tv [untitled] February 14, 2012 1:30pm-2:00pm EST
1:30 pm
this afternoon congressional commission looks into how china treats political dissidents and activists. the commissioning hear from the wife of a human rights that has been missing. 2:30 eastern on c-span3. this is taking place the day the chinese president is visiting washington and our c-span facebook page is looking for your input into the visit by chinese vice president xi jinping. he met with president obama this morning and vice president biden. we're asking you about the importance of u.s.-china relations. go to facebook.com/c-span and share your thoughts. >> now online at the c-span video library, speeches from last weekend's conservative
1:31 pm
action conference. >> we must outsmart the liberals. we must outsmart the stupid people that are trying to run america. >> it's about one country united under god. we're not red americans, we're not blue americans, we're red, white, and blue. and president obama, we are through with you. >> around the last table, they can get along and come at our throat as long as we're foolish enough to raise taxes and throw money under the table and get along in the scene after the bank robbery one for you, one for you and we're all happy. >> click videos and share them at c-span.org/videolibrary. this is c-span3 with politics and public affairs programming throughout the week and every weekend 48 hours of people and events telling the american story on american history tv. get our schedules and see past programs at our websites.
1:32 pm
can you join in the conversation on social media sights. the brookings institution recently took a day to look into how to create jobs and innovation in the economy. in this one-hour portion a discussion in the changes of digital media and technology. >> okay. thank you. director of the center for technology innovation here at brookings. i have to say the members of this panel occupy what has to be the most dangerous position of the day. we are the last session between you and lunch. but we'll try and keep this interesting for you. just consider us the
1:33 pm
intellectual appetizer for the meal coming up. one of the things today has been innovation and we're pleased to have three individuals with tremendous expertise in this area. peter to my immediate right chairman of bloomberg lp. he joined the bloomberg board in 1986 chairman of the board in 2001 succeeding michael bloomberg. he joined the firm as a fulltime executive in 2002. since then he has led the company's group as influential sources in business, government, financial news. prior to his bloomberg position, managing director of donaldson, lufkin and managing director of credit suisse first boston. next to him, ted is the founder, chairman and ceo of monumental sports and entertainment. he's the main owner of the
1:34 pm
washington wizards and when we're discussing innovation in our nation's capital we could use a few more wizards. he operates the bryson center in downtown d.c. before professional sports vice president of america online, active in many different areas, founder and chairman of snagfilms which produces documentary films and has had huge successes, vice-chairman of groupon and on the board of directors of american express and a number of companies. well-known blog, ted's take with interesting material on it. i was looking at it yesterday and featured a quote from winston church hill, which one of his season ticket holders said to him. when you're going through hell, keep going. that sounded like good advice.
1:35 pm
holds the chair in government studies at brookings, author of a number books on government performance and various types of public policymaking. he's putting out a paper today entitled political dysfunction and economic decline. we'll spend a little time talking about that. the paper looks at the growing political polarization between the parties and diminished capacity of congress to address important issues. bill is very honest and direct about many things in part because in his earlier life he served as a sarge enin the u.s. marine corps, which i always thought was an important part of his biography. what i'd like to do is start with peter. you lead one of the major media outlets in the country. i've seen the virtual revolution take place in the media industry. how is the proliferation of new media changed the way in which
1:36 pm
providers create content. >> thank you, darrell. on behalf of the three of us we're pleased and flattered to be here. but it's a formidable topic. in fact, dominic and i were having dinner in new york. i said to him i really have gone through a pretty methodical process, so i'd like to take us through a voyage if i may and start with the fact that certainly in the area of shifting media and how the content providers provide for these various platforms, clearly the sand is shifting between our feet. digital revolution as you all know, look at you in this room, glen on his ipad, he's on the blackberry. if we went through the room -- >> on bloomberg. >> i know you are. i asked this question in st. petersburg, i was giving pithy and thoughtful remarks, literally everyone in the office
1:37 pm
was looking down at their laps. i said, come on, give us a break. i'm kidding. the digital revolution has transformed how information is created, distributed, shared and displayed. in the past as we all know, particularly those of us in the older generation, we received our news from off line traditional stand alone media, radio, television, print sources, newspapers, magazines. today everyone, all of you in this room basically assemble your own media mix integrating traditional sources with e-mail alerts, websites, social networking feeds from facebook and twitter and other technology like the bloomberg terminal. it is, as we all know, a great time can be a consumer of news. the advent of these new technologies have opened the door to a plethora of news sources and tools for distributing the news. the way we gather news has
1:38 pm
changed, too. what kroused to take a film cre with large equipment can now be done by an iphone. as we look at the gentlemen in the back filming this activity, our head of news was in cairo when arab spring broke and basically broadcast from his iphone digital quality video that people put on air. so the need to have a camera crew with lots of satellite hookup equipment and various other things has changed quite dramatically. citizen journalism, as we all know, the consumer is now basically in control. the expansion and choice in number of media ott outlets available led to consumer spending, more time consuming media. they choose when and where to get content, how to share it. some even report it themselves, as we know. they choose -- they can get content on demand when they are ready to consume or realtime through desktop, tablet, phone or tv. in text, video, still images,
1:39 pm
audio or infinite application. data has become customizable, readers can set parameters as they wish based on their particular interest their results are tailored for them. they are, as we all know, cross-cutting trends going through this. tv is on the phone. internet is on the tv. newspapers on the tablet. the world of converging media. we see lines being blurred every single day. the implications these change on content providers are the following. that is the medium today drives the message. consumers are able to demand that content providers deliver content to their preferred platform and device in various formats. audio, text, graphics and video. providers just can't pour the same content into a different rapper. the challenge creating content tailored for each of these
1:40 pm
sources. we have to constantly reconceive how we deliver the same message and figure out what works in each place. think of content today as software, needs to be optimized for the device or platform for which it's being delivered. this has changed the way media gathers and disseminates, media technology companies who fail to do this as we all know will become obsolete. words and images and platforms are also intertwined to consider individual parts of the process in isolation is to miss transformative connections between gathering, writing, delivering, consuming, and sharing. few, if any companies have to think through the ramifications through each new medium the way and to the extent we do at bloomberg. we are, i would underscore, totally agnostic. we don't care how you want it, where you want it and when you want it, but we're going to deliver it. let me give you a couple of
1:41 pm
examples. our terminal users, 315,000 subscribers in 170 countries around the world are sitting at their terminals in most cases between eight and 12 hours a day. they are busy, interested only in the facts. and the prose of future stories is not what they want to see when they are sitting there worried about key decisions in the financial markets. but our tablet reader where we provide bloomberg business week, bloomberg markets magazine, bloomberg television plus and bloomberg rao are usually seated, relaxed, and prepared to spend time absorbing information. we have their full attention, which gives us an opportunity to tell a much deeper and longer story. in our web audience, bloomberg.com and bloomberg business week.com, believe it or not we get most of our traffic from 11:00 a.m. to 2:p.m. a lunchtime audience. they want information quickly but also want a diversion and
1:42 pm
are much more likely to watch a video. on mobile people don't want to read a long story on a small device. we need to shorten those stories. what does this mean in terms of the shift of our focus? in the past the value of a provider's url was the most important factor. you always wanted to drive traffic back to your website and your home page. today you, the average news consumer in this room, goes through nine to eleven different sites a day looking for news. we have so many distribution channels we don't necessarily need to drive them back to the home page. we're happy as long as they are reading our content and don't care where they find it. home page, search engine, facebook, twitter feeds, et cetera. once the content is on the web, others will share it and this enables providers to reach readers they may otherwise have had no reason to interact with. our current model, by the way, for our online offerings,
1:43 pm
one-third home page, one-third search engine and one-third social media. keep in mind, as we all know today, facebook reaches more people than any other u.s. media outlets combined. a great way to distribute our content. they do some of the work for all of us. it's a very and continues to be a world where everybody is competing with everybody. the best story usually wins. this is good for us as a quality content provider and as a new player. >> thank you, peter. ted, you work in the technology and entertainment business and you're very skilled in your personal use of social media and public outreach. for those of you who don't know ted has over 20,000 followers on twitter. anyone interested in following him can sign @ tedleonsis.
1:44 pm
i have much less than that so suffer twitter envy. what you do in the sports and entertainment area, one of the things i think you do especially well is you talk to fans but you also listen to fans. i'm also curious your views about how technology enables two-way communication and how that affects the way you do business. >> thank you. it's an honor to be here. it's really interesting the brookings institute kind of at the epicenter of the new economy. we forget we're living in this world where everyone lives their life on the net. our government really initiated and launched this birth of a new economy, internet economy. we're living in a very sobering time right now where we're not connecting the dots well enough between government and private
1:45 pm
industry, especially to try to focus on the number one problem facing our country, which is how do we get america working again. so what i wanted to talk a little about is the little round trip and lead to a political discussion about what's happened right before our eyes and how we know these facts and statistics happen but we become numb to what the big picture change really means for us. so today there are 2.5 billion people around the world connected to the intern. 2.5 billion. the united states has 300 million internet connections. so we are becoming a very small player in an overall connected world that changes the drive in terms of not only social adoption and change in ip and
1:46 pm
educational materials that are available now really will have staggering impact for us. the good news from a business standpoint, u.s. companies that have been driving the innovation and frankly business models and they have created great franchises. probably in autumn of 2012, facebook will hit 1 billion users. google and all of its sites already has 1 billion users. that means their revenues will start to mirror their usage and where their customers are. all of these great internet franchises, amazons, ciscos, googles, groupons, more and more
1:47 pm
of their business is generated outside of the u.s. they are hiring more people out of the u.s. that's where their growth is coming. that's troublesome right now because their revenue gets taxed in their sovereign company. one of things we have to look at politically and from a tax system is how do we get these great companies initially venture capitalized with risk capital, who went out and hired lots of people, outside the u.s., take some of those profit dollars that have already been taxed and bring them back to the united states and maybe have some kind of tax moratorium if they invest those dollars in private equity firms and venture
1:48 pm
capital firms that continue the cycle to invest in young, innovative companies. an entrepreneur visited me, four people in his company. andrew mason. he'll actually be interviewed on "60 minutes" this sunday, so tune in. he had this idea about social shopping, the ability in a bad economy to be able to aggregate up the power of people seeking discounts. but more importantly it also was a way to get cash back into the system to support small businesses. banks had topped lending to small businesses, factoring and receivables financing was drying up. so he started a company called groupon. groupon become a phenomenon. forbes named it the fastest
1:49 pm
growing company ever. ipo, created around the world, created a new shopping phenomenon. more than 50% of its business very quickly is outside of the united states. so i really do think we need to not lose sight of we were advantaged, because we were the early adopter of the internet and the web and web 20 kinds of activities and technologies, but now that genie is out of the bottle on a worldwide basis and we have to drive lots and lots of new policy, new partnerships between government, between private industry, between the banking system to make sure that it doesn't get away from us and that we can kin to drive innovation and create jobs for
1:50 pm
our economy. if i was running for re-election, that would be one of the major would be major program, the start up initiative that one of my friends and partners steve case is running, that i think is vital for our company because it is small businesses that are venture capitalized that are hiring people. so, the more money and more support that we can offer that system to reach those kids, i think the better off our economy will become. in regards to what's happening in social media, i think it's even more dramatic than people understand. i started to make movies a couple years ago. and i was stunned at how this $8 billion industry, an industry that defines what our culture is
1:51 pm
like around the world, one of our biggest distribution products around the world, how antiquated it had become. in fact, you shoot a film in digital and then you turn it into an analog product, which amazed me. i'd spent my career taking analog products and turning it into digital. you then mail it out to a movie theater and people buy tickets and the industry is pretty archaic. so i started a company called snag films. very proud of what it's doing under the item of what i call filmanthropy. so many movies being made that want to shine a light on a tough
1:52 pm
axe spekt, want a right a wrong, raise money around a cause. so, snag films, in three years we have 3,000 full-length free movies. you can go to snag films and watch a movie for free. it's i bipod, hulu, blackberry the like. if you like the film, you can snag it and you can open a virtual movie theater and you can show that movie to your friends on facebook or your blog or web page or your editorial page. we now have close to 200,000 virtual movie theaters open. that compares to 30,000 physical screens in north america. we're streaming nearly 20,000 to
1:53 pm
30,000 films per month. we're supporting 550 charities. we embrace the film we created literally overnight a brand new infrastructure through streaming and distribution of these good work films. and i think you're just going to see example after example of new technolo technology activating great new opportunities to shake up the status quo of media companies. >> the other panelists have focused on i.t. and media innovation. you think a lot about political dysfunction and the need for institutional reform. as i mentioned, you're putting out a paper today. the title of your paper is political dysfunction and economic decline. i was wonderingex iain both, th dysfunction and then the impact on the economy and innovation.
1:54 pm
>> well, i'll do my best, darrell. it's an honor to share this platform with two such distinguished private sector leaders. and i hope what i have to say will add value to the tremendously important things you've already put on the table. i felt the most useful thing i could do as the last presenter before lunch would be to try to connect some of the dots. from what has been said this morning and connect those dots up to the topic on which i'll be focusing. ted just said at the beginning of his remarks, that we live in sobering times. indeed, we do. i think that's a very good way of describing them. not only because of the great recession that god willing will
1:55 pm
send some day, but on the fundamental secular as opposed to cyclical basis, the american economy and society are being buffeted by the twin forces of globalization and technological innovation. these forces are transforming our economy and our society. and they are also posing a tremendous challenge for our political system. in the face of these dizzying changes, the question is, how are we doing? how effectively are we responding? my answer to that question is, not well at all. and i didn't hear a lot of dissenting views this morning. i heard very amplifications of that judgment we're not responding very well. to what i'd like to do is just to unpack that sense we're not
1:56 pm
doing very well. responding to these challenges by making four points. we are enduring a very high level of political dysfunction in our national politics. a good portion of my paper is devoted to spelling out some details. if any of you disagree with that, raise your hand. i can go into greater detail. i don't think it's necessary. everybody remembers the debt ceiling fiasco. but it goes far beyond that. we heard references this morning to the atmosphere of political uncertainty that is hindering long-term investment decisions. we heard multiple references to
1:57 pm
the most serious challenges that we are really not confronting with the scope and scale that they deserve. and it occurred to me that, you know, when i was younger political risk analysis is something they did of our foreign countries. now it's something foreign analysts do about the united states. this is a sea change and very unwelcome one. my second point is this. and it is foreshadowed in the title of the paper being released today. political dysfunction is the enemy of economic growth. these two processes cannot be decoupled. there is no way for the economy to go around politics. like hell, something you must go through. no now, i made a list of all the different linkages that people
1:58 pm
this morning talked about. it is a long and impressive and depressing list. it includes immigration policy. education and training. infrastructure, trade, taxation regulation. what a couple of panelists called directed public investment. well, i'd like to ask you the following question. how on earth are we going to mobilize resources for directed public investment if we seem incapable of coming to grips with that simple, massive fact. it's not a rhetorical question. it's a troubling question. here's my third point and this is aaffirmtive and forward-looking section of the paper that i'm releasing today.
1:59 pm
institutional innovation is a key that i would say indispensable part of the response to political dysfunction. we can't sit around hoping that political leaders and political parties will join hands and sing kum-bi-ya around the fabled camp fire. we are going to have to change institutions so that the incentives of actors within these key political systems are changed so that they will behave differently so that they will produce better results for all of you. in my paper i lay out three key baskets of institutional innovation. one basket directed towards making congress work again. i can talk about the details of that. if you're interested, but it deals with
127 Views
IN COLLECTIONS
CSPAN3 Television Archive Television Archive News Search ServiceUploaded by TV Archive on