Seriously, it should be here by now – at least if I believe what I see in movies and on TV. You bet I do! There weren't any rocket cars in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but one school of thought places the setting of The Jetsons right around now. And Metropolis is set in 2023 and has rocket cars aplenty!
We want rocket cars! We want rocket cars!
Lost in Space? Set in 19-freakin'-97! That's ten years in the past!
Are you kidding me? Hurry up already!
All over the Cow, we talk about what's new and what's coming: cameras, formats, workflows, distribution platforms and more. Rocket cars may not come up often, but we're pushing into the future of ENTERTAINMENT as hard and as fast as we can.
It's too bad that other parts of our industry aren't as eager to get there as we are. Perhaps the single staunchest opponent to the future of entertainment has been the National Association of Broadcasters lobby. They've spent over $60 million since 2000, pursuing an agenda that, from the beginning, has included consistent opposition to new media technologies.
I got that dollar figure by looking up NAB's semi-annual filings with the US Senate Office of Public Records, and adding up the totals. Feel free to check my math. Start here.
As shown, select "client name." Then on the next screen, enter:
You'll get 120 results, easily sorted by "Amt Reported." The big dollars are from NAB itself.
The bulk of the other entries are dramatically smaller: all of them combined total just over $5 million in the same period.
This is a good place to make something clear. I like lobbyists. I like 'em a lot. Our senators and representatives have a lot of balls to juggle, and lobbyists can help them keep an eye on YOUR balls, so to speak.
To use the example of the Podesta Group as seen above, a short list of their other clients includes Friends of the Earth, Arizona State University, Lockheed, the Cherokee Nation, the Renewable Fuels Association, Orange County Florida, Tyco, Wal-Mart, and Susan G. Komen for The Cure, who've raised over $1 billion for cancer reasearch, education and health services. (Thanks again, Wikipedia.)
See what I mean? A nice broad slice of American life. This article isn't about the problems with lobbyists. By and large, there's no problem.
The problem we're looking at is with one group in particular. One group to whom thousands of us regularly lend support in one way or another, speaking against our interests, when they should be speaking for them.
By and large, that's a problem.
For example, the NAB didn't initially oppose the technology behind cable TV, but once cable began to offer programming that competed with over-the-air broadcasters, the NAB called it “a malignant tumor.” In their protests over direct broadcast satellite TV, the NAB challenged the FCC's right to even grant licenses to DBS providers!
They've taken a similar tack with satellite radio. My favorite was their 1994 insistence that NOBODY be granted a satellite radio license. Nobody! Can you imagine?
Says who, right?
You've already known stories like this for years. When I saw a lot of the "best" ones in one place, it was pretty overwhelming. They were collected by the Wireless Innovation Alliance, who obviously have a thing or two on their minds.
Here at the Cow barn, they first came to our attention with their "The NAB vs. Innovation" page. Even before we got to the arguments, we were struck by the group's key members: Google, Microsoft, HP, Dell, Motorola and a variety of non-profit groups dedicated to various aspects of accessibility to the internet and other forms of mass education and communication.
The "NAB vs. Innovation" page goes back much further than we do in our editorial, all the way back to the radio establishment's fight against the introduction of FM radio in 1933. By 1944, they'd convinced the FCC to reallocate FM to a different bandwidth, which rendered all the equipment developed in the previous 11 years obsolete -- over 500,000 units by 1941. It wasn't until the 1970s that FM radio became a force to be reckoned with, and not untill 1979 that FM had more listeners than AM.
Check the page above for citations. They quote several scholarly print sources, so no hyperlinks available. That's right kids. Some of the best information isn't online, and may never be.
The point is that the NAB was founded in the early 1920s, and they really have been supporting the efforts of their members to stand in the way of innovation just about that long.
Some of the WIA's examples are truly startling, including the NAB calling cable TV "a malignant tumor" (cited in The Economist in 1975). Here's their description of the NAB's fight against satellite TV, my emphasis added:
As with cable, broadcasters aggressively opposed satellite television, even challenging the FCC’s power to authorize the Direct Broadcast Satellite service. A federal appeals court ultimately rejected the NAB’s contention as a “luddite argument,” holding that “existing licensees have no entitlement that permits them to deflect competitive pressure from innovative and effective technology.”
That's the problem. Not the lobbying itself -- it's a free country and all that. The problem is that so many of us have helped fund these anti-techology efforts through our support of NAB.
There are more examples of NAB's oppositions than the WIA can summarize, including NAB's fight against local programming being available to either satellite TV providers and satellite radio. The latter is especially ugly, because the NAB successfully held off the first satellite radio license approvals for seven years by arguing to the FCC that satellite radio threatened "traditional American values of community cohesion and local identity."
So if satellite radio threatens to erode community cohesion, then why fight so hard to keep satellite radio from carrying local news and traffic? The NAB has said, that "From a competitive standpoint, hometown radio broadcasters have little to fear from satellite radio companies." They've nevertheless been pushing Congress for years to outlaw any kind of localized programming there, just as they have for television and DBS services.
As the name suggests, the WIA's primary interest is in wireless spectrum, to be specific, "realizing the opportunity that lies within the television spectrum." Using the space that currently exists between the channels, "white space," especially for things like emergency broadcasts and, ahem, very local content through low-powered FM transmitters, has been one of the key selling points for the digital broadcast transition.
It's also been one of the key points of opposition by the NAB, who claims that this will lead to chaos. Of the WIA, NAB says that "A successful consumer transition from analog to digital television is now imperiled by a cadre of companies that have been hoisted on their own flawed technology petard." So the availability of white space is one of the reasons why we're doing this, and, says the NAB, is why that very transition is "imperiled." Read the rest here and see if it's any more persuasive to you than it is to me.
The peril, says NAB, is the "oceans of interference" that these white space transmissions will create with existing ones. In 2001, the FCC commissioned an independent report to examine these claims. They turned to MITRE, a non-profit corporation with its roots in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and their Lincoln Laboratory, created to develop ground radar air defense systems for the US. The rest of the company's name refers to the "mitre" as a way to fit things together.
And indeed, that's their suggestion: find a way to fit together multiple frequencies in what they call bandwidth sharing. While finding in 2001 that there can be issues with direct broadcast satellites (DirecTV and the like) and adjacent frequencies, they can be easily mitigated. And regarding white space transmission, tthey found in 2003 that there were not significant issues with low-powered FM transmissions in particular, and recommended against taking the NAB's advice. (As much as I hate citing other people's citations, Wikipedia once again gets there fastest.)
Which of course led the NAB to commission its own studies that found -- surprise, surprise -- that there's interference plenty. Especially when taken in context of their legislative agendas over the past 85 years, it's hard to take this as seriously as the findings by the same bandwidth specialists that the US Department of Defense relies on, to the contrary.
 In the meantime, maybe you're grateful that the DTV transition has been pushed back to 2009. You've been talking to your parents about it for years, and they still don't get that it's about DIGITAL TV, not HDTV. No worries. Encourage them in their belief that it's their civic duty to buy an HDTV...which it kind of is.
But the transition has been pushed out so many years because NAB has been spending so much money to fight it for so long, at least in part because of the analog spectrum they'll be surrendering to...wait, surrender? How come NAB keeps saying “surrender?” Who said that spectrum is theirs to “surrender”? WE issue THEIR licenses!
As one senator said of lawmakers yielding to NAB on this issue, “It's not a proud moment.”
That would be Arizona's Senator John McCain, who says about the NAB: “I have a perfect record; I’ve never beaten them." I have no comment on anything else the senator has said about anything, or his fitness or lack thereof for any particular job he's applied for, but here's the rest of the story. The short version is "that was then, we get along fine now"...but I still like the quote, as well as his observation that Congress' history of letting NAB have its way is nothing to be proud of.)
Low-power FM stations, DVRs (an article in itself, that one), harnessing the “white spaces” between existing broadcast channels – the list of NAB's objections goes on, as expenses and delays pile up.
In fairness, the NAB doesn't represent media creators or consumers. It's not their job to foster innovation. Quite the contrary. They're paid millions to ensure that the future unfolds in exactly the way that their members want – as slowly and with as little disruption as possible.
(For example, does the proposed ban on local programming via satellite radio address any consumer needs or desires? Of course not.)
Hey, we'd all like less disruption. New frame rates, anyone? But as both creators and consumers, we're in it for the RIDE. The future is our friend – especially if we might get a rocket car out of the deal.
At least the rocket part of it is coming along nicely, thanks to folks like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origin project. “We’re working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system.”
Wow. How cool is that? Here's a picture of the nose cone, and here's some of the rest of the story.
And PayPal founder Elon Musk founded SpaceX to develop “a family of launch vehicles which will ultimately reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten." NASA's on board: they've already awarded SpaceX a contract ferrying goods to and from the international space station!
The rocket, above, and a story about it, here. It just floors me to think that they're far enough along that they're already working for NASA.
I can see it now: using Paypal to buy a rocket from Amazon! Woo-hoo! Jetsons, here I come!
Did you hear the one about The Big Software Company that's been trying to develop a rocket car?
They're having a problem with crashing.
Anyway, the rocket car isn't even the best part of my Jetsons-inspired future. George worked only 3 hours a day at Spacely Sprockets! And only 3 days a week! Oops.
Or as The Jetson's pet dog Astro would say, “Ruh-roh!”
Three hours, three days a week? I think I might get the rocket car first.
As long as nobody's spending $60 million to stop me.
The image in this title was painted in 1945 by Carl H. Renner....for GM! No kidding!
I found it at the Paleofuture blog, "A look into the future that never was." Its host Matt Novak says, "We had this sort of optimism in the '50s and '60s, a feeling that things were inevitable because of technology. And flying cars were on the short list. I don't think we're going to have freeways in the sky any time soon." Ah well....
Final note: While we've talked about this at length around the Cow barn, the opinions expressed here are my own.
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