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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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USA Edition | Today Is Monday, March 22, 2010 |
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| The Disgraceful Failure Of Electronic Journalism | « Scan Content In The Order It Was Published » | Kodak At The Inflexion Point | |
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Kirkland, Washington — ClearWire is a name you’ll want to remember. This local company has positioned itself and its partners to pull off one of the most difficult and potentially profitable advancements in Internet technology. It’s called WiMax — a next generation, super long range and blazing fast wireless Internet service. If WiMax gains sufficient customers as a result of $ 18 billion investment by a consortium of big names in technology, it will revolutionize Internet connectivity and dominate wireless digital for years to come.
Clearwire’s WiMax consortium plans to roll out a wireless Internet connection service capable of providing users 70 megabit connectivity up to 30 miles from the base station. WiMax is described by some as WiFi on steroids. Better yet, WiMax is ready for world wide roll out — not to mention it is already serving customers in a handful of North American markets.
ClearWire’s partners in WiMax service include Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse Networks. What these companies are trying to pull-off is but one sparkling light in the future of video journalism. Widespread high-speed connectivity — both fixed point and mobile — will free video based media to go anywhere to cover anything.
Intel has made a billion dollar investment to assure that its super high-speed wireless technology becomes the way of the future. No matter the big money and big names, it is Craig McCaw’s start-up that will drive and manage a new, multi-billion dollar consorium that will undertake one of the most ambitious technological efforts in recent history.
With these big names in technology signed up to deliver broadband two-way wireless internet, the prospects for Internet news capture and distribution improve substantially. Think of WiMax as the technology that will replace television broadcasting, wimpy internet service and telephone communications with a wideband, wide-area, mobile service that will soon blanket most of the world’s major cities.
Craig McCaw
The leaders in WiMax service deployment include Craig McCaw and his brothers. Craig McCaw was behind Nextel Corporation which merged with Sprint in 2007. It was McCaw who spearheaded the development of cable television before moving on to do it all over again in the cellular telephone industry. The McCaw’s cable TV interests are now part of Comcast while their cellular telephone business is known today as AT&T Wireless. These successful entrepreneurial efforts made the McCaw’s multi-billionaires. And now they’re at it again — this time to significantly increase the data rate and range for potentially billions of wireless Internet users.
The McCaw brothers are visionaries who see possibilities in technologies with great promise before they are proven, or popular. They did it in cable TV and cellular. Every new business the McCaw’s entered has become fabulously successful. So what is Craig McCaw up to these days? In a word, WiMax.
The future of journalism seems cloudy to many — largely due to the implosion unfolding in both print and broadcast media. While the seriousness of these changes cannot be overstated, neither can the opportunities for journalists in the digital publishing media. The future of journalism looks all the more promising now that WiMax is moving toward reality world wide. What WiMax brings to journalism is ubiquitous mobility and bi-directional wideband capabilities.
The impact of WiMax on journalism — especially live video coverage and remote originations — will derive from its reach as much as its high speed connectivity. In terms of reach, the WiMax forum projects a world wide user base numbering in the hundreds of millions in the next five years.
But reach is only part of the equation for journalists and publishers, for the ability to stream live video essentially from anywhere to anywhere changes the dynamics of video journalism from the entertainment constraints of broadcasting into a new world where credible and probative news can inexpensively be produced and broadcast.
Now the question will be what has the Honorable Profession learned from seeing its traditional media world corrupted by its present focus on profitability above all other considerations? In many ways, WiMax, if successful, wipes the slate clean. It offers electronic journalists a new opportunity.
What we choose to do with it will determine whether journalism remains a viable and honorable profession.
