Why BBC iPhone apps are a bad thing
BBC iPhone apps: exciting, but they should never see the light of day. Here’s why:
The tide is turning against the BBC. Whoever grabs power at the next election will be faced with a gaping black hole where the Bank once stood – every tax will be scrutinised, and the TV licence is likely to be seen as an inessential frippery.
Worse, while the tax-funded BBC is developing brilliant products (iPlayer, BBC News, HD, 3D) at a startling pace, the UK’s commercial media industry struggles to raise advertising and grapples with the impossibilities of charging for its wares online. It’s all falling apart.
The battle for the desktop is lost. People won’t pay for an in-browser experience. Which is why the holy grail for media is mobile. Because folks are willing to pay for stuff on iPhone and Android. Hence The Guardian can successfully charge £2.49 for an (admittedly lovely) iPhone app that does little more than repurpose its website. And so every magazine maker is looking to develop iPhone (and iPad) apps that replicate the magazine experience. Apps they can charge for. Every month.
So when the BBC rides into this nascent market and delivers free apps offering brilliant news, sports and video, it devalues the market. The BBC doesn’t need to chase after sponsors or wonder how to fit advertising onto a tiny screen. It doesn’t need to offer a premium service or get inventive with in-app purchases. It doesn’t even need come up with a business plan.
So as an iPhone user, and BBC fan, I want free BBC iPhone apps. But this time I have to play the role of killjoy: we’re more likely to see a healthy media industry – and therefore a reason to keep the licence-funded BBC – without free BBC iPhone apps.
The buzz on Buzz
I’m not exactly convinced by Google Buzz. And I’m not alone. I was asked by Mercedes Bunz at the Guardian to provide a comment on Google’s new social networking service – and there seems to be a consensus among those polled that Buzz is a long way from success.
I was asked “Will Buzz help Google keep up with Facebook?”. I replied:
“Buzz doesn’t have anything like the scope of Facebook. It’s more akin to Twitter – but it doesn’t really offer anything new. Sure, you can publish pics and videos, but any self-respecting Twitter software will do that too. And being able to type long status updates in Buzz ignores one of Twitter’s great appeals: distilling a thought into 140 characters.
But friends are more crucial than features – and there’s no escaping the fact that Twitter and Facebook have critical mass. Buzz will have all the appeal of an empty disco until it integrates fully with existing social networks, allowing you to aggregate and publish to all your social feeds at once.”
I was intrigued by the comments by Candace Kuss, who points out that Google is becoming less engineering-driven and more brand-driven. Unfortunately, as Candace points out, the Google brand is starting to feel more Microsoft than Apple, right down the colours in the logo.
VIDEO: CES 2010 in review
Never one to shy away from the limelight, I humbly present my coverage of CES for Stuff.tv, scripted, recorded and edited from the comfort of Teddington Studios, with the ever-helpful and often abusive Timothy Bunn manning camera and chopping suite.
VIDEO: The Future Squad’s verdict on tech in 2020
Since the demise of Tomorrow’s World there’s been a disappointing lack of hair-brained futurological speculation on the BBC.
Which is why it was an honour to be invited to be a part of The Future Squad for the BBC News website, alongside such luminaries as inventor Trevor Bayliss and scientist Robin Mannings.
You can see the whole three minutes of liquid-crystal-ball gazing over on the BBC News website. I look forward to the shame of seeing just how wrong I was in a decade’s time.
Tom Dunmore is HM 'Mad' Murdoch in… The Future Squad
The future of news: to pay or not to pay?
This evening I gave a speech as part of a panel debate about the future of news – and, in particular, whether anyone will ever be convinced to pay for the news in this post-paper era. The debate was, funnily enough, organised by online news aggregator fingertips.net.
As I sat down to think about what I was going to say tonight, I was struck by the parallel with the music industry. For the past decade, I’ve been writing about the way the music industry has failed to embrace digital, and crumbled as a result. – like many journos I’ve been sitting in the sidelines lobbing bricks at The Man.
And now, we journalists are facing our own digital waterloo, and despite furious work, we find ourselves as under the same threat as the record companies. Except we have no Fergeal Sharkey to wheel out on TV – he can get away with saying that you’ve got to pay for music because if you don’t the artists won’t get paid. But who cares if the journos get paid? Most people couldn’t even name a journalist, or if they could it’s because that particular writer’s bigotry has put them on the front pages.
Video: talking convergence on BBC2’s Working Lunch
I went on BBC’s Working Lunch today, to talk about the Pure Sensia with Declan Curry.
The Sensia is a DAB/FM/Internet radio that looks a little like a B&W Zeppelin with a large iPod Touch taped to the front. Unfortunately, the BBC hasn’t quite joined the Wi-Fi revolution yet, so we weren’t able to test out the Sensia’s web apps.
We talked about convergence instead. In something that looked a bit like a shed. But only a bit.
Facing the post-media world
Today’s Observer (in print form) alerted me to an excellent essay on the future of media – Post-Medium Publishing, by Paul Graham.
The jist of his theory: Rupert Murdoch’s belated attempts to charge for online ‘content’ is doomed to failure, because the publishing model only works when you’re producing physical formats – when you’re buying the Observer, you’re buying a sheaf of paper. It’s been marked up to £2 because it contains some interesting words, but the words themselves don’t have a monetary value. Ditto music: it’s the physical disc that gives the music value. People value the physical.
There are notable exceptions, particularly if those words lead to generating more money – which explains why the Financial Times can get away with charging online, while the Sun really can’t. But hell, maybe Murdoch’s a visionary. Or maybe he’s just playing hardball with Google, and is hoping to walk away with an income from the search giant rather than internet users.
I don’t agree with all Mr Graham’s points – I find his argument that iTunes is a stealth tax rather than a successful publishing business is a little hard to swallow – but it’s hard to argue with his conclusion:
“I don’t know exactly what the future will look like, but I’m not too worried about it… When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.”
I really liked two other parts of Post-Media Publishing: its title, and Paul Graham’s disdain for the word ‘content’:
“I don’t like the word “content” and tried for a while to avoid using it, but I have to admit there’s no other word that means the right thing. “Information” is too general. Ironically, the main reason I don’t like “content” is the thesis of this essay. The word suggests an undifferentiated slurry, but economically that’s how both publishers and audiences treat it. Content is information you don’t need.”
Which exactly why the tagline for my post-media creative agency Flying Leaf is ‘Creating stuff you’ll love. Just don’t call it content.”
Like Paul Graham, I’m not worried about the future. The slow death of old media creates hugely exciting opportunities for those of us interested in the way that brands communicate with people. But I’m worried about this word ‘content’. It’s time for us arty farty creative types to come up with a word that’s more engaging to describe our craft.
See my previous posts:
Pirates don’t kill music: lawyers do
Facebook costs business £1.4bn? Absolute rubbish
There’s a survey doing the rounds today saying that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are costing UKPLC £1.4bn in lost productivity. This sort of narrow-minded reactionary drivel really scuffs my nostrils.
The survey says workers spend an average of 40 minutes on social networkings sites every week, which amounts to a ‘almost a week out of every year’. I’d love to work somewhere with 32 hour week. But that’s not the point – I’m not protesting about the sums. Nor even the ludicrousness of the claims (though I wonder what affect more roughage in our diet is having on the length of toilet breaks? And how much time is lost to blinking?).
What really annoys me is that the survey fails to recognise the way our work patterns are changing. If we check social media sites at work it’s likely we also check work email at home. In fact, now that we have smartphones, we’re constantly connected – and for many people, that means constantly on the job.
Work isn’t always binary thing: it doesn’t switch on at 9am and off at 5.30. It doesn’t pause for exactly 60minutes at lunch. It’s a flow, and one that all-too-often threatens to overwhelm everything else. Social networking is a lifeline, a sanity check. It’s also a great way for a business to connect to its employees and its customers.
What’s needed is a sophisticated approach to technology and work patterns that can be beneficial for all involved – something that almost every board and IT manager is struggling to understand. But pernicious little surveys like this one provide an excuse to reach for the ‘off’ switch.
But hey, the survey was commissioned by an IT services provider – that’s probably the way they’re used to solving tech problems.
In real life, the easy answer is usually the wrong one.
Video: talking Tory Spotify propaganda on BBC2
One of my more bizarre TV spots as a talking head on the highbrow Daily Politics show on BBC2. Read my thoughts in my previous post, Tories pick Spotify as the new political battleground
Some more of my videos:
Talking upgrade culture with Simon Armitage
Product tour of the B&W Zeppelin mini
Tories pick Spotify as the new political battleground
I’m on my way for my Daily Politics debut on BBC 2 this lunchtime, to talk about the Tories’ new ad on Spotify.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t heard the ad – I’ve been testing out the ad-free Spotify Premium for a feature I’m writing for Stuff – but according to reports it features Conservative chairman Eric Pickles doing a dad-at-the-disco routine. Except that he’s obviously had some savvy scriptwriters, as he apologies for interrupting your listening pleasure with something you don’t want to hear.
He then lays into Gordon Brown’s profligate public spending before suggesting that listeners will have their “chance to end the madness” at next year’s election.
Unsurprisingly, there’s been a bit of a negative buzz around the ad – unsurprising because all Spotify ads are annoying and Twitter has an undeniable a liberal bent – but I also sense a grudging respect. The Tories did Spotify first, and they didn’t do it totally wrong: they hit that youngish, media-savvy audience head on, and set reverberations around the media, old and new.
And many of those reverberations, like this blog, echo the Tory’s central message even if they don’t agree with it. Job done.
There’s been a lot said about Obama’s skilful use of social media in the US presidential election. Spotify – and other web 2.0 services – will be hoping that they will become a political battleground, drawing in much needed advertising revenue while simultaneously stoking demand for the ad-free premium version of the site for those who’d rather listen to Billy Bragg without interruption from Tory grandees.
Will Labour rise to challenge? I suspect so. But if Gordon Brown’s dalliance with YouTube is anything to go by, they could get it terribly wrong.