The DC conference season is kicking into gear and with the Dems in power now, one conference should get a big surge in attendance: Freedom to Connect. F2C is David Isenberg’s annual gift to broadband policy thinkers.
Unlike most DC-based events, F2C aims not to lobby or position or spin or score political brownie points. It aims to illuminate and educate. This year’s line-up of speakers includes some big names who have fundamentally changed the way people think about communications, including the incomparable Bruce Sterling, among whose many achievements is the spawning of cyberpunk science fiction, and Yochai Benkler, whose “Wealth of Networks” is must-reading for anybody serious about understanding the communications industries.
Other speakers include Vermont’s Governor Jim Douglas, whose universal broadband initiative is a first in the nation, and FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein.
F2C is admittedly quirky (a funky but talented musician entertains the attendees on stage during the breaks and lunch is a boxed affair with people sitting on the floor of the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring debating the finer points of telecom policy) and free-spirited (the audience interacts with the speakers in a way not characteristic of buttoned-down DC.)
You won’t hear balanced viewpoints at F2C — it is decidedly a gathering of what K Street lobbyists call “goo-goos.” But they’re smart, interesting and very influential goo-goos.
What you also won’t hear at F2C: pre-canned pitches based on talking points polished to perfection by $500/hour political consulting firms. For this reason, I took the unusual step last year and plugged F2C on this blog, a surprise that seemed to drive David Isenberg mad with joy. He even made me one of his official friends on his own blog.
But, I’m not praising F2C this go-around with the expectation that I’ll be upgraded to David’s BFF. I just think that if folks really want to know where broadband policy is headed, they should start with F2C.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:51 PM | Print | Comments (0)
You know a company is in big trouble when it sends its lawyer as a replacement speaker at a high-profile industry event. That’s what happened at the Midem music conference in Cannes this week. Robin Kent, CEO of ad-supported music download start-up SpiralFrog was slated to speak at the industry gathering, but the company sent its outside counsel, Marc Jacobson of Greenberg Traurig instead.
The cause of the patently poor replacement was a “management shake-up” at SpiralFrog, which apparently lost its CEO, five members of the management team and three board members, not to mention, apparently, office space, all at once.
Mathew Ingram earlier this week wondered what caused what he believed at the time to be a massive “walk-out” at SpiralFrog. The answer, it seems, is that despite SpiralFrog’s deals with EMI and Universal Music, the company couldn’t make the ad-supported download model work, nor could it attract two of the industry’s biggest companies, Warner Music and Sony BMG.
Even EMI had its doubts when it signed on to make its music available for download on an ad-supported basis. And for good reason.
With the still-massive amount of free but unauthorized P2P file-sharing options available, most users won’t opt for ad-supported music (the ads were supposed to play while files were being downloaded). If they want free music, they’ll just go the illegal route. To a lesser extent, the same dynamic holds true for TV shows and movies.
Consumers willing to pay for downloaded content won’t be happy if they have to accept ads at the same time. So, right now the market is stuck between free but illegal downloads and pay-as-you-go downloads without advertising.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:07 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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