Category: web

702 Sydney mornings – watching TV on the net

How is the Internet changing the way we watch TV?

On 702Sydney Mornings this month with Linda Mottram, we’re looking at at how the Internet is changing the way we watch TV.

How much do you use ABC’s iView? Okay it’s not every program for forever  but it’s a godsend when you’re time poor – and who isn’t these days.  So you can catch up with the programs on ABC TV you’ve missed or you knew you couldn’t watch it live.
We’d love to hear from you if you’re now watching TV programs – ANY TV programs – primarily on the Net, through your internet browser rather than sitting in front of a telly.
Aside from catch-up services like iView, ABC is already providing programs LIVE. If you log on to ABC News 24 website, you’ll be watching a live TV news straight away. And then of course there’re a number of avenues for pay–per-view services.”
Some of the things we’ll be discussing are;
  • Differences between different services and how they work and how much they cost.
  • Free-to-air or Pay-per-view. Just how much is available for free and how much isn’t?
  • Limitations of catch-up services. How long are programs kept, how comprehensive is their collection?
  • Limitations caused by copyright laws. Some overseas programs are either very difficult to view or impossible to view online. Will the technology advance mean these limitations will be irrelevant soon if not already?
  • Nobody wants to squint at smartphones to watch nature documentaries do they? Is the quality really up to scratch? Alternatively, what do YOU as a computer/smartphone/tablet user need to know that your viewing experience is as enjoyable as possible?
  • While catchup services are becoming more popular than ever, take up of internet based TV (IPTV) remains very low. Will this ever change? What will cause the change?
  • If the catchup services’ popularity continues to grow – and there’s nothing to suggest it’ll slow down – wouldn’t commercial television need to re-examine their advertising based business models seriously?
  • Main takeups of TV-watching on the net will be younger audiences, but it is quite often more mature and older audience who complain about the permeating advertising. What will it take older audience to flee further and significantly to Net-TV?

Some of the material we’ll be referring to in the program is the ACMA report on Online Video Content Services in Australia and Screen Australia’s What to Watch in an Online World.

Join us on 702 Sydney from shortly after 9.30am. We’ll probably take some calls on 1300 222 702 and we’d like to hear your views, comments or questions.

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Disrupting the education ripoff

Old established ripoffs are being disrupted as technology and the economy changes.

British Columbia’s government has announced they are going to make most undergraduate textbooks free online or printed at low cost as part of their BC Campus program.

One of the first lessons for university students is that they are going to be robbed at the campus bookshop – text books are one of the greatest rorts on the planet.

This scam takes several forms with faculties stipulating the latest editions as course material through to individual professors having a nice little earner in demanding their, often poorly written and out-of-date, textbooks being essential reading for any unfortunate student taking their classes.

Naturally all of these books are sold at eye wateringly high prices far in excess of what equivalent texts are selling for outside the university bookshop.

Given all of this it’s no coincidence that the publishers who specialise in academic texts have been the least affected by the online models that have undermined the business models of the mainstream book sellers.

Over the years there’s been a range of business ideas to setup exchanges to circumvent this legally sanctioned extortion racket and most have failed as the universities and faculty members have protected their cash cows with various tricks to prevent students from buying reasonably priced textbooks.

That British Columbia’s government now sees that this is a barrier for cash strapped and debt ridden students is an encouraging sign and one that recognises the 1990s model of treating students – particularly international students – as easy money is over.

For the Canadian and Australian education sectors which had come to depend upon an expensive “bums on seat” model of financing their faculties, the waves of change and competition is now threatening them.

Probably the biggest threat to this model is from the top tier universities offering courses online. This is radically changing higher education as it’s making it easier for poorer people to access the best institutions.

For the second rate institutions, this means they have to be providing real value for the fees they charge. A certificate purporting to be a degree is not going to be good enough.

While it’s too early to call the end of the textbook ripoff – people don’t let juicy little rorts go easily – its days are numbered. Although we may find the old scams replaced by something DRM related.

Image from Visual Notes of Honourable John Yap’s announcement at #opened12 / Giulia Forsythe / CC BY-NC-SA

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Posting without permissions

Facebook’s groups feature can be dangerous if you don’t check before adding people.

A client of mine once had a angry worker scream at him when she found out he’d posted photographs of all his staff on the company’s website.

“My ex is a psycho, he doesn’t know where I live or work. If he finds this, he might come around here and kill us all,” she cried.

The photos went down immediately and Kevin made sure he got explicit consent before he posted any details of his staff onto the website.

It was a valuable lesson on why you shouldn’t just post people’s details online without first asking them. We all have reasons why we’d like to keep certain facts out of the public light.

A Texan gay choir’s organiser posting the details of members onto Facebook is another reminder of why it’s a bad idea to put someone else’s details online without asking them first.

For two members of the Queer Chorus at the University of Texas, having their sexual orientation pasted on their Facebook feeds caused terrible damage with their families and it should serve as lesson to every manager, business owner or community group leader that this stuff matters.

One of the worrying features with Facebook is how other people can add you to groups without your permission – almost certainly a recipe for misunderstanding and mischief.

What’s even more unforgivable with Facebook’s conduct is the privacy settings for those groups overrides an individual’s own privacy settings.

As one of the victims said in the Wall Street Journal of when his father saw the status update, “I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw this,” she said. “He saw it.”

So even though both the individuals had chosen to lock their profiles away from public view, Facebook and the organiser of the group decided they knew better.

We shouldn’t let the administrator of the Facebook off the hook on this lapse, Christopher Acosta decided to make the group open and public. “I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,” he’s quoted as saying.

That’s nice when you have a tolerant family and you’re from a liberal community but for others that ‘transparency’ can lead to damaging family relations for years, if not lifetimes. In some communities the consequences could be far worse.

“I do take some responsibility,” says Mr Acosta. Which is a nice way of accepting you might have screwed somebody’s life up by doing something you didn’t understand.

Ultimately responsibility lies with the person who presses the button which causes the email or status post to be published. In this case Christopher Acosta was responsible.

To be fair to Mr Acosta, the ability to add people to Facebook groups without their permission is a deeply flawed as are those groups’ setting overriding an individual’s privacy preferences.

Facebook have to understand there are real life consequences to ‘transparency’ which can ruin careers and even cost the lives of people. The damage to families and communities can be immense.

Coming from a secure upper middle class white background, Mark Zuckerberg probably doesn’t quite understand the risks his company’s policies pose to people in vulnerable situations, hopefully some of his older and wiser advisers will explain why ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ are not always a good idea.

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Playing in the big boys’ sandpits

Businesses using social media, cloud computing and web 2.0 services need to be careful of being shutdown without notice.

The Cool Hunter is a site whose mission is to “select and celebrate what is beautiful and enduring from all that is sought-after in architecture, design, gadgets, lifestyle, urban living, fashion, travel and pop culture.”

In posting cool stuff they find on the web, Cool Hunter always runs the risk of copyright infringement complaints as people have the unfortunate habit of slapping images up onto the Internet without permission from the rights holders.

Last August Cool Hunter’s founder Bill Tikos found the site’s Facebook account had been wiped for ‘repeat copyright infringements’ without warning or recourse.

Anybody following this site won’t be surprised to read this – an exposed nipple can get you thrown off Facebook faster than you can say “New Yorker cartoon” or “it’s only a porcelain doll, for chrissake!” – so one can only imagine the paroxysms of rage that alleged copyright infringement sends Facebook’s puritan bureaucrats into.

It’s not just nipples at Facebook though, thousands of small traders have seen their accounts arbitrarily suspended on sites like eBay and PayPal.

Google too are quick to suspend businesses from their local and search services without warning or recourse. Usually business owners only notice they’ve been locked out when they log into their control panels only to find a terse message that their account has been suspended.

What usually follows is a Kafkaesque tale of trying to understand exactly what they’ve done wrong and how to get their accounts reinstated. In some cases the businesses get cryptic messages saying their accounts are still in breach while others get no response at all. In a few examples, the offending page goes back online only to be shut down again a few days later.

Rarely does someone in this situation find a calm, helpful voice to explain exactly what they have done wrong and how to fix it.

This hostile attitude is a result of the “hands off customer service” model of web 2.0 companies and it’s their biggest achilles heel as, paradoxically, customers and users take to social media to complain about bizarre and arbitrary account suspensions.

For some, like Cool Hunter, it’s a monumental pain and loss of a valuable platform while many of those small eBay and PayPal traders may have thousands of dollars tied up in suspended accounts they can’t access.

Unfortunately this uncertainty is the cost of doing business on social media sites and it’s one of the reasons why owning your own business website is essential.

When you choose to use one of these service, understand you’re playing in the big fat kid’s sandpit and you risk him throwing a tantrum and chucking your toys out of the playpen.

Simply put, don’t base your business on Facebook, don’t keep all your money in PayPal and always have a plan B.

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A quick Christmas checklist for hospitality businesses

What should cafes, restaurants and hotels do to be found by holiday makers and tourists?

For listeners of my regular spot on ABC Riverland, here’s a quick checklist for regional business owners to make sure their online presence is ready for the Christmas holidays.

Prospective customers are using the web to find businesses and attractions, so taking advantage of the free listing services by the major search engines and directories is the first step.

Google Plus Local

The search engine giant’s local service gives a free business listing that feeds into their results and those of many GPS devices and social media services.

Fill in as many fields as possible, making sure you don’t forget opening hours and payment methods you accept.

You can also upload photos and menus to your Google Local listing, all of these will help you come up higher in the search engine results.

True Local

News Limited’s True Local offers a similar service to Google and this also feeds into various services along with the local news sites run by the newspaper chain.

Again, fill in as many fields as possible and make sure all your essential business details are listed.

Sensis

While the Yellow and White Pages may be dying, a free listing with their site will help come up on the various Telstra sites and companies that partner with them.

Review sites

Eatability, Yelp and Tripadvisor are all popular sites and applications used by customers to research accommodation and venues. You need to grab your listing and check what previous customers have said about you.

Social media

Along with having your own listing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and possibly sites like Pinterest; you should be doing regular searches to check what people are saying about you and your district.

One of the great things about social media is it’s a great market intelligence tool. For instance if there’s lots of people coming to your town to go fishing and there’s nobody catering for them, then this is an opportunity. Google Alerts can help you with this.

Your own website

Most important of all is your own website. Check that it works on smartphones and tablet computers, if necessary borrow a friend’s Android or Apple device and see what your site looks like on it.

When you review this with your web developer also check your keywords are working and make sure yourmeta-tagsall reflect what you have to offer your customers.

The Christmas-New Year rush is too important a period for hospitality business to miss out on customers. A few small thing might get you the visitors who might have kept on driving to the next town.

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Google tries to drive American business online

Can Google convince reluctant American businesses to move online?

Google’s quest to sign the world’s businesses up to websites stepped into the big time this week with the launch of America, Get Your Business Online.

The US program is based upon the Getting British Business Online program which was followed up with similar projects in Australia and then Texas prior to being launched nationally across the States.

An interesting aspect with the rollout of the various programs has been Google’s choice of partners — in Britain the key supporter was the incumbent telecommunication company BT.

For some reason the subsequent programs have chosen to partner with accounting software companies and small business groups. The US program is no exception.

These partnerships are interesting as the software companies involved are threatened by online cloud services — both Intuit and MYOB have their business models of selling boxed software to small businesses under siege.

While Google regularly cite the Boston Consulting Group’s survey on the importance of websites to business, it seems most small operators don’t care as about half of small businesses don’t care about an online presence most developed countries.

In Australia, the Getting Aussie Business Online fell short of its 50,000 sign up target which indicates smaller enterprises still don’t see the point.

They may be right — for the local locksmith or lawn mowing service a Google Places account may be all they need rather than a relatively high maintenance website.

Part of the problem is that small business proprietors are probably the most time poor people on the planet, so  filling in another set of forms is one of the last things they will do.

Were Google to link Google + for Business to their other services so information wasn’t being duplicated there would be a far quicker and greater take up of their services.

America, Get Your Business Online should be a useful service for some local enterprises but the real challenge for Google is to integrate their services to make it easier for smaller operations to use.

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Owning the customer

Is it possible to own the customer?

During the tech boom of the late 1990s the early wave of web developers had a business model that required locking customers into a relationship.

Having spent thousands of dollars for designing and building a website, a business then found they would have to spend hundreds of dollars every time they wanted to make even a minor change.

While that model didn’t work out for web designers as new tools appeared that made it easy for customers to look after their own sites, it’s still the ambition of many businesses to ‘own’ as much of the customer as possible.

Department store credit cards, supermarket petrol cards and airline frequent flier programs are all examples of how big businesses try to lock their customers into their ecosystem.

Possibly the dumbest, and most counterproductive all, are the media companies with policies of not linking outside their own websites. The idea is to keep readers on their sites but in reality it damages their own credibility and betrays their lack of understanding how the web works.

The airlines too have discovered the risks in trying to ‘own’ their customers as their devaluing frequent flier programs has irritated and disillusioned their most loyal clients.

Many businesses, particularly banks and telcos, try to tie you up into knots of contractual obligations with reams of terms and conditions. All of this is an attempt to make the customer a slave to their business.

Outside of having a legally protected monopoly, you can’t ‘own’ a customer – the customer has to grant the favour of doing business with them.

They’ll only do business with you if they trust that you’ll do the right thing by your promises; whether it’s delivering the cheapest product, the best service or quickest delivery. The moment their trust begins to slip, you risk losing their business.

Executives who talk of the concept of owning the customer are either working in organisations with little competition or those steeped in 1980s management practices. If you hear them talking like that, it might be best to take your business, and investments, elsewhere.

Owning customers didn’t work for the web designers of the early 2000s and it won’t work for businesses in other sectors. The only way to ensure most of your clients keep coming back is to deliver on what you’ve promised them.

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