caught.

So, the method that earns EA no money is, in many respects, the most convenient. They should probably try to dissuade me from doing that somehow. Here’s what they’ve done and what they might have done.

Digital-Rights Management

Games publishers have traditionally responded to the threat of unauthorised copying by introducing more and more sophisticated forms of copy protection and DRM. You have to have the DVD in your drive to start the game. The game requires you to enter a unique serial number. It might check this number against an internal algorithm. More recently, it’s likely to check the number against a database on the publisher’s server – a key that’s used more than a few times will be blacklisted. It might check that key every time you play. Dragon Age employs all these methods. But it doesn’t really work very well as a means of protection.

First, it’s a pain in the neck for legitimate customers. Why should I have to go hunting through my discs every time I want to play the game? What’s with this trillion-character serial number? Hang on, my Internet connection is a bit flakey – what do you mean I can’t play? These methods aren’t just inconvenient; they are also disrespectful. They treat paying customers like potential criminals.

Second, the pirates appear to be really rather good at thwarting copy protection. Cracks to make a game playable without any of the above are easily obtained. So it turns out that the only people who are inconvenienced are genuine customers. Nice work!

Score: 1/5

Enrich the Genuine Copies

In recent years, the idea of giving ‘extras’ to paying customers has gone by the board somewhat. I recall buying games in the nineties that came with 2–3 different manuals, a map of the in-game world, a poster, occasionally novelties like a metal figurine or a sound track disk. Nowadays, games come in DVD-style boxes and so the possibilities for novelties are rather limited.

Nonetheless, EA have actually done quite well with Dragon Age on this score. Rather than physical extras, they come in a virtual form. My box came with a coupon with two extra serial numbers I could enter into the game. These added new content to the game: a couple of extra adventures and unique items and powers to make my character stronger.

I had to register my game with the publisher in order to unlock this content and so there’s no way for pirates to get hold of it. I really like this idea: the illegal copy is impoverished while legitimate buyers are rewarded. And thinking about gamer psychology, I believe it acts as a strong motivation to get the real thing. Those using unauthorised versions will know that their character isn’t as strong and hasn’t got the same resources as those belonging to users who bought it. Gamers hate having a ‘lame’ character.

Unfortunately, Bioware slightly botched the execution. Using the premium content requires the game to check in with the server every time it is run, spoiling the experience for those with a flakey internet connection or wanting to play the game on the move.

On a more positive note, the title is being actively maintained by the developers. Two patches have already been released with a third in the works. Once again, it’s unlikely pirates will be able to use these, again making their copies inferior.

Score: 3/5

Sell a Platform

But EA did more with add-on idea than simply providing bonuses for registered customers. It has built Dragon Age as a platform as well as a game. You can go onto the site and purchase Bioware points to spend on extra chunks of content, such as the Return to Ostagar expansion. Again, you need to be registered to buy and use this content, which once again devalues the pirated releases. Since the game’s launch, there’s only been one piece of additional content to purchase, with a further expansion due in March.

The developers also released a toolset for the game allowing users to create their own tweaks and content for the game that can be distributed and installed in a similar fashion to the official add-ons.

Score 4/5

Build Community

The toolkit is just a small part of the ways that the publishers have attempted to foster a community around the game. Registering the game automatically creates a MySpace-style profile page for every user which automatically records achievements within the game and your character’s progress. You can add comments and screengrabs, and the site comes with the normal tools to twitter/facebook/tell others about what you’ve managed to achieve.

While I think this is useful for games, it’s not especially so in this case. Dragon Age is a resolutely single-player game so there is no particular reason why anyone should be remotely interested in another player’s progress, unlike, say, multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or Eve Online. Oh well – I’ll still give points for good intentions.

Score 2.5/5

Conclusions

A mixed score overall, then, with overly zealous DRM casting a shadow over some more insightful ideas to make piracy a poor option for users. Nonetheless, it appears to have been relatively palatable to users, with over 3.2mn copies shipped by the beginning of February. At £40 a unit, not including any after-sales of extra content, that equals um… squillions in revenue.

The key to good practice here is giving customers more than they expected, rewarding their patronage, hooking them in as they experience the game and up-selling them with extra content to extend the experience. These sorts of ideas might easily be applied to other media forms, such as a music CD or a magazine subscription. If I pay, give me more, exclusive extras that add a lot more value to the legitimate edition than the unauthorised copies. Make it easy for me to use it as a want to. As we all know, the bits and bytes of any digital product can and will be copied by people who are determined to do so. However, if you make those ones and zeroes just a fraction of the whole product experience, then there is still a business in making media.

But because, as the programme pointed out, new media is always analysed through the lens of old media, this leads to much wailing and gnashing of teeth:

• because people don’t pore over the same source for several hours, as they do with a book, the Web cannot allow the same degree of reflection and depth of thought.
• because there is no training, code of professional ethics and industry guidelines, a blog cannot be as reliable as a newspaper.
• because the production was done with zero investment over a very short period of time, this online video cannot have the same quality as a feature film.
• if your doctor spent their research time skimming abstracts rather than reading a learned journal, you’d probably feel quite anxious.

These are straw men proposals, though, based on choices and comparisons that aren’t necessary. When you start forgetting about biased comparisons and look at the value of knowledge creation and discovery on the Web on its own terms, then it starts to look a lot better. For example, it fosters the spirit of enquiry; it gives people access to creative and publication tools for free; it creates communities of learning; it teaches people to question sources; it allows easy access to contrasting opinions; fosters new and non-partisan links between diverse people; and collaborative problem-solving is built-in.

I’m fine with all that. It’s great.

I also agree that our valuation of culture needs to re-calculated to understand what is added by collaboration. The Great British Sandwich and One and Other are online and offline works co-ordinated through the Web and created by thousands, but the lack of auteur confuses establishment reactions to the oeuvre *cough*.

But. The problem comes for people who work as creatives in some respect: artists, writers, photographers and musicians. (It’s also of concern if you think books, music albums and newspapers etc. have intrinsic value and ought to have a place in the world). If modern audiences only pay attention to content for seconds in the context of a continual flow, then your chances of those people stopping to pay is zero. If you try to insist, then you’re likely to simply be removed from those readers’ river of information: your content ends up in its own isolated oxbow lake as the river seeks only the most efficient route to flow freely and follow its gravity.

So perhaps the ultimate answer is to give up on the idea of the creative making a living from the sweat of their brain. To instead embrace the exciting and new opportunities of the creative cloud where every work is ultimately collaborative in some respect. William Owen wrote an interesting blog post last week in which he suggested that the advent of cloud collaboration spells the death of the author:

We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

Owen’s thoughtful post does seem indicative of the sort of change that’s taking place and the sort of mental change that – over the next couple of generations – may well take hold. I do worry, though, about the idea of ‘responsibility’ in this arena, though. I wonder whether culture can possibly be created without responsibility. Others have talked about the necessity of curation to creating something that actually has any value – whether it be the editor of LOLCATS or Comment is Free. They’re another group of people that need to get paid, but whose value won’t necessarily be recognised by feeders from the stream.

Going back to Cultural Studies, the idea of the creative as a special sort of person producing a special category of goods has a very short and specific history that arguably began with Wordsworth and began to end with Warhol. As Raymond Williams observes in Keywords (1976), ‘Art’ referred to any kind of skill, from carpentry to angling, between the C13th and the C16th, when it started to acquire the distinct types of specialisation it has had since, with those becoming mainstream by the C19th. He suggests that division between ability in the creative arts and other kinds of skill is a consequence of their devaluation in the industrial revolution. It was:

…related both to changes in the practical division of labour and to fundamental changes in practical definitions of the purposes of the exercise of skill. It can be primarily related to the changes inherent in capitalist commodity production, with its specialisation and reduction of use to exchange values. There was a consequent defensive specialisation of certain skills and purposes to the Arts or the humanities where forms of general use and intention which were not determined by immediate exchange could be at least conceptually abstracted.

In other words, the idea of creativity as a livelihood has required a form of special pleading for 200 years. With cloud culture, as further changes in production and distribution dramatically make the exchange value of many of these forms of specialised and practised skill even lower, these divisions cease to carry much weight.

All rather bleak for me! But thinking of web users as (increasingly) people living their lives in a stream has also made me think that Media and the Arts are looking in the wrong places for solutions. Paywalls and micropayments cannot work for these undemanding yet voracious audiences because they work against the culture of the Internet. Advertising, by its nature is interruptive and attempts to hijack the flow of the stream: it won’t be effective. Taxes on ISPs to support struggling journalists and musicians seem incredibly unjust: the argument that they should get a proper job seems insurmountable. More opaque funding for public creative projects — from statues to concerts and local newspapers — feels better, but again smacks of special pleading and artificial markets. Maybe the real answer does lie in creatives accepting that the market value, for now, of what they would ideally like to do is zero. I have been thinking about some ways out, but this post is already too long.

[See Jaron Lanier’s interview in this morning’s Observer for some more on all this, and the consequences. I’m not especially impressed by his solutions, though.]

picture credit: rachel_thecat and unknown

The excitement over Google advertising Chrome and Search during the Super Bowl comes from two hot-spots of media attention:

1. Google Search is continually used as the prime example of the power of word-of-mouth over traditional forms of marketing: ‘…and they never spent a dollar on advertising it!’ says the social media guru.
2. The slots between segments of the Super Bowl are famously the most expensive and sought-after TV ad-spots of the year. (On the official site, linked above, a link to a video of the commercial slots was the top item when I looked!)

The Internet and the Super Bowl last intersected so heavily ten years ago, in 2000, called — at the time — ‘dotcom bowl’, when ten heavily-funded, but mostly impractical internet start-ups spanked $40mn in venture capital in order to secure the slots, at an average of $2.2mn for 30 seconds. Twelve months later, all but two of those start-ups had gone bust. Internet companies have tended to avoid the Super Bowl since then for obvious reasons.

So you might take this appearance as an indication that either Google has given in to Old Media; or conversely that the value of old media has dropped so low that even the biggest advertiser on the Internet will give it a go.

Personally, I take it as a sign of changed understandings of old and new media and of how persuasion through advertising works. Hell freezes over indeed.

Firstly, dividing old and new media into two separate, enemy camps that will have nothing to do with each other is nonsense. You aren’t a Luddite if you use TV; you aren’t progressive if you use the Web. This false dichotomy has held both sides back for too long. Old media still have massive reach compared to the Web: and telling more people about your stuff is mostly good, especially if you have a consumer product, like a new web browser, to give them. To give an example: the highly favoured Compare the Meerkat campaign — created by VCCP – had digital end-locations but depended on a massive TV, newspaper and outdoor campaign to create its success (400% increase in traffic and 80% more quotations given for client Compare the Market).

Second, Internet advertising isn’t a very good platform for persuasion. Sorry. You have one five-or-so-word opportunity and (maybe) a graphic that has to fit into a fairly small space. Most people ignore you. The people that click on your ad are stupid, bored and poor. Or are your competitors and their agents. What’s good about it is that it’s so cheap that you can throw a small amount of money at it (compared to traditional media) and create a lot of clicks, it generates great CPA information and, if correctly targeted at long-tail keywords, then yes, it sells.

It won’t change people’s minds, though. You need longer periods of time and richer engagement to do that. I read today that cinema advertising revenues went up 5% [PDF] last year. What’s that about – apart from creative agencies loving them? It’s about the realisation that advertising-as-experience (and therefore, ‘something that might influence someone’s opinion’) still doesn’t happen very often, predictably or inexpensively on the Web.

This is the truth. We live our lives not offline or online, but inline. We’re continually in both spaces and don’t draw much distinction between them, contrary to what a lot of commentators would have us believe. This is especially true of younger people, who’ve grown up with the Net at their side. We don’t ‘jack-in’, as Neuromancer and countless successors imagined, we accommodate.

[PS. Throwing irony upon irony, this is also the year that Pepsi, long a Superbowl standard, decided not to bother and devote the money to social media *cough* philanthropy instead.]

[PPS. What I wonder about is why Google cares so much about Chrome? It’s given none of its other products, consumer or business, remotely the same funding or attention…]

In mitigation of my not being able to think of anything interesting to write about today, I shall pass on several thousand words by other people, published by The Society of Digital agencies (SoDA). It’s a survey and editorial on what members of the society think 2010 holds for digital media marketing.

It’s a 70-page PDF, but don’t worry too much about the apparent weight — it’s all microchunked into big charts and easily-digestible 500-word thought pieces from the leaders of a number of digital agencies.

Overall, the outlook is bullish:

• 81% of Brand Execs expect an increase in digital projects for 2010
• 50% will be shifting funds from traditional to digital media
• 78% of global participants believe the current economy will actually spawn more funds allocated to Digital

Two Thousand and Ten Digital Marketing Outlook

hat tip: iboy

As you will be equally unsurprised to learn, Facebook remains the front runner, with 206mn unique visitors in December – 67% of all social media users.

While the rate of growth is impressive, there’s another side to these figures which is rather less so. Five-and-a-half hours over a month? Pathetic! People in the US spend four hours a day watching television.

Of course the figures are slightly meaningless, except as a comparison to the same measure over the previous period. The figure of 5h30 is arrived at by dividing all the time spent online by the number of people using social sites during that time. In truth, there’s probably a very stark differentiation between people who spend hardly any time at all on social sites and those who are never off them.  Nonetheless, a bit of a reminder that social networks have quite some way to go before they rival more traditional media for consumption rates (although — interestingly — their reach is pretty similar).

Another interesting chart shows the differences in time spent across different countries. Australians appear to be the most socially active, with the Japanese bringing up the rear. Presumably interactions using mobile devices weren’t measured? We in the UK come third — another Bronze for the plucky Brits. I’d love to speculate further, but wouldn’t be able to resist national stereotypes.

picture credit: Avlxyz

There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update — actually, let’s call it the iPad — I stand by everything else in the post, though].

Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but the consensus of opinion is that it’s basically a big iPhone. Let’s imagine that’s the case, and I’ll write an apology on Thursday if this turns out to be very wrong.

It’s not just Apple that thinks that 2010 will be the year when Tablets finally come of age. Models from HP and Nokia were just two of the slew unveiled at CES a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I know that Apple UX design expertise means that their device will be poles apart from the Tablet PCs launched by these competitors or Microsoft hardware partners in the noughties, but it won’t be entirely different. The latter part of that is interesting to me, because I spent quite a lot of time with those devices, reviewing them for trade and consumer press titles. What I discovered is that they’re good at some things and less so at others.

Good for:

• Reading things – but not very long things – they still had LCD screens, so still created eye fatigue. Fine for a magazine article or a blog post, though.
• Filling in forms – the devices proved popular with people like service engineers, medical doctors and financial services salespeople.
• Drawing things – it’s easier to draw freehand using something like a pen, rather than something like a mouse or a touchpad.

Not so good for:

• Typing more than a few words – some had convertible designs whereby you could unfold a keyboard, but that made them bulkier.
• Surviving in your bag – the screen needs covering so needs a sturdy secondary case, which means it takes longer to get out and at work than a conventional laptop.

In a story today that looks not totally dissimilar from industrial espionage, a research firm called Flurry has apparently tracked the application usage coming out of Apple’s headquarters to reveal some suggestions of the use cases the company is anticipating:

The mix of apps is made up mostly of media and entertainment titles, as opposed to productivity or entertainment programs — underscoring that the tablet is aimed at consumers. [my emphasis]

“In particular, there was a strong trend toward news, books and other kinds of daily media consumption, including streaming music and radio,” stated the report. Coupled with recent reports that Apple is in talks with book and newspaper publishers, the apps suggest the tablet will compete with Amazon’s Kindle e-reading device.

Across the “tablet” apps Flurry identified, it also found a strong emphasis on social networking, photo sharing and other types of social interaction.

I hope you can see where this is going: iSlate and social media in a world where all right-thinking people are toting an iSlate. Web 2.0 is all about people creating online content: wikipedia, blogs, flickr, twitter, whatever. Slate computing devices are good for consuming content – I think it’s safe to say that a modern slate will also do video quite well. And anything that’s similar to a big iPhone will have some sort of GPS capability and the capacity for Location Based Services (LBS). They’re good for creating certain kinds of content – especially pictures, but not really for creating text content. I can imagine that up-to-140-characters will be fine, but your hand will get tired after that point.

So — in a slate-enabled future of social media expect…

More: microblogging, drawings, tagging, one-click sharing, LBS, pro media by the microchunk (iNews).

Fewer: blogs, wikipedians, lengthy comments.

This is bad in some ways, of course. Social media is already criticised for its superficiality. I cannot imagine that being able to write less will improve this image problem. On the other hand, blogging and wikipeding are already far too onerous for most people, so you could say this was simply being responsive to what people mainly want to do. Perhaps more worrying is the idea that there will be less authorship in this world and more spreading and curating. Perhaps fancifully, I like to think that the ability for anyone to self-publish is an empowering thing. I wouldn’t like to think that my ability to do so would be impeded by my choice of computer hardware.

One things I will be very interested in is the camera capabilities of the device. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine people taking a photo using a tablet, no matter who designed it, but am prepared to be corrected.

Picture: iPed Multitouch Slate by Myiube

The diagram was changed to add in users of Twitter and other ‘status-update’ applications, most notably Facebook. Author Josh Bernoff notes that this group has a different demographic make-up to others:

Conversationalists intrigue me. They’re 56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.

He also explains that people don’t just belong in one category. That’s why the percentages don’t add up to 100 — people take on a variety of roles at different times — the rungs are behaviours rather than groups. I’d argue that all of us are Spectators at least some of the time — people who continually contribute tend to be a bit annnoying, to say the least.

It’s clearly appropriate that Tweeters be included, and understandable that they weren’t perceived as a meaningful description two-and-a-half years ago when the chart was first published. But why are they placed higher than Joiners, Collectors and Critics? It surely doesn’t take any more commitment or engagement to publish an update than it does to join the site in the first place?

I guess the problem is that Twitterers are a broad church. Some people are using it as a microblog or lifestream; some use it to share or republish cool links; some just offer a daily ‘I’m doing this today’; some have conversations.

This was a problem with the ladder analogy in the first place: it’s a little too coarse. Owning a blog doesn’t necessarily mean you’re more ‘engaged’ or ‘participatory’ than someone who doesn’t.

picture credit: Anne Oedolfhirsch

My estwhile colleague, the excellent David Gauntlett, has posted a new video about the work towards his next book Making is Connecting:

The video argues that certain forms of digital/social media practise offer the hope of personal and communal redemption. When we publish stuff or make things online or get together with others in a common cause online to do practical things, then the value of that activity goes beyond the intrinsic value of whatever artefact is produced: we’re connecting with other people and increasing our social capital. We’re making ourselves happier as a consequence and establishing or reinforcing communities that might do social good. Becoming a member of wikipedia or getting together with others to do some guerilla gardening are new opportunities that help us get over the cultural, spiritual and social slump that constituted C20th mass media. That era is characterised as one of consumption rather than creation, the renewed promise of the C21st through the magic of digital.

I love all this and a big part of me would like to leave this post here. But then I’d have to rename this blog twopointhappyclappy. This is terribly unfair, I know, given that Gauntlett’s book is only half-finished. but meh.

My main issue is that I’m tempted to say ‘so what?’

So what if some people become more happy, productive, social as a consequence of this? That’s all lovely but there’s no challenge to power in any of this. There’s no real change to the world. The mandarins at Whitehall aren’t going to be shaking in their boots. I imagine the scene:

Bernard (rushes in breathless): Sir Humphrey!?

Sir Humphrey (for it is he): Yes, Bernard (arches a brow)

Bernard: It’s the internet people, sir. They’re making things!

Sir Hunphrey: What’s this? Barricades across the Mall? Million man marches into Parliament Square?

Bernard: No, sir. It’s something different.. It’s…

Sir Humphrey (exasperated): Spit it out, Bernard.

Bernard: They’re making community gardens on disused land and infographics about motorway jams.

Sir Humphrey (sighs): Oh, Bernard. Why on earth do you think we spent all that money on data.gov.uk?

Getting people involved in creative community and personal projects is clearly a good thing. I have no argument with that. I agree that this change will probably make things better. And happier. But I want more better. An intelligent networked commons has the opportunity to make government, parliament, business and international affairs work differently: to be more accountable, changeable and responsive; to empower people to do as much as they can, and find other people so they can do more; possibly wreak radical change to the whole system*. I feel a little short-changed by Gauntlett’s account, in short. I think our expectations can and ought to be higher.

picture credit: Kelly Sue

*(I remain vague on this — sorry)