By Rick Aristotle Munarriz, The Motley Fool Posted 12:45PM 10/24/11

All of us at TVissimo are curious to see how Steve Jobs is going to change the TV landscape as he moved his company so that now - Apple may be ready to think inside the box -- the television box, that is.

One of the juiciest nuggets in Walter Isaacson's authorized Steve Jobs biography is that the iconic tech visionary was working on an actual Apple-branded television as one of his final projects at the company.

"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," Jobs told Isaacson. "It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud."

"It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."

A History of Chatter

Professional Apple watchers have been speculating on Apple's evolutionary move into flat-screen televisions for a long time.

"Apple's fantastic ability to create exceptionally user-friendly products could revolutionize TVs just like the iPhone changed the mobile phone market," Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said more than two years ago.

Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White and VentureBeat's Dylan Tweney have continued to add perspective to the speculative fire.

In a note to clients six months ago, White suggested that the Cupertino tech giant may have a Web-tethered television on the market as early as this holiday shopping season. That obviously isn't going to happen, but an analyst doesn't go out on that kind of limb unless he has pretty good sources indicating that a full-blown big-ticket television set is in the works.

Connected bloggers -- including Tweney -- began throwing out a 2012 release date this summer.

However, now that even Jobs is -- or rather sadly was -- publicly discussing an integrated TV that's easy to use, it really becomes a matter of time before Apple makes it official.

There's Nothing Good on TV

Don't confuse this with Apple TV, the small set-top gadget that's been a rare dud in Apple's arsenal. We're talking actual smart televisions.

Google  hasn't had a lot of success with the Google TV platform it introduced last year, but the search engine giant rushed that initiative to the market. Apple will have time to get it right. When Jobs told Isaacson that he finally "cracked" it, he wasn't talking about cracking the screen.

Apple's television should be able to stream your owned content backed up on Apple's new iCloud storage solution. There will naturally be apps and access to the prevailing streaming services. Google TV has apps, but developers will finally get serious about developing for Apple. In other words, even without trying, Apple will raise the bar.

(Spoiler alert: Apple will try.)

Big Boxes: Big Headaches

Apple wouldn't be the first computer company to have dreams of becoming a TV star. Dell and Hewlett-Packard rolled out branded flat screens a couple of years ago. Why not? PC monitors continue to get bigger, and the line is blurred between large flat-screen PC monitors and small flat-screen LCD and plasma TVs.Top of Form

Consumers didn't take to Dell and HP as the centerpiece of their home theater systems. HP in particular was just ahead of its time in introducing its Web-surfing MediaSmart line five years ago. However, neither of those two box-smiths have the brand panache of Apple, which can get folks camping outside its stores overnight to become the earliest of the early adopters.

Traditional manufacturers will tell you that making televisions is a cutthroat business with meager margins, but that's obviously not going to dissuade Apple. Its brand alone commands a market premium, giving it a markup advantage that has turned commodity gadgetry -- MP3 players, smartphones, laptops, and tablets -- into juicy profit centers.

Avoiding the Mickey Mouse Mistake

Now that Jobs has gone public with his new vision for television, it will be hard for Apple to resist its introduction. If and when it hits the market, it will be Jobs' baby -- his youngest and final child. And it will be a big hit, at least initially.

A lot can happen between yesterday's dream and tomorrow's reality. Several decades ago, Walt Disney discussed EPCOT on his weekly television show. His Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was a planned city, with actual residents and self-sustaining operations. The EPCOT amusement park that opened in Florida many years after his passing bears no resemblance to his original vision.

This won't happen here. For starters, the gap between Jobs' words and the actual rollout will be substantially shorter. Apple also has no reason to deviate from the proven formula, and having $81.6 billion in cash and marketable securities gives the company the freedom to once again dream out loud.

The Apple television is coming. Start lining up and thanking Jobs.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/rpLCS3

This is the third in a three part series covering the efforts of the PBS affiliate in St. Louis, KETC, to align social media and traditional television.  I am interviewing Rob Paterson who is part of the team supporting the KETC efforts. 

Bill: So now you have tackled a relatively easy problem with war memories and one that is a little more complex with the mortgage crisis.  Now you are going after a very controversial issue.

Rob: Yes. Immigration is an issue that divides the nation. Part of our motive is that many of the important issues in America are like this one such as the war, the economy, healthcare, and education. There is a whole range of issues that are vital to the success of the nation that are locked in ideological dogmatic dog fights that are intensely polarizing. The current media, in the so-called search for balance, enables the extremes to pull the gap even wider. There is no room for a civic discourse that was the American way. There is no room for the community to talk with each other and work out a solution.

This polarization was the context for the third project. It could have been the war or healthcare or similar tough topics. Immigration is an issue that is bubbling up in the St. Louis area so we picked it. The task before us is that we were dealing with a topic where the media often uses fear and gets away from conservation. Can we do better? My own view is that if there is not a defined way to have these conversations what is the future of the country? We will never solve anything.

Bill: I think that you have very accurately portrayed regular commercial television news and how it serves as a vehicle for further polarization in the nation. I recently viewed again the movie Invictus about Nelson Mandela as I am getting ready to go to South Africa. I am a big fan of him. Instead of a vehicle for further polarization what you want to be is a vehicle for reconciliation just as Mandela did through example.

Rob: Yes. I love it. Reconciliation is a wonderful word.

Bill: Invictus is a great movie about engaging both sides. Just like South Africa, America needs the engagement of both sides.

Rob: This is what we are after here. This is the Holy Grail. So how do we do this? We are going to try to put the control in the hands of the public. We are going to try to put the public into the center of public television. This will be a revolution. Currently it is called public television but it is made in the old way using the concept the station is very clever and it is going to give the public what the station thinks the public wants. In this project we want to be led and influenced all along by the public.

We are going to make a four-part TV documentary. We have a very active Web space and an exceptionally active community outreach program. And we have set up a school to teach people how to tell stories using video. This is the new literacy.  Any one can pick up an iPhone or a Flip camera and press the red button but it takes some skill to make a story.

Now I will weave this together.  The outreach people have been talking to thousands of people in St. Louis about their experience with immigration. We have sent out a survey to all of our members and we are getting some responses back. My job is to use Darwin to see what everyone else outside St. Louis is doing.  From this we have been designing the four part television series. In the past the TV producer comes up with a story and films it. We have done the interaction part in steroids. We are making the film as a result of the understanding and knowledge we have gained from the local community and beyond.

There has been nine months of active interaction with the community and the world beyond. We created a Web site that enables us to go out on a daily basis and ask people questions about what is going on and have the answer up on the Web site the next day.  We never used to be an instant anything but on we have learned to do online video.

What this means is that there will be a news item that I might pick up or we learn through other means. Then we will go out and have people react to this item and put up their answers within a day. So the whole thing feeds on itself. We have taken people who have never done anything like this in their life. They have now learned how to produce content on a twelve-hour cycle. 

Bill: So they produce this content but how is it turned around?

Rob: We shoot it with a Flip camera. We edit it with iMovie. Then we upload it to YouTube and it goes on our site. Nothing could be farther from a heavily produced segment.  We do not take a camera crew out. The people on the street do not even see the camera even though we tell them it is there. They sign a release form but there is no big camera presence or crew.

Bill: Once it goes on YouTube and on the site what happens?

Rob: We are building a mosaic of responses. The question is how do you have balance? The answer is that you do not try to balance everything off in one show each time.  The typical TV thing is one side says black and the other says white. You put them together and you have a dead program or just ranting.

Bill: So you achieve balance over time.

Rob: We are achieving balance over time through a mosaic.  In a mosaic the pattern emerges.  We are neutral in that we not offer judgments on what any one individual says. But the pattern over time comes out.

We spent the last two months on the site learning how to do all this. This interview is timely because we about to promote the site. It has been public for a while but we have not promoted it.  We had to learn to do many things and we were not ready for show time. Now we have enough material on the site that the mosaic is starting to appear.  This will feed into the documentary that will be filmed by the professionals. We are also sharing ideas about what will be in the documentary in the hope that people will add to or adjust what we do.

We are going to do something that is extremely difficult. We are going to film the documentary as an interactive process with the community. We will use professional filmmakers but with community involvement.  We will be finishing the documentary over the next four months and interacting with the community over this time about what we are doing.

Bill: So the documentary draws on the mosaic as raw material.

Rob: Yes and also parts of the documentary will be revealed while we are still in the editing phase and see what kind of response we get. So this will be as interactive as you can get. It has never been done before so we are a bit nervous about how it will come out.

Even though the final documentary will be filmed by professionals, much of the content comes from the community. To this end we have children of Bosnian refuges learning how to use Flip cameras to record stories and this is great fun.

Bill: What are the immigrant groups that you are looking at?

Rob: We had to learned how to best categorize them. When we started there were so many groups we were not sure what to do. Now three groups have emerged. There is the group most Americans are worried about, the very large numbers who are coming in from Mexico and other Latin American countries in the last twenty years. The majority of these immigrants have come in the last ten years. The large group of Latin American immigrants mainly work in food related jobs such as picking crops, serving food, performing lower level aspects of meat packing, etc. These are the types of jobs that many Americans will no longer take.

At the other end are what we might label as the best and the brightest. These are very clever people who come from many countries around the globe to get a better life.  At least a quarter of the best startup companies in the US have been founded by these people. This is a reliable source of new jobs. Most of the job loses have come from traditional companies and twenty five percent of the new jobs have been in companies that were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants. These immigrants are not limited to a few countries and come from all over.

The third group of immigrants are refuges. They come in completely different circumstances. There was the civil war in Bosnia and America made room for a large number of Muslim Bosnians who, if they had not come here, might have died or fared poorly. The same goes for a large group of Liberians. These two groups come from very different parts of the world but they share common experiences and have seen terrible things we would never want to see. 

The refuges have a particular process. It used to be that you would arrive from Sarajevo and you would get three months support from the Feds and that would be it. Now it is eight months. In that period you have to assimilate, get a job, and get started.  This is very difficult.

The common thing that all immigrants share is that getting legal is all but impossible.  Many people might say that I have no problems with immigrants as along as they are legal. One problem that is not understood is that getting legal status is all but impossible. Even if you have family it will take between ten and twenty five years.

 

 

 

This is the second in a three part series covering the efforts of the PBS affiliate in St. Louis, KETC, to align social media and traditional television.  I am interviewing Rob Paterson who is part of the team supporting the KETC efforts.

Bill: Tell me about the second phase of the social media project.

Rob: The second phase of this experiment came as the financial situation in the US started to get bad. The idea was to connect people in St. Louis to resources, both online and physical, that they could trust to help them with mortgage problems.  We started this on our own and then we discovered something about the community. There are all sorts of organizations that work on issues like the mortgage crisis but most of them never talk to each other. Many of them are quite suspicious of each other as they compete for funding. We acted as a resource to help bring these groups together. We found a means through the United Way where people could phone in and get help from any resource. 

We used the Web site to support his. We decided from a tool point of view that we were not going to use tools on the site that anyone else could not use. So we used the free and easy ones.  We used YouTube and this was a big deal for us at the time. It is taken for granted now but using a tool that everyone can access on the Web-based was new.

Bill: The concern with YouTube was losing control over the content?

Rob: Yes. But after we used it successfully we thought of other uses. The station has a wonderful series titled, Living St. Louis, that has many episodes on the community that you could no longer see after each was shown. As a result of this project, the station converted the entire series to YouTube and made it available through the Web site and a YouTube channel in a searchable archive. It gets a lot of traffic now. So as a byproduct of doing this effort we found a way to make some of our quality content more accessible and drive up traffic.

Bill: I can really see the benefit here. One of our local Boston stations has a similar series and I am always disappointed if I miss a good episode, as there is no way to see it after its scheduled showing. I would be very excited to have the ability to search an archive to see if there is an episode that covers a place where I am planning to go or to help me determine where to go.

Rob: It sounds like an obvious move but it is new for broadcast TV. By doing these new projects we can break through what is considered normal and the old culture of control. We were so successful with the mortgage project that we got funding to bring this to over 30 markets around the US. This was the first time we had a national project. There were actually over 60 stations as we did radio and TV.

As a result of this many of these stations who had never done this type of project or run this type of Web site or used YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, now did new things. In many cases the radio and TV people in same area did not talk to each other, as there was a sense of rivalry and distrust. Now they communicated on a common project.

This effort helped stations go beyond simply being a public media and better become a public service media. In other words, they could help their community deal with an important issue.

Bill: Isn’t being a public service vehicle part of their charter. Perhaps they may pay lip service to it in most cases.

Rob: Public service is specifically part of their charter. However, many forgot this and thought they were a television station. It’s like the credit unions that tried to be banks. Now the new social media is allowing public television stations to fulfill this responsibility. But the barrier is culture and mindset.

In the sixty TV and radio stations that participated in the mortgage program you could divide them into three groups. First, there were those who got it and fully participated, pushing through the cultural barriers.  Then there were the stations that understood it intellectually and partially participated but need another project like this to go further. Finally, there were those that just went through the motions because funding was attached.

Bill: Was the goal of this program to provide better coordination of mortgage relief services to the people?

Rob: Yes, and just as important it was to enable the people in the community to find a safe and trusted channel to these resources. Here is the interesting part. The TV viewership for public television tends to be age 55 or older, well educated and of European descent. Because the issue of mortgage foreclosure affected so many people outside this demographic, we started to attract people outside this core demographic who had never been part of the public television audience. We were now reaching people online who did not watch the station’s Newhour and who might not ever watch it. However, we really helped them and they got engaged with the station through the Web and remain attached to it.

Bill: So you were reaching out to people online that you were not reaching through the traditional channels.

Rob: Yes. The Holy Grail in public television is to expand the audience. With social media we can enjoy the support of a much wider audience without compromising the quality of the broadcast television.  These people become attached to the station because it helps them.

Bill: What you also do is become a role model for traditional commercial television that, I believe, has the same charter to provide a public service to the community.

Rob: Yes and the commercial stations generally pay even less attention to this responsibility.  This is a good time to transition to the third phase, the coverage of the immigration debate.

Bill: We will begin to cover this in the next post as the third part of our series.

 

 

 

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) St. Louis station has been conducting a series of projects integrating social media with traditional broadcast television. This integration of old and new media is a topic we have frequently covered here and KETC is doing some of the most innovative work in this space. They began with a project on preserving World War Two stories from local vets. A second effort supported those caught in the mortgage crisis. In the third initiative they are using social media to help facilitate more rational conversations on immigration issues. In this post I discuss the first effort and the other follow.

Bill: Rob can you provide some background on the KETC social media project? What are its objectives? What has resulted so far?

Rob: KETC is the public television station in St. Louis. Since Jack Galmiche took over as President four years ago, his mission is to find a new model for a public television station in America. Like others, he understands that the old financial model for public television cannot continue to be successful. The old model worked on the premise that that public TV has quality content that you cannot get elsewhere. You have to adhere to our broadcast schedule and if you like what we bring you will support us financially with donations.

This old model will not work going forward as you can get great content for free anytime you want from many sources. While there is still a legacy group of supporters, this dwindling group will not take any TV or radio station securely forward into the future.

So the question becomes if we cannot rely on the old base of support, what will become the new base? Over the past four years Jack and his team have been working on a hypothesis that social media can help reach and sustain a new base of support to augment the old one. The current project on immigration is the end result of a series of experiments using social media to expand the base of support. The hypothesis goes on to say that public television should be in a great position to become the safe place where the community can interact with itself on issues that it cares about since public television is so trusted.

The first time we did this we used a very safe topic around the Ken Burns series on World War Two. As this series was being aired we went out to the local community through social media and other means, We said that there are many veterans in our community and you may or may not have shared your personal stories with your family.  Ken Burns is providing the stories of some vets. We are going to provide an easy means for you to share your own stories of the war that can be recorded forever. We will provide a way for these stories to be shared. 

This effort around World War Two stories went really well. We found a way to enable people to use the Web to share their memories. We discovered a way to engage a community around a topic. In this case, an important one, but also a safe one. No one was going to object to us having grandpa tell his war stories. One of the great examples occurred when one vet came to the station and asked to see Jack. He gave Jack his war medals. He said that he had never told his war stories before and for the first time he felt safe enough to do it. He wanted to tell then before he died. We were all moved by this experience and felt we had learned something.

Bill: This is a topic that is very near to me as my father was a World War Two vet who as a commando, often operated behind the Japanese lines. He was reluctant to tell more that general overviews of much of what he experienced but I know that it had a profound effect on him. He gave his medals, not of disrespect, but more out of modesty, to me incorporate into my childhood reenactments of World War Two. This was a favorite play topic for us in the 50s.

Rob: We are the same age and we did this also.

Bill: This occurred in the raised cemeteries of New Orleans that we pretended were urban battlefields.  There are many friends my age who also report their father’s reluctance to take about the war.  So what do you see that occurred that enabled these men in your community to share their experiences? How did social media play into this?

Rob: There was definitely a social media component. We had a dedicated Web site. We had a way of getting content to us and then we would put it up. We ran something like an antiques road show where people came in and told their stores and we recorded them. We found that the grandchildren started to ask their grandparents to tell these stories. For many men and, in some cases, women, once they saw others telling their stories and it was safe, they felt comfortable doing it themselves. They also realized that this might be their last chance. We have now set up a permanent memorial of all these stories so they will live on through the Web.

Bill: So, if I am hearing your correctly social media was used in two ways. First, to make people more aware of what you were doing. Second, to share the content once it was collected.

Rob: Yes and we had never done anything like this before. The Web had simply been the place to find out the schedule for TV shows or asking for donations. This was the first time we had a two-way interaction with the community through the Web. We asked for stuff and we got stuff back.

Bill: So what did you learn from this first step that you applied to the next step?

Rob: We learned how to start to work together. The tools are free and easy to use. The underlying story was a breakdown of the silos. To work well on the Web you have to have all the parts of the organization working well together. So we had cross department meetings to get the work done.  We had producers, marketing, outreach people, and our one person Web department. These cross department meetings had not occurred. As we moved forward this integration was a big deal and key enabler.