Research and commentary on digital technologies in public life
Students will be studying election technology and election administration in freshman seminar courses taught by at Princeton (by me) and at Stanford (by David Dill). The students will be writing short articles on the Election Machinery blog. I invite you all to read that blog over the next three months, to see what a small nonrandom sample of 18-year-olds is writing about the machinery of voting and elections.
Want to watch a popular television show without all the ads? Your options are increasing. There’s the iTunes store, moving toward HD video formats, in which a growing range of shows can be bought on a per-episode or per-season basis, to be watched without advertisements on a growing range of devices at a time of your chooing. Or you could buy a Netflix subscription and Roku streaming box on top of your existing media expenditures, and stream many TV episodes directly over the web. Thirdly, there’s the growing market for DVDs or Blu-ray discs themselves, which are higher definition and particularly rewarding for those who are able to shell out for top-end home theater systems that can make the most of the added information in a disc as opposed to a broadcast. I’m sure there are yet more options for turning a willingness to pay into an ad-free viewing experience — video-on-demand over the pricey but by most accounts great FiOS service, perhaps? Finally, TiVo and other options like it reward those who can afford DVRs, and further reward those savvy enough to bother programming their remotes with the 30-second skip feature.
In any case, the growing popularity of these options and others like them pose a challenge, or at least a subtle shift in pricing incentives, for the makers of television content. Traditionally, content has been monetized by ads, where advertisers could be confident that the whole viewership of a given show would be tuned in for whatever was placed in the midst of an episode. Now, the wealthiest, best educated, most consumer electronics hungry segments of the television audience–among the most valuable viewers to advertisers–is able to absent itself from the ad viewing public.
This problem is worse than just losing some fraction of the audience: it’s about losing a particular fraction of the audience. If x percent of the audience skips the ads for the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, then the remaining 100-x percent of the audience is the least tech-savvy, least consumer electronics acquistive part of the audience, by and large a much less attractive demographic for advertisers. (A converse version of this effect may be true for the online advertising market, where every viewer is in front of a web browser or relatively fancy phone, but I’m less confident of that because of the active interest in ad-blocking technologies. Maybe online ad viewers will be a middle slice, savvy enough to be online but not to block ads?)
What will this mean for TV? Here’s one scenario: Television bifurcates. Ad-supported TV goes after the audience that still watches ads, those toward the lower part of the socioeconomic spectrum. Ads for Walmart replace those for designer brands. The content of ad-supported TV itself trends toward options that cater to the ad-watching demographic. Meanwhile, high end TV emerges as an always ad-free medium supported by more direct revenue channels, with more and more of it coming along something like the HBO route. These shows are underwritten by, and ultimately directed to, the ad-skipping but high-income crowd. So there won’t be advertisers clamoring to attract the higher income viewers, as such, but those who invest in creating the shows in the first place will learn over time to cater to the interests and viewing habits of the elite.
Another scenario, that could play out in tandem with the first, is that there may be a strong appetite for a truly universal advertising medium, either because of the ease this creates for certain advertisers or because of the increasing revenue premium as such broad audiences become rarer and are bid up in value. In this case, you could imagine a Truman Show-esque effort to integrate advertising with the TV content. The ads would be unskippable because they wouldn’t exist or, put another way, would be the only thing on (some parts of) television.
Today, we checked out the house, again, and lo and behold, it finally has power again! Huzzah!
All in all, it hasn’t been that bad for us. We crashed with friends, ate out all the time, and (thankfully) had daycare for our daughter as of Thursday last week. Indeed, I’m seeing fewer people’s kids around the office this week and more people seem to be getting back into the groove.
Even though Rice wanted classes to restart on Tuesday of last week, the unstated unofficial everybody-get-back-to-work day was really yesterday, Monday, just over a week after the hurricane. What’s the status of the city?
Many people are still without power, and the power crews are now dealing with harder cases, individually damaged lines, and so forth. Getting the rest of the city online may well take a good long time. Another interesting effect is that the rush-hour traffic is beyond insane. Luckily, our daily commute is short enough that we’re largely immute to this, but traffic lights which reset to blinking red are slowing down everything, to the point that remote freeway exits are backing up into the freeways due to the malfunctioning traffic lights at the intersections below. The Chron estimates it could be until November until all the traffic lights are repaired. Ouch.
Naturally, one of the tempting purchases for us is some kind of natural gas powered, permanently installed generator. I’m sure if I shop around for one now, I’d pay a mint to get it. Maybe in the off season… Needless to say, I don’t see the city investing to bury all the power lines that run above ground. They have legitimately higher priorities. As to me, I sure would have been happy to have had power all the way through this thing, brought to us by the one utility that never had any downtime: our natural gas line.
[Sidebar: it takes a major power outage for you to really appreciate how people got by in the days before electrical power. Pickling, preserving, and other techniques suddenly seem awfully clever. Some candles put out an awful lot more light than others. You can also see why it was a standard architectural feature of old Southern homes to have big outdoor porches — so you’d have somewhere slightly cooler to sleep than indoors.]
Many people have been emailing me to send their best wishes. I thought it would be helpful to post a brief note on what happened and where we’re all at.
As you know, Hurricane Ike hit shore early Saturday morning. The wind, combined with a massive storm surge, caused staggering devastation along the Texas coast. Houston is further inland, so the big issue for us was and still is fallen trees and downed power lines. Rice University, as a result of what must have been a huge amount of advance effort, came through with flying colors. They had power and a working network pretty much the whole time. They didn’t have any water pressure for a while, but that came online Monday. Our main data center, built recently with an explicit goal of surviving events like this, apparently lost power for a while, at least in part. (I don’t have the full story yet. I do know that a failed DNS server caused our email server to experience problems.)
Our own house had no particular damage, although the back fence came down. We still have no power, but we’ve had water pressure (initially low, now fine) and natural gas the whole time. The hardwired telephone had a few outages, but continues to work reliably. Cellular phones were initially dicey but are now working great.
Luckily, the weather has been unseasonably cool, so we and all our neighbors have been leaving windows open. Over the weekend, the highs are in the mid 80’s (28-30C), with cooler weather at night, so we’ll do okay on that front. At this point, many restaurants are open, so the lack of power doesn’t mean living off canned food. Likewise, some gas stations and supermarkets are coming online again. Life, at least in this part of the city, is starting to resemble normality.
A looming concern is mosquitos. After Tropical Storm Allison in 2001 (see my photos), the big issue was clearly mosquitos. Lots of rain means lots of standing water, and that means mosquitos are on their way. Back then, few people lost power. This time, it’s going to get ugly.
Rice had a full faculty meeting on Tuesday morning. Our president announced that we would be resuming classes on Tuesday afternoon, but we could not have any assignments due or exams given this week. Last night, we got an email saying that everybody has made assignments due Monday next week, and that we needed do something else (without saying what). Apparently, there’s been an outpouring, among our students, of interest in volunteering to help the community (a good thing!), and I’d certainly like our students to get out and help. But if we’re supposed to get back to teaching, then that means work. I’m not sure how we’ll ultimately resolve this.
Unscientific data: our president asked for a show of hands at the meeting. How many faculty had no power? Maybe 90%. How many faculty had no daycare for their kids? Maybe 80%. How many faculty had significant damage to their homes? Maybe 20%.
For any of you who want to see what I saw, I took a bunch of pictures.
Meanwhile, I need to get back to work myself. We’ve got a research paper due Friday. Life goes on.
Welcome to the new, redesigned Freedom to Tinker. Beyond giving it a new look, we have rebuilt the site as a blogging community, to highlight the contributions of more authors. The front page and main RSS feed will offer a combination of posts from all authors. We have also added a blog page (and feed) for each author, so you can read posts by your favorite author or subscribe to your favorite author’s RSS feed. Over time, Freedom to Tinker has evolved from a single-author blog into a group effort, and these changes better recognize the efforts of all of our authors.
Along with the redesign, we’re thrilled to add three authors to our roster: Tim Lee, Paul Ohm, and Yoshi Kohno.
Tim Lee is a prominent tech policy analyst, journalist, and blogger who has written for sites such as Ars Technica, Techdirt, and the Technology Liberation Front. He is now a computer science grad student at Princeton, and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy.
Paul Ohm is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado, specializing in computer crime law,criminal procedure, intellectual property, and information privacy. He worked previously as a trial attorney in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the U.S. Department of Justice; and before law school he worked as a computer programmer and network administrator.
Yoshi Kohno is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on assessing and improving the security and privacy properties of current and future technologies. In 2007 he was recognized by MIT’s Technology Review magazine as one of the world’s top innovators under the age of 35. He is known for his research on the security of implantable medical devices and voting machines, among other technologies.
Finally, Freedom to Tinker is now officially hosted by Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. A major goal of CITP is to foster discussion of infotech policy issues, so it makes sense for CITP to host this kind of blog community for CITP members and friends.
We hope you enjoy the new Freedom to Tinker. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.
