COVE is model for more magic up our lab-coat sleeves
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” — Arthur C. Clarke
For station general managers feeling whipsawed by the accelerating pace of technology-driven media upheaval, the irony of Arthur Clarke’s words is that keeping pace with today’s technology practically requires a staff magician.
In the nearly four decades since Clarke wrote that sentence, technology has become exponentially more important to the health of the public media system.
At the same time, thanks to the Internet, technology has become distressingly more complex — to the point where even the smartest executives in public television are sometimes heard asking for someone to pull back the curtain and explain the rapidly changing new media landscape in plain English.
In that spirit, PBS Interactive has assembled this guide to some of 2010’s most important new media trends — including the handful of PBS Interactive initiatives designed with the singular focus of helping stations become wildly successful new media magicians.
PBS Interactive 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0: The history of PBS Interactive spans three eras. PBSi 1.0 launched in the mid-’90s and focused on getting the pieces into place to build PBS.org into the period’s world’s most-used dot-org site.
In 2007, we changed directions, rolling out PBSi 2.0, with an important new mission: Grow PBS.org for the benefit of stations.
This year, we’re evolving to PBSi 3.0, with a mission of growing on all platforms – e.g., Web, mobile, iPad, smart white boards and others — for the benefit of stations.
COVE clones: Nearly 120 stations have adopted COVE (the Comprehensive Online Video Ecosystem), the local-national video platform that PBSi developed for station sites. COVE allows stations to create custom video portals that display local video productions side-by-side with national series.
This is a true local-national platform. Even though some stations haven’t finished rolling out their COVE portals, the amount of local video in COVE (3,000 hours) already dwarfs national video (1,500 hours).
The early results are exciting. On WTTW’s video portal, the Chicago Tonight program had a 114 percent increase in video traffic in the six months since the station launched COVE. As of last month, users across the PBS system had viewed 17.8 million local and national COVE videos.
The COVE approach has been so successful that we’re now extending its local-national paradigm to all key initiatives. As we roll out initiatives in mobile, News and Public Affairs, for example, we will build a local-national platform designed to engage new audiences for stations. In short, each time we consider a new project, the first question will be: Can we turn this into a COVE Clone — serving our audience and stations in a way that’s as effective as COVE?
Project Merlin: Imagine a national newspaper that reached 12 million readers a month. Now imagine the newspaper’s publisher deciding to promote your station every day on every page of the edition that goes to your local residents.
Stop imagining. The publisher’s name is Merlin. The “newspaper” is PBS.org.
When Merlin rolls out this year, every page of PBS.org — from the home page to all producer pages — will include at least one promotion that drives users to their local PBS-station site.
This is a radical shift. It expands PBS.org from being a respected national content site to being a respected national-local content site and a marketing channel that delivers qualified leads—potential viewers and supporters—from our pool of 12 million visitors a month to station websites.
To get a sense of the potential, consider this: WHYY saw a 200 percent increase in traffic to whyy.org when it collaborated with PBS Interactive on a pilot that promoted local video content through PBS.org.
As with COVE, Merlin will be an opt-in project. Participating stations will simply need to share metadata about their web content for it to appear on PBS.org and drive new visitors back to the station site.
APIs: The public media world should feel right at home with the term “API.” Not only is it an acronym, it’s also the force behind some of our most important work, such as the Public Media Player (more about that below).
In reality, though, the most immediate effect of the term “API” is to intimidate all but self-confessed geeks. The term is common enough that everyone thinks they should understand it, but few actually do.
And that’s not surprising. Even Wikipedia’s definition does little more than create confusion: “An Application Programming Interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program which enables it to interact with other software.”
So far so good. The definition continues: “It is similar to the way the user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers. An API is implemented by applications and operating systems to determine their vocabularies and calling conventions, and is used to access their services. It may include specifications for routines, data structures, object classes and protocols used to communicate between the consumer and the implementer of the API.”
Clear? Think of an API (an Application Programming Interface) as a piece of software code that enables one program to talk with another program.
From a technical perspective, the Internet is a vast Tower of Babel. Each website uses numerous different protocols, few of which can easily speak to each other. APIs create a shared language to connect sites or components within a site.
APIs come in a couple of flavors. NPR deserves kudos for its “Open API,” which allows the public to create new noncommercial ways of mixing and matching NPR’s text and audio content with content on other websites. (This API is what allowed an NPR fan to build a popular, but unofficial, NPR iPhone app.) This spreads NPR’s content beyond npr.org, vastly increasing the number of people who see it.
PBS has taken a different approach. We’ve focused exclusively on creating APIs that help stations and producers. We’ve built more than 25 of these “private” APIs, including ones for local TV schedules and tune-in promotion to help stations create rich web experiences with data from PBS. Our COVE APIs, coming this fall, will connect stations to PBS Video in ways that were previously unfathomable. Some of these APIs ultimately will be opened up to the public as well.
These “private” APIs aren’t glitzy, but they’re practical and effective. Think of them as a simplification/efficiency layer on top of PBS’s complex internal systems — a layer that allows us to connect the services of PBS.org to station websites — driving traffic and engagement for stations.
The Public Media Platform: This collaboration between PBS, NPR, PRX, PRI, and APM (with funding from CPB), aims to knit together the various public media publishing tools so that content from any public media partner can be surfaced on another partner’s site.
In other words, what Merlin does for stations — enable them to “syndicate” their content to PBS.org and receive traffic in return, the Public Media Platform would do for the entire public media ecosystem. TV content could appear on radio station websites, radio content on TV station iPhone apps, etc.
The goal is to build a prototype of the Public Media Platform in six months, then move on to a working version.
Mobile, apps, Android, tablets: Americans have adopted web-ready mobile phones at a faster rate than they took to the desktop Internet during the 1990s. The growth curve for Apple’s iPhone is much steeper than the early growth curves for Netscape, AOL and other desktop Internet pioneers.
If you need further proof that mobile is changing the media landscape, consider this: Americans today are spending about as much time watching video on their mobile phones as they are talking on them.
And the iPhone is just the first wave in uncoupling the Internet from traditional computers. The 2010 holiday season will see a flood of ultra-portable touch-screen “tablet” computers similar to Apple’s iPad. The bottom line: Portable devices are key platforms for producers and stations to grow audiences.
PBS has been an industry leader in iPhone apps for kids. Five of our iPhone apps — Super Why, Curious George, Martha Speaks, Mister Rogers and PBS Kids Photo Factory — each spent time near the top of iTunes list of most popular kids apps. Two of those (Super Why and Curious George) hit No. 1 in the educational games category.
Now we’re beginning the next stage of our mobile strategy: Do for mobile what COVE did for video. In other words, we’re creating a powerful local-national mobile platform that enables stations to better connect with their audiences, drive TV tune-in and build their membership files.
Later this year, we’ll launch a PBS primetime app for the iPhone that will focus on increasing television tune-in. It will include preview clips and tune-in information, all automatically localized to local stations.
Working together, PBS Interactive, stations and producers can do what public media has always done best – use technology to serve the American public. The challenges posed by today’s emerging platforms are more intense, but for stations that master these technologies, the payoff in terms of audience and revenue will be ... magical.
Jason Seiken is PBS’s senior v.p., interactive, product development and innovation.
Photo illustration by Current.
Web page posted May 17, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Current LLC