Month: August 2009

advertising innovation in action

Here’s a Hollywood-based analysis of sign spinning:

Some of these spinners are quite good and can be fun to watch. But again, I just wonder how useful it all is. Personally, I think they should set up the sign on a stand and [hire] performers to do stuff in front of the sign.  That or women in bikinis.

That’s dead-end thinking of traditional media.

Another whole world of value lives within persons.  Forget about supply and demand.  Have more fun with what you’re doing.  Create more enjoyment for others.  The business will come.  And if it doesn’t, you haven’t wasted any time.

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Thanks for contributions to the above video:

Music by Sackcloth Fashion, courtesy of BeatPick.com / CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Creative Commons License
Sign Spinners by Douglas Galbi is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

distribution networks for digital cinema

A geographically inclusive transition of movie theaters to digital cinema will require geographically comprehensive high-bandwidth connectivity.  Movie theaters offer cheap, popular entertainment.  The physical distribution of film prints places little economic and technological constraint on movie theater location.  Hence movie theaters are geographically ubiquitous.  Digital cinema, however, may make movie theater location practically relevant to movie distribution.

The bandwidth required for distributing digital cinema depends on formats and compression technology.  The leading specification for current digital cinema, the Digital Cinema Initiatives specification, prescribes a maximum image bit rate of 250 Mbit/s (megabits per second) and a maximum audio bit rate about 5 Mbit/s.  A plausible compression ratio of 10 thus implies bandwidth about 25 Mbit/s for real-time transmission of a single digital-cinema movie.  If a movie theater shows a different movie every day, it might have roughly 12 hours to acquire a movie from a digital network.  Thus connectivity of several megabits per second would be sufficient for non-real-time showing of current digital cinema formats.  Being able to show live events, however, is an important advantage of digital cinema.  Moveover, newer higher definition and 3-D digital formats will require greater bandwidth.  For example, the  Super Hi-Vision format specifies a 25 Gbit/s native image rate, and researchers envision a 80 Mbit/s compressed signal.

Both satellite systems and incumbent telephone companies have networks that could provide geographically ubiquitous distribution of digital movies to movie theaters.  Satellites are a good technology for geographically comprehensive broadcasting of high-bandwidth signals.[*]  A satellite distribution network, however, confronts location-specific issues such as satellite line-of-sight, signal fade in rain and snow, and aesthetic and zoning concerns about satellite dish placement. Despite their business being focused on over-the-air broadcasting, traditional television networks and other analog video service providers in 2008 spent an estimated $100 million purchasing legacy wireline video transmission capacity from telephone companies.  That figure suggests that satellite distribution systems for digital cinema are likely to require significant complementary wireline network services.  Telephone company video transmission revenue seems to be concentrated in telephone company service areas covering New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.  These cities are associated with key video sources and video production facilities that probably require wireline transmission to satellite uplink facilities.  Wireline complements to satellite-based digital cinema distribution systems may be concentrated in those cities. Short inter-premises wireline links might be used elsewhere to place a (downlink) satellite dish off the site of a movie theater. The extent of such siting issues isn’t clear, but might matter for a geographically comprehensive transition to digital cinema.

Digital cinema offers exciting new possibilities for movie theaters.  Independent theater operators are concerned about being left behind in this transition.  Without good national broadband network development, a weak distribution network for digital cinema might be a problem.

Note:

[*] Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp. (formerly Access Integrated Technologies, also called AccessIT) is a leader in digital cinema distribution.  Through its acquisition of FiberSat Global Services, it acquired a data storage and uplink facility at the Los Angeles International Media Center and capacity to distribute digital cinema via Ku-band and C-band satellites. In Oct. 2007, AccessIT (now Cinedigm) announced Cinelive, a new proprietary product to bring live 2-D and 3-D content to digital movie theaters.

mountains of telecom data for crowd fun

Huge archives of files containing U.S. local-exchange telephone companies’ service volumes, rates, and revenue from 1992 to 2009 are now available for collaborative reformatting, organizing, and analyzing.  U.S. local-exchange telephone companies that the Federal Communications Commission regulates via price caps publicly file annual tariff review data.  These data include service volume (demand) and rates for every interstate access services provided under price-cap regulation.  The data also include various aggregations of service revenues as well as price indexes used within price-cap regulation.

The source archives consists of standardized (by year) Tariff Review Plans (TRPs) and ad-hoc rate detail files.  The files are specific to a filing year (1992-2009) and a price-cap-regulated telephone company service area. The filings consist of annual tariff review filings (usually from about June 15 of a given year), as well as some additional filings (revisions, restructurings) in the these formats.  Some filings for years prior to 2003 could not be located.  The original source files are in Lotus 1-2-3 .wk3 and .wk4 format.  The price-cap archive contains 2,946 Lotus 1-2-3- files (with a few other format files) and has a total uncompressed size of 4.04 gigabytes.  The rate-detail archive contains 2,473 Lotus 1-2-3 files and has a total uncompressed size of 1.39 gigabytes.

I’ve already made some of the data much more accessible, organized it, and done some analysis that illustrates its use. I organized and categorized all the rate elements for Bell Atlantic and all the rate elements for US West from 1990 to 2009 and put them into tab-delimited text datasets.  I also created a tab-delimited text dataset of a section of the Tariff Review Plans (TRPs) for thirteen large,  historical telephone company service areas from 1992 to 2009.  You can find some of my analysis of the data in this blog’s network connectivity category.

Much useful work remains to be done with the data.  One important task is to make all the source data more easily and universally accessible.  Neither OpenOffice.org Calc nor Microsoft Excel 2007 (nor the forthcoming 2010 Excel product) read Lotus 1-2-3 .wk3 and .wk4 files.  Microsoft Excel 2003 does open the files.  Lotus 1-2-3 can still be purchased, now at a suggested retail price of $313.  Of course, any conversion of the source files is likely to lose some data.  Note that the archives I’ve created are themselves neither official nor authoritative. A useful format conversion for the data could aim only for the modest objectives of making the data more publicly accessible for exploratory analysis and for stimulating informed discussion of telecom policy.

The data would be more useful if it were better organized.  Structuring existing fields into records by company and year would enable many useful queries.  By following the models of the datasets I’ve already set up, anyone could make a small contribution by doing similar work for a small subset of companies and years.  Such individual contributions could easily be aggregated.  Since comparisons across companies and across years contributes to insight, individual contributions would be much more valuable in the aggregate.

Figuring out  and administering a good structure for managing the archives and contributions of work is also an important task.  This task seems similar to that of running an open-source software project. The success of open-source software projects indicates both that the task is feasible and that expertise exists in doing it.

Many persons complain about telephone companies and criticize government regulation. Here’s an opportunity for these persons and anyone else to contribute to understanding better telephone companies and government regulation of these companies.  Many hands together could make quick work of reformatting, organizing, and analyzing these huge archives.

government employees in virtual world

Back in 2003, as a hard-working, dedicated civil servant in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, I told my manager (now retired) that I wanted to learn more about massive, multi-player online games and other virtual worlds. What patterns of communication occur in virtual worlds?  Voice communication seemed to me likely to become a significant aspect of virtual world communication.  Should electronic voice communication between avatars in virtual worlds be regulated like plain-old telephone service between flesh-and-blood humans in meat space?  Perhaps voice communication in virtual worlds would provide useful information about the cost structure of plain-old telephone service.  Perhaps virtual worlds provide a leading indicator of communication services that would become more generally available.  To investigate these important issues, I proposed spending some time at work playing online games and participating in other virtual worlds.

My manager said absolutely not.  She pointed out that such activities wouldn’t look good if reported on the front page of the newspaper.  She said that if I wanted to learn about online games and other virtual worlds, I would have to do it at home, on my own time.  Undoubtedly she made a sound, prudent, managerial decision.  No World of Warcraft and Second Life at work!

Change is happening.  The FCC’s first broadband workshop on open government and civic engagement was streamed into Second Life (post-action blog report here).  While I probably could have gotten permission to attend the workshop in Second Life, I would have chosen to attend it in person, just downstairs.  I’m a flesh-and-blood-loving kind of guy.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the initial part of the workshop because I was in a meeting. But in any case, streaming the FCC’s first broadband workshop into Second Life is likely to be just a minor act in the FCC’s new engagement with new communication services.