Today the World Electronic Media Forum decamped to the HQ of the European Broadcasting Union, close to Palexpo, but so badly signposted that I arrived half an hour late. The EBU is another of those inter-governmental organisations that inhabits Geneva, and is beautifully appointed. The conference room has the usual booths for translation, plugs sockets for all EU countries, and Ethernet- and WiFi-based Internet access (though I only discovered the latter at the end of the day).
The workshop was entitled 'New Media and Broadcasting - Time Machine for the 21st Century', with each session rather engagingly named after a HG Wells novel.
Highlights of 'The Shape of Things to Come' included the Swissinfo.com search engine which includes text and time-based media. The presentation from Microsoft's Patrick Griffis concluded by flagging up the possibility of 'broadcast Ethernet', employing unused TV and radio frequencies. The eccentric German technical researcher Gerhard Stoll (ARD/ZDF/IRT) exemplified technological madness in his discussion of the future of audio, allowing no room for any thoughts of social trends or other practical issues. (He could speak English faster than I can, and maintain multiple trains of thought in a second language, so he can't be all bad.)
'When will it all stop, and what are the forces that shape new media change?' was the title of the talk by EBU's David Wood. He argued that there is not one media future to predict, there are many. He contended that the 'butterfly effect' created changes that while initially unnoticed could later be important, and that instead we should look to the attractors for change, rather than the events. He made an empirical case for cyclical platform development, for instance in HDTV (high definition TV), between the EU, US and Japan, where each region improves on the others' achievements, leading to adoption. (Of course this doesn't make sense in the case of a technology that just isn't of its time... perhaps like HDTV.) I responded to him, making a case for prediction based on an appropriate understanding and synthesis of business models, technology possibilities, social trends and human needs, looking at how people want to do things, and what is usable. We really need some industry leadership in forecasting!
'The Day of the Comet' focused on digital TV. Masaru Ideo, of the Japanese broadcaster NHK, talked about their HDTV research, which began in the 60s. He showed a wonderful HD video made, in Antarctica, of a solar eclipse by the moon (the 'black sun'). It had been made to sell the idea of HDTV, and should certainly have done the job. NABA spokesman Michael McEwan gave a detailed and engaging description of US plans for analogue switch-off and adoption of HDTV -- which are much further advanced that I had suspected. His section on the right conditions for successful digital television transition could well be applied to other information technology rollouts.
Gabriel Fehervari of Belgium-based Euro1080 outlined his company's plans to become the first EU HDTV broadcaster. After the session I talked to his assistant, Vicky De Beule, who was much more lucid about the possibilities for HDTV. Using sport and cultural events she outlined a model in which cinemas could be used for live broadcasts of soccer games during the next World Cup, and allow people to watch operas with high quality images and sound. Cinemas need to utilise their daytime downtime, and many older people don't like going out in the evening, so broadcasting cultural events (downloaded asynchronously) during the makes sense. Cinemas will soon have to upgrade to digital projection so the investment in kit for HDTV projection would be amortised more quickly.
The discussion in the session was very useful. Issues brought up included the implications of HDTV for makeup and set design, the need for people to move to 16:9 aspect ratio so that footage can be easily integrated and legacy material viewed appropriately, and the possibility that with better quality images audiences may want slower editing, so they can better appreciate them. Another issue is how people will record and share HDTV shows and the implications for PVRs and VCRs. More generally, people are increasingly combining TV watching with other activities, such as Web browsing, or they have the TV on in the background. This trend mitigates against HDTV, but there may be more trends in its favour. Another question from the audience, and one that should have been addressed, was whether HDTV would change the content and type of programming. Certainly, new technologies don't tend to ape old media forms for long.
'When the Sleeper Awakes' addressed interactivity and the user. Andreas Weiss of German broadcaster ARD gave an excellent reflective talk on the history of media forms and the kinds of discourse they facilitated, and claimed that newspaper readers at the time of the Crimean War were much better informed that those who followed the third Gulf War on TV. Newspapers, he argued, allowed public debate to be broadened, as newspaper reading was a public affair (presumably in coffee houses and the like), and frequently stimulated debate. Radio and TV were powerful, he noted, but less capable than print of communicating complex messages. This point was nicely illustrated with a 1932 quote from Brecht. He concluded that interactive services can be developed to heal these deficiencies.
In the debate I contended that the problems of political discourse were not caused by limits or changes in media affordances and thus couldn't be fixed by them. More likely, trying to use interactive media for social policy would turn people off interactive media. (New Labour's current Big Conversation in the UK may be a case in point.)
Graham Dixon spoke as a representative of BBC Radio 3, and is also a delegate to the EBU. He discussed developments in the BBC's radio models, though noting that their focus was on audiences not technology ("Is this new toys for the boys, or are we delivering?" he asked rhetorically). He added that broadcasters still had a duty to inform, educate, and entertain, and the question was whether they should carry on with this role, or enhance it. He noted how DAB had been taken up as a result of new audiences being addressed, not because people were demanding better quality. Giving presence to radio shows on the Web, and the celebrated BBC Radio Player, had allowed listeners to find other shows and channels that were of interest to them. People were also listening to DAB via appropriately enabled TV sets. He also advertised a forthcoming DAB radio that would allow listeners, in a TiVo-like fashion, to pause live broadcasts.
Nokia's Martin Sandelin focused on broadcast media and phones, citing three mega-trends: the falling Cost of producing unique, personalised content (for instance Weblogs), convergence into one end user terminal that people will carry with them, and the ability to reach people and allow them to interact wherever they are. He noted that mobile phones were the only 'new thing' that people don't leave home without. He discussed the tendency to built radios into mobile phones, and claimed that they "have the perfect interface for radio tuning". He also discussed a concept for 'visual radio' that would include images, text, and notifications. It would tell you the name of the musician currently playing, and let you order ringtone based on the song, or whole song. "A totally new interactive media is being created", he claimed. If the enabling conditions are met, he concluded, half the world (4 billion people) will have a mobile device by 2015, and these would be voice-, data-, radio- and TV-enabled.
Nokia is certainly on a kick with the mobile devices game. It sees the unwired developing world as its market to lose, and it has a point. However Sandelin falls into the same traps as many other convergence-boosters. The mobile phone is the Swiss army knife of connected devices. It is not great at anything (even voice) and people only use such devices in the absence of something better. A key problem is the user interface, which is far from ideal for most tasks. Rather, we need to see integration across devices, allowing people to configure one device from another, and use different devices to access the same material, depending on their context of use. The open standards that allow this kind of activity in the PC world are alien to the mobile phone industry. His banal response was that cellphones already have an embedded Web browser, giving you the experience of a $1000 connected PC on a mobile phone. Right.