Tim Hwang

The mediageek radioshow airs live this Thursday, August 20 at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Evanston-Chicago, IL and online at www.wnur.org. If you have questions or comments for Tim Hwang send them to me by email – paul(at)mediageek(dot)net – or by twitter. The syndicated podcast will be posted Sunday night, or you can listen to the show on any of the thirteen other affiliates listed at the radioshow site.

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A screen shot of an online chat with an Apple rep purports to show that Apple blames AT&T for the Google Voice block. For its part AT&T says it “does not manage or approve applications for the App Store.”

It’s a tangled web at the moment, but still one thing is clear: while Blackberry and Android phone users can get Google Voice, iPhone users are blocked.

But it’s not just about Google Voice, though this instance appears to have come at the right time, with a newly confirmed and tech-savvy FCC Chairman, along with a full slate of commissioners for the first time since 2008. There are other apps you can’t get in the iPhone store, and those that are crippled–like Skype and the Sling Player–presumably to protect AT&T’s cellular voice and cable TV services from competition.

While it’s true one can still go shopping for a different phone or a different carrier to avoid some of these restrictions, it’s also true that not every carrier or phone is available everywhere. There are places where you can’t get an iPhone, and places where you can only get a smartphone by using AT&T, Verizon or Sprint. Increasingly it’s looking like the worst fears of Net Neutrality advocates have come to mobile devices first.

Veteran FCC watchers are actually amazed at how fast Chairman Genachowski responded to the Google Voice iPhone story, since the agency isn’t known for quick action. Such responsiveness may be an indicator as to how critical the potential threat is to free and open communications, given the likelihood that soon more people will access the ‘net via a mobile device than with a PC.

We’ll be discussing this topic on Thursday’s mediageek radioshow with guest Tim Karr who recently blogged about the topic for Free press.

I want to know what you think: should the FCC or Congress step in to regulate mobile cellular and broadband networks and devices? Should the government act to limit handset exclusivity and curtail the power of Apple and AT&T to reject applications that might promote competition?

I’ll be reading your responses live on the radioshow. Send them to me three ways: comment on this post, send me an email (paul[at]mediageek[dot]net), or respond via twitter.

The radioshow airs live this Thursday at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at WNUR.org. If you’re listening live we’ll also be taking your calls at 847-866-9687. The following week you can listen to the podcast archive online or on any of the 13 other mediageek affiliate stations.

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Most of the rest of the show was dedicated to Time-Warner Cable announcement today (April 16) that it was going to hold off on “testing” bandwidth caps in Austin, San Antonio, Rochester, NY and Greensboro, NC. There’s lots of good reporting on the issue over at Ars Technica.

The podcast will be available this weekend.

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Of course, this situation begs the question of why the cops felt the need to have a second 2-way radio in the first place, given that police departments have their own set of frequencies set aside for just their use. Makes a person wonder just what, besides profanities, the cops were talking about on the 2-meter band that they didn’t want to talk about over normal police frequencies.

As it turns out the 2-meter band wasn’t such a good choice if privacy was their motivation. Hams tend to be pretty protective of the bands allocated for amateur radio, policing them pretty closely, generally on a 24-hour basis.

According to a local news report, “the FCC is letting Indianapolis police handle the issue internally,” even though apparently, “officer use of unauthorized frequencies goes back many years.” Should we be surprised at the double-standard in the treatment of flagrant unlicensed use of the airwaves? If the culprits had been plain old civilians making potty-mouthed broadcasts for “many years” without a license on the 2-meter band do you think the FCC would let them off the hook without a notice of apparent liability, nevermind a fine?

While I’ve been critical of the FCC’s policies for the licensing of broadcast stations and the accompanying enforcement measures, I do believe in equal treatment under the law. Seems as though having a badge means you can abuse the airwaves without a license, with the only punishment being that your chief will take your toys away.

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Last Tuesday’s presidential inauguration was one of those moments where I think all business except for vital functions like transit and public safety stopped all over the country as people tuned in to watch Obama’s swearing in. Another thing that stopped for a lot of people was the internet. Arguably this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest live streaming video events in the history of the event. It was also one of biggest tests for streaming video over the internet, and the results were decidedly mixed.

I was at work on Tuesday, where one of my responsibilities is providing instructional media support. As soon as I got in that morning I started getting requests from people all over our building to set them up to watch the inauguration. Now, the building I work in is poured concrete monstrosity that acts like a Faraday cage, successfully blocking reception of most broadcast signals. On top of that, there’s no cable TV in building. So I advised anyone who asked about getting a TV that they should consider viewing a live stream. Then I went to go set up a live stream in a large conference room with a video projector. At that moment I realized that maybe the live stream wasn’t going to work out so well, as it took many different attempts on several different sites before we could get anything to stream for more than a few seconds. That was around 30 minutes before the inauguration was set to begin.

When I returned to my office all attempts to get a stream there–whether from CNN, Ustream or even the CBC–resulted in failure. A few minutes after the ceremony began I received an email from our central IT network department, advising us that our multi-gigabit campus network had ground to a halt due to people watching the inauguration online. Looking at Twitter and the CNN live Facebook stream I saw that we were not alone, as folks all over the internet were finding it hard to get a reliable stream.

In the end it looks like about 7 million people were able to get live streams of the inauguration, according to Dan Rayburn whose estimates are based on talking to actual content distribution networks. By any standard that’s an impressive simultaneous viewership for the internet. But it’s less impressive compared to broadcast television, where 37.8 million people watched the inauguration.

More illustrative of the difference is the number of people who were denied the ability to watch the inauguration due to capacity limits. That is, another 37 million people could have tuned in to the inauguration on broadcast, cable or satellite TV while still leaving capacity for 37 million more. Whereas on the internet 7 million appears to be the upper limit — past that nobody else could watch.

That’s because streaming internet video is based upon a technology called unicast. With unicast every single viewer is getting a unique stream of data from a video server on the internet. So, if the video stream requires a bandwidth of 256kbps, then ten viewers requires 2.5 megabits, and a hundred viewers require 25 megabits. So, how much do you reckon 7 millions viewers might require? Using my thumbnail estimations, the number is in the region of 1700 gigabits. On top of that the video provider streaming that content has to pay the bandwidth for each and every one of those viewers.

Although there are certainly costs associated with reaching larger audiences in the broadcast realm in terms of larger transmitters or contracts with cable and satellite providers, by and large each additional viewer to a broadcast channel causes no additional cost to the broadcaster. If CNN and FOX News both are able to reach 50 million households, but only 10 million tune in to CNN but 12 million tune in to FOX, there’s ostensibly no additional cost to FOX to reach those extra 2 million households. But it would be much more expensive to reach 2 million more with internet streams.

The reason why this difference is important is because so many arguments in favor of loosening ownership rules for broadcast or justifying the Clear Channelesque gutting of our broadcast media is that the internet provides a rich, nearly infinite alternative tailored to many more diverse and narrow interests. Of course, I’d be fool to say that’s not entirely true. Indeed the internet is a medium that enables many more people to become small-scale narrowcasters at very low cost compared to broadcast TV or radio. Yet, it is still ill-equipped to offer a live, truly mass media experience on the scale and magnitude that television and radio can.

Furthermore, when the a large number of so-called internet broadcasters attempt to offer up such a live broadcast experience it risks bringing the whole enterprise to a halt, getting in the way of other streamed audio or video content. By comparison, 37 million people watching the inauguration on broadcast TV posed no barrier to watching cartoons or home shopping instead.

At root the internet was never intended to be a live broadcast medium. It’s foundational technology, packet-switching, is very efficient for moving data around a diverse, multi-nodal network, and was invented specifically to allow for little pieces of data to move around out-of-sequence and even by different paths, and still be able to be put together whole and in order. It also wasn’t designed to happen in linear real time. The problem with live audio and video is that they’re fundamentally linear — the order of each frame of video and each second of sound is critical, and any misordering renders the program unintelligible. An increase in the speed of the internet combined with clever protocols and programming has made streaming live content with minimal lost data a reality, but it’s still really a hack.

One of the reasons that the inauguration was able to be viewed by 7 million online in the first place is that major content distributors like Akamai have invested heavily in edge servers. With this approach the content you receive comes from a server that is located as geographically close to you as possible, so that the data passes through as few networks as possible, putting less strain on the whole internet. I’m certain that advances in edge networks combined with increased bandwidth capacity at all levels will make the internet more accommodating to live streaming media in the future. But that day is not here yet.

I see the problems with the inauguration streams as a reality check to remind us, and especially our new policymakers in DC, that the potential of the internet as a true media broadcast alternative has not yet arrived. That day will happen only when there’s sufficient investment in and deployment of bigger pipes at all levels of the internet. Yet, this is something that our broadband ISPs don’t necessarily want to see because rich internet streaming poses competition to their cable TV business. So while with one side of their mouth they’ll point to the diversity of the internet as rationale for deregulation and consolidation, with the other side of their mouth they’ll lobby against increasing content-agnostic expansion and network neutrality because of the competition it represents.

We need to invest in our broadband infrastructure, from backbone to last-mile, while keeping the information superhighway open to all traffic, without any prejudicial tolls. It must be a truly neutral network. Only then is there the hope that the internet might be a suitable alternative, supplement or replacement for broadcast media. And until then, we owe it to ourselves to value the broadcast media we have and not to let it be starved to death in the way that’s happened since 1996.

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The first show of the new year featured my annual year in review discussion with John Anderson of DIYmedia.net. In the first half of the program we noted the relative lack of progress on many issues and discussed Larry Lessig’s call to get rid of the FCC. For the second half we got down to brass tacks reviewing John’s research on FCC enforcement action against unlicensed broadcasters in 2008 — a whole lotta smoke, not much fire. Ragnar also excerpted a portion of this on his Pirate’s Week podcast.

Listen to part one of the year-in-review:

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Listen to part two, all about FCC enforcement in 2008:

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However, much is still unknown about Genachowski’s views on media issues, like ownership concentration and indecency enforcement. He was an assistant to Clinton-appointed FCC Chairman Reed Hundt in the 1990s, and we might learn a little bit about Genachowski by looking at his former boss’ tenure at the Commission. With regard to media ownership, Hundt opposed lifting the nationwide radio ownership cap. The lifting of the cap–which brought on the Clear Channel era–happened with the passing of the Telecomm Act of 1996 by Congress, signed by President Clinton, and was not decided by the Hundt FCC. Hundt was also a proponent of children’s programming requirements, while also pushing for indecency fines against the likes of Howard Stern.

We’re sure to learn more about Genachowski’s views on a whole panoply of communication issues when he goes up for confirmation by the Senate. Here’s hoping that his apparently progressive outlook on Net Neutrality is combined with the willingness to put the brakes on the Bush FCC’s full-speed gallop on loosening media ownership limits. I must admit that ensuring a free and open internet, along with enacting policies to stimulate high-speed broadband build-out really should be the top priority for media and telecomm, above all.

With the lessons learned from the 1996 Telecomm Act and the ill-considered experiment of taking away common carrier status from internet (therefore creating the need for Net Neutrality) there exists a blueprint for creating a much more vibrant, diverse and free media ecology.

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Kodak made the first salvo in the pocket HD-cam arena with their Zi6, which has received decent reviews. Flip’s new Mino HD camcorder just received praises from the New York Times’ gadget reviewer David Pogue. The reliable Camcorder Info also gives it a positive review, ranking it ahead of Kodak’s HD cam.

While it doesn’t seem to offer HD on par with what you’ll see on DTV or with one of the HD camcorders from a major player like Sony or Canon, both reviews emphasize the higher quality than any of the standard-def pocket cams. One strange design choice that both reviews note is that there is a video out jack for standard-def video, but not for high-def. So you can watch your videos directly on your TV, but not in HD. To view HD you have to download the video to your computer.

Each time I write one of these posts I say something like, “I’m going to have to check one of these out.” But I’ve yet to do so. Maybe the holiday season will lead to some super discount deal online that I can exploit, though buying a camcorder is not high on my list at the moment.

Since there is no manual control or microphone input, these cameras are best for recording video in situations where a typical camcorder would be too unwieldy, inconvenient or impossible. However, I think that paired with one of the new-generation digital audio recorders (like a Zoom H2) you might be able to do a decent job recording a lecture or similar event. Just put the audio recorder up close to the subject (or near a PA) speaker, then sync the sound in your editing application, like iMovie or Premiere. Sure, the audio recorder is one more thing to carry. But together with the camcorder they’re still smaller than a typical miniDV, DVD or hard drive camcorder alone.

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The show airs live tonight, Thursdays, 9 – 10 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM Evanston-Chicago, IL and online at WNUR.org. You can catch it on Friday at 5:30 PM on Community Radio WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign-Urbana, IL, which also has a live stream.

If you can’t catch the live streams, the show will be available at the radioshow website this weekend, and airs on thirteen other community stations next week.

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At its Nov. 4 meeting the FCC is scheduled to decide on opening up to broadband wireless internet spectrum being vacated by the analog TV turn-off. Already FCC engineers have released a report endorsing this use of these so-called “white spaces.”

Predictably, the National Association of Broadcasters is going to great lengths to prevent this from happening, sensing a credible threat to their broadcast spectrum oligopoly and plans to turn TV and radio frequencies into tightly-controlled digital networks that are internet-like but mostly useful for helping you spend money. Like in 2000 when they cried “interference” over the creation of 100 watt low-power FM stations next to their 50,000 watt blowtorches, the NAB is challenging the FCC’s own engineers to claim that opening up white spaces for what is being called “wi-fi on steroids” will cause interference to television broadcasts. Nevermind that the FCC engineer’s are about as cautious and conservative a bunch you’ll ever find, backed up by independent analysts time and again.

So what do you do when you’re a industry lobbying group that doesn’t have the engineering facts on your side? Why, you lobby Congress with bogus arguments hoping they’ll intervene! The NAB also filed a request with the FCC to delay the vote, which doesn’t seem to be getting a warm reception at the Commission.

It’s no secret that the broadcast industry isn’t in great shape, largely due to decades of backwards-looking, anti-innovation business moves combined with repeated Congressional and FCC lobbying efforts to win regulatory protection in direct conflict with their free-market rhetoric. Now the NAB has no problem blocking the potential for greater nationwide broadband internet access that could be especially valuable to rural and other underserved areas. Just think, anywhere that can receive an over-the-air TV signal now could be receiving broadband internet wirelessly.

Groups like Free Press are running campaigns to help reach out to your congresscritters, though I’m betting they’re unlikely to pay much attention to the NAB’s bellyaching right now.

I’ll also be covering the issue on this week’s radioshow, with eagle-eyed FCC watcher Matthew Lasar joining to bring maximum analysis to the situation.

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