TV Stations' Mantra for 2009: Ubiquity

The word for 2009 is "ubiquity."

There was a time when broadcasting and ubiquity were, in the world of mass media, synonymous.

But those were the days before the Web and cell phones and other hand-held gizmos had emerged as honest-to-goodness TV outlets.

Now that they have, TV stations can't be said to be everywhere. They may offer news and weather clips on their Web sites and various mobile platforms, but they don't yet make their fundamental service -- the 24-hour-a-day channel of news and entertainment that has defined them for the past 60 years -- available to those proliferating second and third screens.

And I think they must if they intend to be major media players in the 21^st century.

The good news is that they are close to halfway there.

Through the Open Mobile Video Coalition, leading broadcasters are developing a system that will allow any station to use a small portion of its digital spectrum to be a part of the burgeoning mobile world.

In relatively swift and painless fashion, the ATSC has settled on a DTV mobile technical standard. And repeated real-world testing shows that it works.

Now, the focus is shifting to turning the technology into a business.

Media General's John Conschafter, who heads the OMVC's business group, said this week in our Executive Session that much non-technical work needs to be done before DTV mobile is a revenue-generating enterprise.

According to Conschafter, he and other mobile proponents must convince copyright holders, syndicators and the networks to permit mobile simulcasts and persuade manufacturers to put DTV mobile receive chips into cell phones and other portable devices.

Conschafter seemed confident that those negotiations would go well and that later this year consumers with the latest MP3 players or PDAs would be able to tune into their favorite TV stations while on the go just as they do when they are sitting in their living rooms.

I've got a feeling that it's going to be a lot tougher than Conschafter lets on, but, what the heck, January is the month for optimism.

Unfortunately, broadcasters are making far less progress on the getting their signals onto the Web.

It's a whole lot trickier.

Before stations can even think about simulcasting on the Web, they must figure out how to restrict their signals to their local markets since they have the rights to air syndicated and network programming only within their markets.

Unlike DTV mobile, which is inherently local, the Web is inherently global. When you put it on the Web, you are distributing it to the world.

WRAL Raleigh, N.C., owner Jim Goodmon, one of broadcasting's true visionaries and a strong believer in putting TV stations on the Web, actually came up with a scheme for geographically limiting the reach of a TV signal on the Web.

It involves a dongle, a small device that plugs into the USB port of a computer. The dongle would tell the computer which signals it could receive based on instructions broadcast by a local FM station.

So, in Raleigh, for instance, the dongle would allow the user to receive WRAL, but only if he or she were in the presence of that local authorizing FM signal. Take the dongle into another market and it wouldn't do anything.

The dongle-FM scheme is not ideal. It's probably too costly and difficult to implement and some believe it would be easy to hack.

But so what? It's the concept that matters.

As I argued here last July ("The Web Won't Wait for TV Stations"), if the dongle doesn't do it, figure out something that will.

What broadcasters need is another team effort along the lines of the OMVC. Let's call it the Open Web Video Coalition and let's recruit all the leading station groups as members.

This new coalition's first order of business would be to sort through the technology and come up with a foolproof way of keeping streamed TV station signals from slopping over into other markets.

Once that is accomplished, the coalition would try to persuade the copyright owners, the networks and other program suppliers to play along just as the OMVC is doing in mobile today.

In an Executive Session interview slated to be posted next Tuesday, CBS research guru David Poltrak talks about the new audiences that CBS's steaming of primetime shows on the Web is beginning to deliver.

According to Poltrak, the online audience for How I Met Your Mother in fall 2008 was up 65 percent over fall 2007. More important, he notes, the median age of the online audience was 28, 16 years younger than the median age of the broadcast audience.

With such evidence piling up, TV stations simply cannot afford not to have their channels on the Web, just as they cannot afford not to have them in every cell phone, PDA, iPod and laptop. To ignore these new TV media is to ignore the new generation of viewers.