Writing, super-fast broadband: February 2009 Archives

First published here on 1/12/08

I'm just back from catching up with some friends in the States, where aside from eating too much, I also managed to spend some time playing around with what some people are already calling the new YouTube; Hulu.

At the moment the site only works in the States, where it allows you to watch clips, TV shows and movies from broadcasters like NBC, Fox and others. It's pretty extensive and catching on fast.

Analysts are predicting a pretty quick upward curve in its usage. In some respects what it offers doesn't strike me as entirely new, US MySpace users have been able to watch episodes of their favourite shows on the social networking site for a while. However, where I found Hulu came up trumps was with its high definition offer, something I'm not sure that MySpace offers.

So, the other Sunday I hooked my laptop up to my friend's wireless home network and streamed a high definition movie which I watched on my 10" screen with their three year old. I forget what I watched, but I know it involved characters that were vegetables and that it looked like a Wallace and Gromit film, but with fewer references to cheese.

The cool thing about it, aside from the quality of the movie (by which I mean the imagery, not the already forgotten story,) was that it was entirely free. Every 10 minutes or so I'd get a 30" advert for something. But, as this constituted much less advertising than I might get through standard US TV watching, I figured this was a good deal.

I then used the service again at a couple of airports to watch some short Family Guy clips (no ads) - again streamed in very good quality (although I don't think that Hulu classed them as HD). Each one was a couple of minutes long and they certainly looked as good as the new high quality streams on the BBC's iPlayer.

Suffice to say I'm already signed up to the potential of super-fast broadband, but the experience brought some of the potential alive to me in a way that simply reading about it cannot / does not.

Does anybody else have a similar experiences, or experiences, from places they've visited that they want to share?

First published here on 30/12/08.

Two well know strategists, Robin Foster and Kip Meek (both of whom worked at Ofcom several years ago,) have written an interesting paper for the Social Market Foundation on the future of Public Service Broadcasting (PSB).
 
As with super-fast broadband, the issue of funding is at the cornnerstone of the current debate on the future of PSB. You can find out more about this debate by visiting our PSB blog. In both of these debates the issue of who will pay - and the value of the wider social and economic value of this investment - is never far away. 
 
Ofcom research published in September 2008 suggested that to maintain existing levels of PSB in the UK a total funding requirement of between £330-420m p.a. is needed to sustain public service provision by 2012. By the same token, estimates of the sums needed to deliver a super-fast broadband network across the UK vary from anywhere between £5-30 billion, depending on speeds, deployment technologies, and so on.

With so many demands on the public purse; from banks to hospitals, schools to defence, there's only so much that Government can do and clearly the decision makers will have some tough questions to answer in the near future.
 
Foster and Meek have an interesting take on this, amalgamating the two debates by placing the emphasis on creating high-speed broadband networks, but suggesting that through these networks citizens and consumers would be able to access as much, if not more, PSB content than at present.
 
The document, supported by the BBC and Five, is well worth a read, even if it hasn't attracted as much comment as might have been expected.
 
From my perspective, it does add something new to the mix. Much of the public debate about PSB seems to focus on preserving the current broadcasting ecology, whilst this proposal outlines a different way of doing things. Part of the challenge is that arguably you're not comparing like with like; PSB programming is accessed - and paid for - by almost 100% of homes, whereas existing internet penetration is 68%, with only 58% of homes signed up to broadband.

So, if you were a Minister in these uncertain times, where would you put your money? Would you look to the future by upgrading the existing broadband infrastructure which only two-thirds of the population tend to utilise, or shore up the structure of our current - widely used - PSB broadcasting system?
 
One thing's for sure, it's not an easy decision to make.

There's a risk that we all think super-fast broadband is a "good thing" (copyright Sellar and Yeatman), and so Kate Bevan is right to ask in The Guardian today whether we actually need connections at 50 Mbps or more.

Arguably, based on current consumption patterns the answer for most people is "no".

But if we took that view then we would never see any innovation, and society would risk standing still.

Harry Warner, one of the studio founding Warner brothers, opined in 1927; "who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" Later that year Al Johnson's The Jazz Singer - Hollywood's first talkie - was released and movies changed forever.

But Warner's comments weren't as ridiculous in 1927 as they might seem now. Talking movies were an unproven technology and many people thought they would be little more than a passing fad. In contrast, silent movies were a proven winner with large scale audiences. Now there's only one year-round silent movie cinema that I know of (in LA, and it's fabulous,) whereas every one horse town has a talking movie cinema.

When we talk about the possibilities for super-fast broadband, we're not in too dissimilar a position to Warner et al in the late 20s. We've already speculated about some of the possible uses of super-fast broadband from HD movie downloads to multi-player gaming, but arguably the real innovation will come about as the technology is embedded and becomes established. Consumers will probably start to do things with the technology we haven't considered or thought to be niche. This is exactly what's happened with SMS or many Web 2 applications and will, I'm sure, be equally applicable to a super-fast broadband age.

As they say (repeatedly) in the Field of Dreams, build it and they will come. Who they are, and what they will do with it, of course is another matter altogether...