Bundling, choice, and basketball

It is a new year, and time for the latest version of what seems like an annual public fight between a big Cable TV company and a high-profile content provider. In the latest example, Cable TV provider Time Warner Cable and the MSG (short for Madison Square Garden), Network are in a pitched battle over the rights fees that Time Warner has to pay to MSG for the rights to distribute MSG programming on its cable systems. As a deal could not be reached by December 31, as 2012 begins the MSG feeds have been blacked out on Time Warner systems. Blah, blah, blah

From a purely selfish point of view, the current dispute hits close to home for me - my cable provider is Time Warner, and the MSG Network carries most of the games for my beloved New York Knicks. I admit, the prospect of not having easy access to Knicks games has harshed my Happy New Year mellow.

However, these Cable TV contract disputes provide additional insight to how a combination of escalating programming costs, (mainly in the form of ever-increasing fees paid by networks for the rights to carry professional sports broadcasts); traditional and arcane packaging or 'bundling', and near-monopoly competitive enviroments in many localities have conspired to drive up the costs of basic and enhanced cable rates over the last decade. When ESPN agrees to pay the NFL just over $15 billion over 8 years for the right to show 'Monday Night Football', rest assured the viewers, (and in many cases the non-viewers), of ESPN end up having to pay more to watch Jaws and Gruden gush over how great a job every coach in the NFL is doing. 

The end result is a simple and classic pass on the costs gimmick - ESPN and other content providers pay more for their programming, they in turn squeeze the Time Warners and other cable systems for higher per-subscriber fees, and finally the cable systems themselves pass the increased costs down to their customers by jacking up cable rates. Traditionally the cable systems try to mask this process somewhat by their practice of packaging or bundling groups of channels into programming tiers, (Basic, Super Basic, Colossal Super Mega, etc.), that ostensibly provide some consumer choice as to the networks they'd like to subscribe to, and how much they are willing to pay for them. But even the most discrete set of packages or bundles that are generally offered still do not come close to most consumers actual viewing patterns, and likely the set of networks they would order if true a la carte pricing was available in the cable TV industry.

There has been tons written about a la carte pricing for cable TV, and speculation on whether or not it would actually decrease average cable rates. I've seen pretty compelling arguments on both sides, so it is hard to say what the outcome would be. Additionally, any system of individual pricing and ordering of cable networks is generally seen as a death knell for a slew of less popular, niche channels that simply would not have enough viewers willing to pay for them individually to keep them afloat.

Thinking about this entire situation as I have the last few days, (again as it effects my ability to easily watch the Knicks games), I can't help but wonder if this cable TV model is just a refection of a waning and outdated set of assumptions about how content should be created, distributed, and consumed. In an environment where attention, activity, and engagement with content is increasingly shifting to mobile phones and tablets, which themselves are primarily single-purpose application driven, then the idea of consumers choosing to pay monthly fees for 500 channel cable bundles in order to access the 17 channels they are interested in seems like a dying distribution model. 

Why can't the MSG network or the History Channel or the hundreds of other channels out there simply create their own an iPad application that would allow consumers to make individual choices about what content they'd like to access and pay for? And to take it a step further, why can't the individual entertainment producers simply skip the traditional networks, cable systems, and satellite providers completely, and market their shows, movies, sporting events, etc. directly to the end user, either with applications or direct streaming or download?

The answer is of course they can, and many are already moving in that direction.

But sadly for me, the era of direct, low friction, and discrete consumption of New York Knicks games has not started as yet. So until then, I get to listen to Time Warner and MSG call each other names.

Let's Pass on That, (The Hamster Wheel)

Really late to the story on this, (about nine months late to be more precise), but I recently found and read an incredible piece by Dean Starkman for the Columbia Journalism Review site titled 'The Hamster Wheel'.

In the article, Starkman compares the changes in journalistic approaches, and the increasing demands on journalists to create tons of consumable content for a myriad of platforms, (TV, radio, Web, Social Networks, blogs, live blogs,and on and on), to the proverbial caged hamster running on an exercise wheel. Lots of activity, lots of energy being expended, but no real progress, and of course the hamster ends up in exactly the same place when exhaustion sets in as it was before the running started, and theoretically it still had some options.

In the context of the news business, Starkman describes the Hamster Wheel psyche like this:

The Hamster Wheel isn’t speed; it’s motion for motion’s sake. The Hamster Wheel is volume without thought. It is news panic, a lack of discipline, an inability to say no. It is copy produced to meet arbitrary productivity metrics. But it’s more than just mindless volume. It’s a recalibration of the news calculus. Of the factors that affect the reporting of news, an underappreciated one is the risk/reward calculation that all professional reporters make when confronted with a story idea: How much time versus how much impact? This informal vetting system is surprisingly ruthless and ultimately efficient for one and all. The more time invested, the bigger the risk, but also the greater potential glory for the reporter, and the greater value to the public (can’t forget them!). Do you fly to Chicago to talk to that guy about that thing? Do you read that bankruptcy examiner’s report? Or do you do three things that are easier?

It is perhaps difficult to find another industry than news and information services that has been disrupted more massively in the last 15 years or so by the rapid development of the web, the birth of so-called 'citizen journalism', and the perfect storm of cheap data plans, incredibly powerful smartphones and other mobile devices, and hundred of millions of social network platform users ready and eager to report and comment on the news - all in real-time. In the CJR piece, Starkman paints a vivid picture of increasing activity with possibly dubious benefit, and that underscores more endemic tensions in workplaces today - we are all asked to do more, or at least the same, with far less people and resources.

The article contains an example of the Hamster Wheel in action using the illustrative chart on the right - over the last ten or so years, story production in the printed Wall Street Journal has increased substantially, with corresponding reductions in headcount leading Starkman to conclude the average WSJ reporter is now 69% more productive that in 2000. 

In the race for web traffic, more views of a networks' or news organizations' YouTube videos, 'likes' on Facebook, or Twitter followers; Starkman makes the argument that the traditional values and importance of deeply reported and in-depth investigative pieces (the ones that can't really be tweeted), are suffering. And not only are news organizations steering away from the investment of time and resources to produce these pieces, the long-term financial benefits of the current 'Hamster Wheel' strategy are dubious at best. Some estimated claim the popular and 'Web 3.0' model of journalism The Huffington Post only creates about one dollar of revenue per reader per year.

Is that a large, more applicable to the workplace take on all of this?  In other words, why did I just spend 45 minutes and 600 or so words writing about a nine-month old article on the news business?

Well here goes - I think many of us of running on our own personal or organizational Hamster Wheels. We too have to be everywhere. We have to connect and communicate with colleagues and staff on many more platforms than ever before. We have to engage potential job candidates all over the social web, and create compelling engagement strategies for the conversation, (that will work on all kinds of mobile devices including ones that have not been invented yet). We have to stay on top of news, information, coming and goings in our industry in a 24/7 global context.

In short, we kind of have convinced ourselves, just like the execs at many of the news organizations that Starkman discusses in the CJR piece, that we can't take a breath, miss a tweet, an update, follow the hashtag from a conference we could not get to, or let someone else beat us to the punch.  It is a hard way to live without any kinds of filters to know what is truly important and meaningful and what isn't.

I'll leave you with a final nugget of insight from the the piece:

The most underused words in the news business today: let’s pass on that.

They might be the most underused words in your business too.

Can I get the Cliff's Notes version?

Before the days of Google and YouTube and online ‘note-sharing’ sites,  the enterprising high school or college student, tasked with reading a long book or mastering (at least well enough to pass the test), a complex subject had only two choices.  One, actually read the entire 23,000 pages of ‘Anna Karenina’ or two, head down to the local bookstore and pick up the Cliff’s Notes version.  The Cliff’s Notes hit all the high points - characters, plot, themes - all in an easy to digest neat little package.  

The Cliff’s Notes ‘study guides’ were launched in the US in 1958, and were meant to serve as a supplement (yeah, right), to the original texts that many students struggled to plow through and comprehend.  Naturally students began substituting flipping through the Cliff’s Notes as a substitute for reading the ‘real’ books, and was born a what has become a rich and long history of sloppily structured term papers and reports, bound together by shallow plot and character analysis, large fonts, and wide margins.  

Aside - in later years the ‘Let’s rent the movie version and watch that’ strategy began to take some of the shine off the Cliff’s Notes gambit. While even less of a commitment of time and energy, the movie version approach led to a new set of issues.  Namely, the creative licence sometimes employed by film directors that makes significant and material changes to the plot, characters, and even ending of the source material.  Witness the professor’s comments on my 5-page opus on Malamud’s The Natural - ‘I know you only watched the movie’.

But even though generations of students have used the Cliff’s Notes (and other shortcuts) for other than their noble and intended purposes, that doesn’t mean that the drivers that lead to taking those shortcuts (lack of time, inability to connect the material and effort required to a tangible benefit, sheer humdrum nature of most of the works), are not valid or real.  In fact, many of those same reasons apply in the real, grown-up world or work as well.  Whether it is company sponsored training and development course materials, the content of your voluminous new employee onboarding manual, or even the latest vanity book published by your CEO - most of us feel already overwhelmed with information coming from all angles and multiple sources to realistically digest more data, especially in large chunks.

We’re all too busy in our email inboxes all day long anyway. Email we notice.  The CEO’s book,  the 79 slide ‘2011 Planning’ PowerPoint deck that someone nicely printed for us, or the 37 archived HR Happy Hour podcasts on our iPhones don’t seem to get the attention they deserve. But maybe in smaller, more easily digestible pieces, this content would have a better chance of being seen, heard, and marked.

Which is all a long (we really need an editor around here), lead up to the main reason for this post. An online service called ‘Daily Lit’.  Daily Lit is a service that delivers books in easily digestible daily email or RSS subscription formats.  You sign up, choose a book from the selection of about 1,000 titles (lots of Seth Godin for whatever reason), and start receiving a daily message or update in your RSS reader with the first installment of the selected book.

Why read a book via email or RSS? From the Daily Lit FAQ’s:

Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don't find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. This works incredibly well not just on your computer but also on a Treo, Blackberry, Sidekick or whatever the PDA of your choice.

All in all, a pretty cool idea and interesting service.  And I think one that could be a lesson to those of us that are charged with workplace communications in their various forms.  You spend ages planning, developing, and promoting your content.  You want, and in many cases need, employees to consume and understand.  But if your delivery mechanisms do not match the employee’s preferred and potential inclinations for consumption, you may as well lock all your creations in the file room, never to be seen or heard again.  I am not necessarily advocating turning all your communications into a series of bite-sized daily emails; the last thing many of you want to do is hit your employee population with more email.  But what does seem clear that that good and important content alone may not be enough, the methods of delivering that content might be just as important, and for employees buried all day long in their email inboxes, they might not have time to look up and notice anyway.