Snurb's blog

Sydney.
My talk was next at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, and seemed to go down pretty well - I had been somewhat worried about getting booed off the stage by the broadcasters in the room, seeing as I was pointing out the dark clouds on the horizon for them. Here's the Powerpoint, and the paper is online, too - hope the audio recording worked, too! the audio turned out a little noisy once again, but it's better than nothing...

Sydney.
Rachel de Sain is the next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; she is Strategy and Commercial Manager for Mobile at Sensis. Her focus is on mobile advertising and marketing. Sensis operates brands such as Yellow Pages, WhereIs, TradingPost and Citysearch, and has recently come around to placing this content in Google and Google Maps as well - in this, mobile has become one of the most fundamental parts of the business.

Sensis gets around 2.5 million searches from mobile devices per month, and this doubles around every four months. Mobiles now have a 101% penetration rate in Australia, but over 49% of Australians have owned a phone for over 7 years, so it's not a new technology any more, even though technological features keep changing. Benefits for consumers are that mobiles are always on, that they choose whom to communicate with, that communication is personalised, and that it is relevant on the fly - if therefore provides confidence for consumers. For advertisers, the always-on nature is also attractive, and customers using mobile phones to connect are genuine customers, not windowshoppers. Also, the return on investment is measurable. Overall, though, the mobile is about building bridges, it takes users from one platform to another, and this is crucial.

Sydney.
The next speaker at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress 2008 is Tiffany Hall, Technology Controller of Nations & Regions at the BBC. She's focussing on the experience of rolling out the BBC iPlayer, an on-demand TV catch-up service (similar to the ABC's iView); programmes can be streamed or downloaded, and the service is funded by UK television licence funding (which is why content at present is not available outside the UK - unless you use an anonymiser proxy with a UK IP address). The player also contains parental guidance features (as timeshifting undermines the more conventional scheduling of differently rated programmes at different times of the day). iPlayer streams at 800kbps, with sound at 250kbps, and there are further moves to maximise the picture quality. About 80% of users use Windows, about 20% Macs, and only around 1% Linux; the player is now also available on the Nintendo Wii and on the Virgin platform.

Sydney.
Following on from the last two very informative sessions here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, we have a social networking panel. Akamai's Stuart Spiteri kicks off by asking about the impact of continuing change, and Andrew Cordwell answers that this is indeed difficult. For MySpace, local people talking about local issues will always continue; the challenge is to build on this in a more global fashion, and to connect these levels. Francisco Cordero also points to the importance of continuing to develop the technology.

Sydney.
Next up here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Francisco Cordero, General Manager Australia at Bebo, a social networking site which is big in the UK and has recently moved into the Australia/New Zealand market in a more substantial way. Indeed, the promo DVD that Francisco is showing here still has a strong British accent, in contrast to the MySpace promo we saw in the previous session.

The DVD compares Bebo profiles with users favourite music and media to a typical teen's bedroom, incidentally. It also highlights the made-for-online drama series Kate Modern as an online marketing tool, which was used to promote new bands, for example. The Bebo term for brand engagement with Bebo users is 'open media' - even though the DVD promises in the same breath that brands control content, distribution, user experience, and advertising.

Sydney.
We're now starting the second and last day of the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress here in Sydney, and I'm speaking about the impact of online media on broadcasting around noon. We begin with Andrew Cordwell, Director of Sales at Fox Interactive Media, though, which runs sites such as MySpace, IGN, Rotten Tomatoes and Ask Men. Globally, there are 122 million users on MySpace, with 300,000 new sign-ups per day and some 8 million users online at any one time.

Sydney.
The final Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress panel for today shifts our focus from broadcasting to (print as well as online) publishing. Hugh Martin, General Manager of APN Online, opens the discussion by noting the long history of developing online counterparts to print newspapers (and the slightly shorter history of doing the same for magazines). He points to the recent announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is soon to cease its print version, moving entirely to an online newspaper, while magazine publisher Condé Nast has a very hard time working out how to make money online.

Sydney.
We're getting close to the end of this first day at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress; one more speaker and a panel to go. We begin with a repeat performance by Tony McGinn, CEO of MCM Entertainment, who was already on a panel this morning; he opens by noting that we are in a period of significant change, even without the added impact of the global financial crisis. The first fully educated Internet generation is about to take the wheel, and will drive radical change over the next few years.

Sydney.
Here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress, we now move on to another media industry panel, involving a number of the speakers of the day as well as Jason Paris from TV New Zealand. Some 12-18 months ago, New Zealand launched a FreeView service similar to what's soon coming to Australia, and this service has now achieved 10% penetration; TVNZ also launched an online catch-up service similar to the ABC's iView which now generates 300,000 hours of viewing per month, was the first broadcaster in Australasia to launch a YouTube channel, operated a YouTube live debate between the political leaders in the recent elections, partnered with Bebo, and offered four simultaneous live channels covering the recent Olympics online in addition to the TV channels, generating 360,000 viewing hours. It also offered a choice between ad-supported and for-pay online options, and ad-supported content won hands down (at a ratio of 70,000:1).

Sydney.
Up next here at the Australasian Media & Broadcasting Congress is Michael Smith, Corporate and Consumer Group Marketing Director at Optus, who shifts our focus to mobile media. He notes that some 75% of the Optus Zoo mobile portal is user-generated - "stuff that's interesting to me". Users want to access content on their own terms, and so Optus is connecting with a number of media industry partners - this is different from the completely integrated Telstra Bigpond approach, or the handset-as-portal approach of the iPhone, for example.