August 2011 – Page 2

Local TV

August 26, 2011

I think it’s fair to say that DCMS’s plans for Local TV are mostly terrible.

Luckily, people who know a lot more about it that I do are writing it all up. I enjoyed these three posts on the LSE blog on the subject, all by Sally Broughton Micova.

They are well worth reading for anyone interested in local media.

Local TV Part 1: A Tale of Two Cities

The DCMS’s framework document states that “market experience suggests that small standalone local TV stations can struggle to develop s sustainable business model”. However, the Government’s plan is to issue individual local licenses and then leave it up to the market to determine if local stations give it a go alone or come together in a network. This means anyone interested in opening local television and broadcasting through DTT in Birmingham will have to individually negotiate with whoever might be interested in Hereford, Grimsby, or any of the other 60 plus locations. News Corporation, which owns a large number of local TV stations in the US and controls two of those in Birmingham Alabama, has other problems at the moment, so it seems unlikely it will be interested in applying for a multitude of individual local licenses in the UK. It is not clear how a backbone of sufficient size and capacity to adequately support local TV across the UK will spontaneously emerge from the negotiations of a few enthusiastic local parties.

Local TV Part 2: Great Expectations

One of the ways the Government’s plan intends to provide financial support to local TV is by having the BBC spend up to £5 million annually for 3 years to buy content from local stations. At the local TV summit Hunt also suggested that local TV will be selling content to other national stations. This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, £5 million divided among several stations will amount to very little in relation to the budgets required to make high quality content. Secondly, local stations will have to produce content that national stations will want to buy. Consider the plea from Shameless’ Paul Abbott for British producers and commissioners to try making television drama at a cheaper cost of only £500,000 per episode. Or, that national stations in the UK are currently spending their budgets procuring high quality production from independent producers and hit series from the US.

Local TV Part 3: Don’t start linear

The proposal, to use the digital terrestrial television (DTT) platform and create linear television stations across the UK, is already old fashioned enough. It is admirable to invest in local media, but new technology allows more innovative and more sustainable ways of doing it. Putting local TV onto DTT multiplexes (MUXs), even in a first stage as the Government proposes, is an unnecessary investment, and one that sets local television off on the wrong foot in terms of both sustainability and purpose.

What I’ve been reading

August 25, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

openkent :: home – "Open Kent is where public sector bodies in Kent can publish information about the services they provide."
How to do a Crowd | Innovator Inside – For crowds, read communities, groups, whatever. Good stuff.
Shabby PR from SOCITM « Simon Wakeman – "As a PR man I’m well versed in the technique in play here – create a stir around headline grabbing stat or two then ride to the rescue with a carefully pitched product or service to solve the various woes created by aforementioned stat. "
Government corporate websites in eye-popping 3D – Fascinating to watch this develop.
Local Government please don’t sack the connectors. « Podnosh – "So as funding dries up for the jobs best done by connectors – please local government management, make sure you find ways of keeping them in fruitful work and onside – because you will be needing them."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

Having been playing with Google+ for a while, I’m starting to get to grips with things. I’m seeing it as a place to talk geeky stuff, where I won’t bore the large group of people I am friends with on Facebook who aren’t obsessed by the internet. Twitter remains my default place to share stuff online though. A few things have occurred to me that would improve the service:

1. Let me sort out my Google identity crisis

A few others have made this point – most consistently, Dan Harrison – but those of us that use Google to host our email using our own domains (ie my dave@kindofdigital.com email address is set up using Google services, and thus is a ‘Google Account’ in its own right) can be in a bit of a pickle.

Luckily I’m not the position that Paul Clarke found himself in, as I’ve always used a vanilla Gmail account for most of my interactions with Google. But it would be nice that those of us who are actually paying for the Google service get as full an experience as those using free accounts.

2. Find a way of making circles quicker

It’s got some lovely little visual tricks, but the circles interface just takes too long to organise. It’s also something that you can only get right after having used the service for a while – ie once you’ve already got hundreds of people in your circles and it’s too much of a pain to fix.

In other words, circles has got the technology pretty right, but the process isn’t great and Google needs to find a way of speeding it up.

3. Make better use of my other streams: email, docs, Reader

It strikes me that Google has a bunch of my other content and information that it could be making use of within the Google+ interface. After all, through Reader it knows what my favourite websites are, and which I pay most attention to. With Docs it knows who I probably work with, because I share documents with them.

It would be great if G+ became my Google service dashboard, where I can access all my own Google-stored data but also all the stuff shared by the people I know.

4. There is a distinction between +1ing something and sharing it, but it isn’t that pronounced

I guess the comparison to Twitter is that +1ing an item is like marking it as a favourite; and sharing is like retweeting. But Twitter is a very different beast to G+ and I’m often left wondering whether I should share, or +1 a bit of content. In the end, I usually don’t bother to do either.

5. Why on earth hasn’t Google killed off Buzz? It’s another potential confusion

Not much more to be said. Buzz was Google’s previous effort at doing something like Twitter… and not only have they not killed it off, they even include a user’s Buzz updates as a tab in their Google+ profiles. I don’t know why this is there as it appears to be a confusing duplication of effort and features.

Maybe all I want is FriendFeed?

Whilst I was thinking about all this, it made me wonder whether the grand sharing tool I seem to want Google+ to be might in fact exist, in the form of FriendFeed, the forgotten social sharing site bought by Facebook a few years ago.

I went and took a look, and lo! FriendFeed still seems to be running, albeit without much love. Here’s mine.

If you’re new to the site, it enables you to pull all your social content into one place (tweets, bookmarks, blogposts, Facebook statuses, shared Google Reader items, etc etc) and subscribe to other people’s feeds.

One downside to this is a bit of duplication (ie, if I post something on my blog, and then tweet a link to it, it’ll appear twice in my FriendFeed) – but that’s easy enough to overlook.

So I do wonder if, for Google+ to have something that sets it apart, looking back to FriendFeed might be a good idea.

What I’ve been reading

August 22, 2011

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting – "Large collaborative projects aren't, in fact, large collaborative projects according to Shirky. They're small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort."
Clay Shirky Says Good Collaboration is Structured Fighting – "Large collaborative projects aren't, in fact, large collaborative projects according to Shirky. They're small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort."
Will it be orange? | Government Digital Service – Is orange a good colour for a government website?
Does democracy have to be political? | The Democratic Society – "I can’t be the only one who has been struck by the way in which the people getting involved with the community clear-ups after the riots have been so keen to state that their motive is not political."
Opening government, the Chicago way – O’Reilly Radar – "To get anywhere close to achieving that goal, Chicago will have to close the IT gap between the public and private sector, particularly in the emerging field of data science."

You can find all my bookmarks on Pinboard.

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