Here’s a grab bag of miscellaneous media news:
The Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) is joining the Open Mobile Video Coalition, taking the group from 281 stations to 422 stations, the coalition said last month.
The association promotes the use of broadcaster’s ATSC system for mobile video. The new members join Belo, Fox Television Stations, Gannett Broadcasting, Gray Television, ION Media Networks, NBC, Telemundo Stations, Sinclair and Tribune Broadcasting.
Broadcasters’s mobile video will have competition from dedicated mobile tv transmitters belting out 50 kilowatts on the 700MHz band. Mobile tv transmitters, primarily used by cell phones, use two major (incompatible) OFDM-based standards; DVB-H and Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO.
The European Commission (EC) supports the DVB-H standard. It seeks a single mobile TV standard to avoid market fragmentation. The EC favors DVB-H over QUALCOMM’s MediaFLO and the DMB standard because it has the widest deployment in Europe, with successful commercial launches and trials in 18 countries there. The EC estimates that the market could be worth up to 20 billion euros by 2011. Datamonitor says Europe will have 42.7 million mobile broadcast TV subscribers by 2012.
Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, on channel 55, is used by Verizon in the United States (and soon another carrier, rumored to be AT&T). But the 700 MHz band also includes, channel 54 and channel 59, bought by Aloha Partners, for DVB-H mobile television (although no carriers yet promote it). The 700MHz auction may add more one-way tv channels — the unpaired frequency on channel 56 is a likely candidate.
Whether DVB-H will win — controlling some 36 mobile television channels (12 mobile channels x three frequencies) or loose to Qualcomm’s MediaFLO, (currently only on one 700 MHz frequency), remains to be seen. Broadcasters (understandably), want to use their own ATSC digital television transmitters, but can only dedicate a small slice of their 6 MHz spectrum to mobile video — and they must develop a standard around ghost-prone ATSC. A good trick.
Both public and private radio networks are “jazzed” about the potential of conditional access on HD radio — otherwise known as “pay radio” (FCC docs).
Ibiquity, the developer of HD Radio, used by U.S. terrestrial broadbasters, hired NDS Ltd., the big British company that handles subscriber authorizations for many pay TV and satellite TV companies. NDS also developed “conditional access” systems for MediaFlo as well as Sprint’s Mobile WiMAX television.
Another difference between mobile television (supplied by Qualcomm and its mobile competitors), is that mobile operators pay for their frequencies. Corporate media gets their local radio and television channels for free (after “strip ‘n’ flip” corporate buyouts). Taxpayers in the United States allow corporate media to “own” broadcast frequencies at zero cost — in exchange for their “public service”.
How fair is that? Should taxpayers subsidize newspapers?
Meanwhile, the web-based sourcing system Public Insight Journalism, developed by Minnesota Public Radio, is gaining far-flung users through pilot partnerships with radio networks in Colorado, New Hampshire, Oregon and North Carolina.
The initiative cultivates radio and web audiences as potential sources in news stories and helps reporters find individuals who can bring expertise and personal experience. For example, a husband whose wife suffers from dementia and lives in a nursing home came forward to describe his relationship with another woman—one whose partner has Alzheimer’s disease and lives in the same nursing home. The story, reported by Dan Gorenstein, was picked up by NPR’s Day to Day, and This American Life. “We might not have come across that story—it was one of the gems,” Greenberg said.
Tonight the PBS series Expose, has a program on The Oregonian’s story by Les Zaitz, Jeff Kosseff and Bryan Denson (watch)
Could a well-intentioned government program become a cash machine for businessmen bent on enriching themselves at the expense of the disabled? In 1971, Congress created a program to channel federal contracts to charities that train and employ workers who are blind or have severe disabilities. Known as JWOD (named after the law that created it, the Javits-Wagner-O’Day act), it eventually came to have a $2 billion dollar budget.But no one, it appears, was keeping track of where that money was going, until journalists from The Oregonian decided to have a look. What they found was abuse of the system and anemic oversight resulting in a massive bilking of taxpayers and precious few jobs for the genuinely disabled.
The Oregonian won a Pulitzer for the story on the Kim Family search (the C/Net staffer), but was also a finalist for national reporting on their 2006 story seen in tonight’s Expose: Charity a launchpad for entrepreneur’s empire.
In Tackling Life, The Sacramento Bee set out to tell the story behind the drumbeat of dire statistics related to young African American males. It did so through the lens of a youth football team formed in 1992, tracing the lives of five key players in the ensuing 15 years.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Gannett Mobilizes News, Microsoft Disputes FCC Unlicensed Finding, E-Books Now, Qualcomm Down on 1-2 Punch, X Games Goes Live, FCC Finalizes Rules on 700MHz: Limited Open Access, No Wholesale Requirement, Open Ads and Kim Search Story Wins Prize.
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