November 2014

Digital to Overtake TV Ad Spending in Two Years, Says Forrester

US advertisers' spending on digital advertising will overtake TV in 2016 and hit $103 billion in 2019 to represent 36% of all ad spending, according to Forrester's latest estimates based on its ForecastView model.

US advertisers will spend $85.8 billion on TV ads in 2019, which will equal 30% of overall ad spending that year, according to Forrester. But digital won't usurp TV because of big brand advertisers taking their commercial money and redirecting it toward YouTube and Facebook. There will be some cannibalization of TV budgets, but the bigger contributing factor will be an influx of new money dedicated to digital because marketers are able to prove that digital works, said Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk.

Who Are the Winners and Losers in Pay TV’s Unbundled Future?

The pay-TV bundle is a gigantic iceberg that’s slowly melting.

As Internet-video options proliferate, consumers will have a growing list of reasons to stop paying $90 or more per month for multichannel television. And the jockeying is now under way among programmers and distributors to prep the life rafts if viewers decide to jump en masse. A key change in the landscape: Major media companies, after years of resisting the Internet’s pull, have finally decided to step into the brave new over-the-top world, with video delivered not via satellite or cable TV, but through broadband. How quickly these moves might undercut the traditional pay-TV ecosystem is anyone’s guess. But a shift is coming.

The big concern for programmers is that they’ll get stripped out of the bundle, if Internet-delivered video spurs a migration to less-expensive packages or a la carte OTT services. That’s a growing risk as the price of pay-TV packages keeps heading north.

OTT is Dead; Long Live OTT

[Commentary] With each new announcement of a service going “over the top” of traditional cable systems, investors and consumers, persuaded by the national media, start to believe the breathless confirmation that this time we are witnessing nothing short of a TV revolution -- a new way to buy and watch the medium. The reality is much more mundane, and if the cable industry doesn’t make strategic missteps, the bundle will continue to dominate the pay TV-buying public’s appetite for years.

The hopeful fantasy that somehow consumers can one day choose to buy channels on their own at an affordable price is just that -- a fantasy. It’s not a real business that will rival cable operators.

Here are five reasons: 1) OTT offerings will always be weaker. 2) An OTT a la carte service would cost too much. 3) Robust network OTT services would destroy the very bundle programmers have worked so hard to create. 4) OTT a la carte would be too complicated. 50 OTT a la carte might mean higher broadband prices and more regulation.

The Truth About Teenagers, The Internet, and Privacy

While teenagers’ privacy concerns have been closely examined when it comes to how they relate to brands and other people, experts do not fully understand how teens feel about the government’s use of their data. That may be because it is still a fluid situation: today’s adolescents are growing up in the context of a national conversation about the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, and spying -- issues that are being debated as I type this sentence.

“It’s still unclear exactly how these issues will impact their behavior and choices in the years to come, but I guarantee that it will,” says Miller, of the University of Toronto. “They’re soaking this knowledge in and living it in a way that is very different from older generations.” Adolescents have been migrating away from Facebook and Twitter over the last few years, showing preference for sites like Snapchat, Whisper, Kik, and Secret that provide more anonymity and privacy. Part of this transition can be explained by the fact that the older social media sites stopped being cool when parents joined them, but perhaps another reason could be that teenagers growing up in the post-Snowden era implicitly understand the value of anonymity. For teens, it’s not a matter of which platform to use, but rather which works best in a particular context.

Privacy Tools: The Best Encrypted Messaging Programs

It is not easy to sort out which secret messaging tools offer true security and which ones might be snake oil. So I turned to two experts -- Joseph Bonneau at Princeton and Peter Eckersley at the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- for advice about what to look for in encryption tools.

Working together, we chose seven technical criteria on which to rank encryption tools. The criteria aim to assess whether the tool is designed to combat threats such as backdoors secretly built into the software, Internet eavesdroppers, or tricksters who steal the secret "keys" that users must safeguard to keep their communications secure. Check out the results of our review.

HHS Secretary names members for federal Health Information Technology Policy and Standards Committees

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell named a new member to the Health Information Technology Policy Committee (HITPC) and renewed appointments for three members of the Health IT Standards Committee (HITSC).

The committees are charged with recommending policies and technologies needed to implement a nationwide health information technology infrastructure and strategic plan. The two federal advisory committees were created through the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act in accordance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). The committees provide the opportunity for stakeholders and the public to provide direct input to HHS.

New HITPC Member:

Anjum Khurshid, public health representative; senior advisor - health systems division, Louisiana Public Health Institute

Continuing HITSC Members:

Floyd Eisenberg, M.D., M.P.H., quality measurement representative; consultant, iParsimony LLC
Leslie Kelly Hall, consumer/patient representative; senior vice president of policy, Healthwise
Arien Malec, electronic exchange representative, vice president - data platform and acquisition Tools, RelayHealth

Here’s Why Taylor Swift Pulled Her Music From Spotify

Taylor Swift pulled all her music from Spotify, save for one song, in a move that’s got many of her fans -- and especially the music streaming service -- calling desperately for her return. The singer hasn’t been too keen on sharing her music with Spotify. Swift’s most recent album, 1989, wasn’t on the service, and she initially held off on allowing Spotify to stream her 2012 album, Red. But the 24-year-old, whose music seems to have its own copyright patrol service, had been showing signs that she wouldn’t work with Spotify since July, when she explained her problem with streaming music services.

She’s calling for artists to reject services that devalue their work through low payouts. Other artists have taken similar actions, including musicians like American rock duo The Black Keys, who have spoken out against the small royalties paid by streaming services. Meanwhile, some artists like Coldplay choose to stagger their album’s streaming release in order to encourage listeners to buy or download the album before it’s available for streaming.

G7 broadband dynamics: How policy affects broadband quality in powerhouse nations

As we become more dependent on information technologies, questions about how to build, sell, regulate, and upgrade broadband networks become increasingly crucial. Broadband networks are key enablers of information technologies as well as products of them, so their status tells us a great deal about the extent to which technology permeates the modern society. Policy experiments over the past decade provide insight into the effects that regulatory policies have on the vibrancy of these networks and the richness of the applications they enable. Policy is not the whole story, however: nations differ with respect to geographic, historical, and cultural factors that strongly influence the motivation to invest in technology and the ability to reap its benefits. Isolating the effects of policy from these other factors is easiest when we compare broadband diffusion, quality, utilization and cost in nations that are similar in size, economic development, education, and population distribution; hence, this study examines broadband in the Group of 7 (G7) nations.

The web is a terrorist’s command-and-control network of choice

[Commentary] The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) is the first terrorist group whose members have grown up on the internet. They are exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach. The challenge to governments and their intelligence agencies is huge -- and it can only be met with greater co-operation from technology companies.

These companies have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us. If they are to meet this challenge, it means coming up with better arrangements for facilitating lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies than we have now. As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the spectacular creation that is the world wide web, we need a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens. It should be a deal rooted in the democratic values we share. That means addressing some uncomfortable truths. Better to do it now than in the aftermath of greater violence.

[Hannigan is the director of GCHQ, a UK government intelligence and security organization]

US tech firms help terrorists, says new UK spy chief. Maybe, but they also help the rest of us.

[Commentary] Robert Hannigan, the new head of British spy agency GCHQ, has attacked Silicon Valley tech firms for aiding terrorism by providing greater security for their customers in the wake of Edward Snowden’s surveillance leaks.

I see two themes here: an echoing of the FBI’s stateside efforts to get politicians to force tech firms to allow spies and cops to bypass tech firms’ newly heightened encryption efforts (he named no names, but Google’s email encryption push and Apple’s device encryption moves spring to mind); and a bolstering of the UK government’s desire to block extremist online material.

It cannot be said often enough that it’s impossible to clamp down on terrorist uses of technology without clamping down on the freedoms of everyone else. One more time: If you intentionally break the digital locks that we all use, we are all made less, not more, safe. It is absurd and incorrect to think that you can insert a backdoor -- a flaw in security -- and expect it to be exploitable by only one entity. If we all have broken locks, we are all more vulnerable not only to foreign intelligence agencies, but also to non-state hackers.

Benton

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