JMS

The first week of meetings with the Digital Distribution Consortium (DDC) working group has come to a close and we’re off to a good start despite the torrential rain in DC [my flight from Boston was due to arrive at 8 pm and eventually touched ground at 2 am, where I was greeted by a 90 minute wait for a taxi. The next morning parts of the metro were shut down and I joined thousands of commuters in waiting and then giving up on various shuttle busses and I ultimately ended up hoofing it to NPR headquarters.]

Most of this first week we spent huddled around conference tables and white boards at NPR. We will spend three more days at NPR next week and then take the show on the road to Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, arranging meetings with industry experts along the way.

The basic plan is to devote a chunk of time over a six-week period to think through digital distribution services that would benefit from a greater degree of coordination across the system.

We’ve decided to organize our efforts by writing a business plan for an ‘entity’ that would perform these services, describing the markets it would target, its products and services, revenue model, competitive position, strategic partners, risks, technology and operational needs, expenses and investment requirements — a full picture.

We’ve agreed that the character of the service is ‘enabling’: it should help a wide variety of stations, networks, producers, and other partners offer digital content to existing and new audiences across multiple platforms in innovative ways. It should leverage the collective assets of a more broadly defined public media field to create a significant presence online, increased relevance and engagement with audiences, and new sources of revenue.

After we get a comprehensive plan together the next phase is to make recommendations for how best to make it happen in our current configuration: what would need building or buying versus coordinating between existing resources and infrastructure, what roles might our and other organizations play, what would be the governance and investment structure, is this indeed an ‘entity’ or something else?

Of course it’s been very tempting for us to jump to phase 2, especially given our own direct interests in the outcome and the likelihood that it will be tricky to navigate. I think we all swing between excitement about the project’s potential and recognition of the complexities of orchestrating it in reality.

We’ve launched a project wiki here: http://digitaldistribution.wikispaces.com