SuitWatch--September 25

Views on Linux in Business

--by Doc Searls, Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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"The Syndication Solution"

Thursday, September 25, 2003--One of my ongoing writing assignments this year is to tell the story of Linux in webcasting. So far, the big story is all on the big-time supply side. It's huge, and that's only if we take Real Networks into account. I visited Real on my last trip to Seattle (right before last week's Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise--watch the Linux Journal Web site for reports), and I was extremely impressed. These guys are doing some amazing stuff with Linux--and a lot of it. They're another example of a smart company doing the smart thing, deploying Linux back-end servers by the truckload and then increasing the size of the market by contributing development support to the open-source Helix Community.

But, what about the small-time supply side? Or the demand side? What's happening there? I've written a lot about what Bill Goldsmith has done with KPIG and Radio Paradise; see the long list of links below. But Bill is only one broadcaster. Although he's done some great hacks with Linux, MySQL and other LAMP tools, he's a smart and resourceful broadcaster, not a developer. So his hacks are confined to only a few stations. The last time I asked Bill for an assessment of what was going on in the fledgling small-operator webcasting industry, he wrote:

Most Internet radio is pretty heavily Windows-based, since there's lots of cheapie automation software, encoding tools, etc., available for Windows--but in the Linux world you need to "roll your own" from a variety of different bits and pieces. Someday (hopefully soon) I'd like to bring all of those pieces together into a (fairly) easy-to-use package.

He added:

One "radio building block" in particular that you might want to feature is ecasound, a sound-processing utility that I use to do totally professional-grade dynamics processing (peak limiting/compression) on the audio.

Professional audio dynamics compression--what music radio stations use to make themselves sound as loud as possible all the time--traditionally has been expensive. When I was in the radio business, back in the 70s and 80s, the big kahuna in the broadcast audio processing market was Orban. Well, Orban still holds about a 70% share of that market, and the prices of its goods run in the thousands. Meanwhile, ecasound is freeware that's GPLed by Kai Vehmanen and currently at v2.3.0.

Still, that's only one tool, and it's on the supply side. What about the demand side?

I've been investigating the demand side lately as a customer. It's an interesting perspective for me, because my first interest in the business was on the supply side, as a retailer. Many years ago, even before I worked in radio, I ran the audio department of a large department store in New Jersey. This was back when the best audio sources were vinyl, and analog technology was doing its best to push distortion down to large multiples of the near-zero values that are standard in digital products today. In those days a pile of relatively small quality-driven companies constantly upstaged one another in setting standards for the industry. All of them competed for the attention of music lovers and audiophiles. Even when names like Scott, Fisher, Harmon-Kardon, Sherwood, Marantz and McIntosh gave up shelf space (or sold out entirely) to Pioneer, Yamaha, Sony, Sansui and Kenwood, audiophile demand had a real relationship with manufacturer supply. And it showed. Behind my desk are a Yamaha receiver and a Marantz tuner (with a scope) with FM tuners that beat anything on the market today--not only in raw performance, but also in plain usability.

Audiophiles still are around, and they still have relationships with suppliers; but now they're driving only the high-end manufacturers whose names and goods are largely invisible outside specialty magazines and audio/video salons. What's happening on the broad "consumer" side of the market is a rolling mess of disposable goods.

Here's what I found when I went hunting for gear:

1. As a value, reception is dead. As far as the manufacturers are concerned, nobody listens seriously to AM or even FM at home any more. And, nobody gets television from any source other than cable or satellite. Hookups for FM antennas on the backs of receivers and table component radios usually are dumb and terrible, often putting two posts with spring tabs where a coaxial connector ought to go. The AM tuners all are awful too, with terrible reception and subminimal audio, because the chipsets were down-costed almost to zero a decade ago. Often they come with a lousy loop antenna that the user thinks is for FM. So they hook it up to the FM terminals, where the antenna yields bad FM and no AM at all.

   In the town where I live, exactly none of the stores--including Circuit City, Costco, two Radio Shacks and two high-end audio places--had outside antennas hooked up to anything other than satellite TV systems. And, in almost every case, the other display units either had no antennas or the wrong antennas. Nobody seemed to care, because, frankly, few of the units would be used primarily for radio, which has been reduced to an automotive accessory. The main sources for home sound these days are CDs, DVDs, MP3s and cable and satellite.

2. Thanks to the likes of Bose and Cambridge, you can get good speakers at a good price. Of course, you need to have up to six of them at a time if you want surround sound, but hey, credit where due. (Possibly relevant observation: "digital" labels aside, speakers are analog.)

3. The high-end guys are in the central system business. They want you to have a big thing, preferably in a rack, that goes in a closet somewhere and drives speakers all over your house. These racks are controlled by local keypads that few people can understand. Two of our friends have these systems; neither of them understands how to use them. At one house recently, we nearly destroyed the hearing of the children in an outer bedroom when we turned up the volume control at the central unit, which was many rooms away.

4. User interfaces largely are from hell. Teaching accordion would be easier than teaching how to use some of these things--and more worthwhile.

5. There is little awareness, on the part of most manufacturers, that the Internet, much less Internet radio, exists.

So let's go back to the supply side again. Sooner or later, whenever you talk about Internet radio, the question of business models comes up. How can a little one-person station actually make money? Where's the advertising? How many listeners will pony up through PayPal?

Wrong questions, all of them.

We actually have one business model already, in public radio. The problem is public radio continues to operate in nearly complete ignorance of the Net and its potential for building remunerative market relationships with listeners.

This subject came up yesterday morning when Dave Winer complained eloquently about WBUR's nearly complete absence of any systems that allow real market conversations to happen between the station and the customers that keep it in business--namely, its listeners. Like most public stations, WBUR lacks a simple way for listeners to make quick and easy contributions over the Web. That's because, like most big public stations, WBUR is obsessed with obtaining high-paying sponsorships and subscribes to direct mail up-sell mentalities with the rest of us. One look at KQED's support page tells exactly that story.

There's an extreme irony here, because listener- and viewer-supported noncommercial radio and TV are the only forms of broadcasting that actually do business with their users. They are the only ones whose consumers also are the customers. By contrast, commercial broadcasting's consumers and customers are different populations. Calling commercial broadcasting consumers a "market" is misleading, because they aren't on the buying side of the marketplace. They're on the selling side, serving as the product sold to advertisers, at fees based not on what any one consumer offers but on ratings over which only the surveyed few have any influence.

Yet, in spite of the fact that they suffer no split between their consumers and customers, public broadcasters continue to leverage the woe-is-us, please-keep-us-from-dying sales pitch that Pacifica stations wore out their arch-liberal audiences with in the 1960s. It was Pacifica that broke all the ground that public radio has farmed since NPR came along in the 1970s. Pacifica pioneered listener sponsorship, the pledge drive and a host of other weary fundraising traditions, from banks of phone volunteers to parades of re-runs between breaks for appeals by station personalities and visiting celebrities.

With few exceptions, public radio and TV stations show no evidence they even begin to understand the fund-raising potential of the Net, much less the abundant networked sources for original programming, widespread news gathering, community involvement and other virtues public broadcasters love to talk about but practice with a relative rareness that increases with every worthy form of radio that arises outside their cloistered system.

Exhibit A: Christopher Lydon's interview series. Chris is a former New York Times reporter and radio host whose show on WBUR was a favorite for thousands. Now he's doing great radio on the Web through this interview series. Until Chris' series came along, I had no interest in carrying around a portable MP3 player. Now I want one, simply so I can hear his stuff and other stuff like it--including my own countless tapes and digital recordings of conference sessions, plus the hundred or more interviews I've done for Linux Journal and never transcribed. Those all are sitting in boxes on shelves right now. They belong in an archive that can be heard, on an as-wanted basis, over the webio.

Exhibit B: The RSS feed for Chris' interviews. RSS stands for really simple syndication. It's the means by which everything posted on Linux Journal's Web site appears in Google News, plus countless other aggregation services. Syndication quickly is becoming a fundamental Internet service--one by which everything new and linkable can notify the rest of the Net that it now exists. Why shouldn't stations of all sizes, on both radio and television, put out an RSS notification when a new show or song or anything is available? Why not start relationships between RSS sources and the TiVos of the world? Well, only because we're leaving all the innovation up to large manufacturers who remain disconnected from what's really going on or, worse, who are trying to put a whole pile of DRM into our household entertainment systems.

Exhibit C: The Howard Dean campaign. Want to know why Howard Dean is raising so much money on the Net? Two reasons. One reason is he hasn't been bought by large contributors. The more small contributions he receives, the less he owes to anybody in particular. The other reason is he makes contributing easy. There's no minimum, and there are no fancy up-sells for Major Sponsors. It's not a fancy game. It's brick-simple.

There's another reason why Dean succeeds: there's plenty of involvement by volunteers. Everybody who writes for the Web is in a position to contribute to the campaign, whether they like it or not. All they have to do is operate compatibly with the natural marketplace for opinions and ideas.

That's what happened right here a few weeks ago.

On July 22, my piece, called "Saving the Net", went up on the Linux Journal site. The next day, Matthew Gross wrote "Saving the Net, and Politics, According to Doc Searls: or, Bringing out the Bat" on the Howard Dean campaign weblog. The challenge: raise more money on the Web from many contributors than Dick Cheney hoped to raise that weekend at a $2,000/plate fundraising dinner. The goal was to raise more than $250,000. By the time Cheney had his luncheon, the campaign had raised $344,000. By the morning of July 29, the total passed $500,000, from 9,500 people.

Disclaimer: I'm a registered independent and completely non-partisan in my reporting on politics. But I do believe the Dean Campaign is delivering a trainload of clues about how networked markets get smarter faster than most suppliers, whether we're talking about politicians, big media or big retailing.

So the challenge is to network the webcasting marketplace. RSS is one piece. Exposing audio archives is another. And, coming up with a worthy radio is the final one. The DRMeisters of Silicon Valley and Japan aren't going to deliver it. That leaves the job up to us.

It shouldn't be hard. The sources should be Ethernet and Wi-Fi. The tuner should be some kind of open directory setup and/or something that is informed by RSS notifications. (For example, when Terri Gross' "Fresh Air" comes on, I want to know.) Some kind of recording system, or interface, without DRM, is another piece. Then some knobs, speakers, amplifier and outputs to other equipment, and you've got it. Syndication and directory services are the key pieces. Work those out in an open way, and we'll blow old-fashioned broadcasting out of the water.

By the way, I am told by the Dean Campaign that they're looking for some good Linux jocks to work on staff. If you're interested, write to me and I'll pass your name along.

Resources

Smart Companies Doing Smart Stuff

• Real Networks
• How Linux Makes Companies Smarter
• Helix Community

Geek Cruise

• Geek Cruises
• Linux Lunacy

Bill Goldsmith, KPIG, Radio Paradise, ecasound, Broadcast Gear and Linux-Based Radio

• Open Source Radio
• SuitWatch, November 1, 2001
• The Promise of Radio Paradise: An Open-Source Challenge to Commercial Radio
• Bizarre vs. Bazaar
• Silent Mayday
• Why Are So Many Internet Radio Stations Still on the Air?
• Hollywood Steps Up Its Assault on the Net While Webcasting Death March Claims KPIG
• "News in Progress"
• "Mysteries at Sea"
• ecasound
• Orban
• Orban Press Release
• Broadcast Supply Worldwide

Public Radio, News Sources, Consumer Electronics

• Scripting News
• WBUR
• WBUR Support Page
• KQED
• KQED Support Page
• Christopher Lydon
• Christopher Lydon's Interview Series
• Christopher Lydon's RSS Feed
• "Saving the Net"
• Intel, Sony prep digital content standard

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Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. His monthly column in the magazine is Linux for Suits, and his biweekly newsletter is SuitWatch.

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