IoT: The Internet of Things ~ A Few Tweets and Posts

What is the Internet of Things (IoT)? Meola (2016) gives us a useful definition of IoT in this passage:

"The IoT refers to the connection of devices (other than typical fare such as computers and smartphones) to the Internet. Cars, kitchen appliances, and even heart monitors can all be connected through the IoT. And as the Internet of Things grows in the next few years, more devices will join that list."

And he elaborates his conversation under six important topics:

1. Basic definitions of IoT-related terms that ease us into better informed and more sophisticated conversations and narratives. These terms are: IoT device, IoT ecosystem, entity, physical layer, network layer, application layer, remotes, dashboard, analytics, data storage, and networks.

2.  IoT predictions, trends and markets -- up to 2025.

3. IoT industries, looked at from the interconnected perspectives of consumers, governments and ecosystems.

4. IoT companies. The list he gives features mostly American companies, but this will obviously change as the rest of the world checks in with new ideas and orientations.

5. Top IoT platforms at present: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, ThingWorx IoT Platform, IBM's Watson, Cisco IoT Cloud Connect, Salesforce IoT Cloud, Oracle Integrated Cloud, and GE Predix.

6. IoT security and privacy, including the growing risk of hacking and other or emergent forms of cyber attacks. 

READ: Andrew Meola (2016) What is the Internet of Things (IoT)?

In 2015 and 2016 I released five IoT-related tweets (incorporating two pertinent posts) which I wish to share with you. I'm assuming that you haven't seen them yet among my many tweets and re-tweets. Here they are:

1. Mauri Yambo‏ @MauriYambo  23 Feb 2015

   Big Q for #IoT: in what forms does #spiritware manifest itself in the #InternetOfThings?
2. Mauri Yambo‏ @MauriYambo  22 Jan 2015

   While U were otherwise engaged, here's what I said about #drones a year ago (already!) http://bit.ly/1oDOW83 , #Mallarme, #Dice, #IoT
3. 
   
4. Mauri Yambo‏ @MauriYambo  2 Jan 2015

   to @MauriYambo

   @MauriYambo Why? It doesn't waffle or lose sight of #IoT's core aspect: #Internet/ICT-enhanced logistics on a globally expansive scale. #KOT
5. 
   
6. 
   
7. Mauri Yambo‏ @MauriYambo  12 Nov 2016

8. #IIoT = #Industrial #IoT http://bit.ly/2eMvN32  #IndustrialInternet
9. Mauri Yambo‏ @MauriYambo  11 Jul 2016

   #Sociology and #Work #Redesign http://mauriyambo.blogspot.com/2016/07/sociology-and-work-redesign.html … #Design #IoT, #SocioTechnical #Conception #Execution #Innovation #Organization

Papo ~ Haiku

That ode soundin' rag.
Mziki to her two ears,
Who's in my arte.

The African Music Industry, Local Content and 24/7 Music Video Programming

In a recent post titled " Waka Waka, Shakira and the Art of the Blockbuster Song", I offered the view that Waka Waka had emerged as an unintended and largely unanticipated catalyst for pop-music artistry and appreciation all across Sub-Sahara. I added that African artistes and fans had, since 2010, watched with surprise and been inspired by how the addition of a few lines had turned an old African song, fused with new and thoughtful tunes as well as creative dance routines, into a music video of global appeal.

However, the buzz around the World Cup could only temporarily wire together national TV channels across Africa. There was no permanent promise in this; and if there wasn't, there would be no long-term change in the pattern of distribution and consumption of music videos. Artistes on their own didn't have the wherewithal to make a difference here. So where was the wherewithal to be found?

Certainly, a general push for local content on national and more local media did not begin in or after 2010, but well before that. TV broadcasting was particularly challenged -- and vexing in its incapacity as far as music lovers were concerned -- as only it could show music video on a continuous and therefore most accommodating basis to a heterogeneous mass audience. The individualized CD and DVD player did become available earlier as an option, but plainly wasn't ever going to create a sense of community (of mass participation) -- such as you get when watching, even when physically alone, a live soccer game. 

When, in 2003, I authored a report on airtime distribution of local and foreign content on East African TV channels (see extract, Television Broadcasting in East Africa...), it signalled the fact that a critical mass of concern around local content already existed, sufficient indeed to elicit research funding in the hope of energizing and pivoting broadcast policy, via actionable evidence, toward local content.

And yet, consequential moves to deliver local TV content -- music video in our particular case -- on a sustained basis are much more recent. I think this is because several components of the requisite formula for sustainable/profitable delivery of local content have only lately become self-evident. First, the local music industry must be fecund enough to produce a certain minimum number of top quality pop videos to sustain a 24/7 music channel at requisite levels of audience enthusiasm and loyalty. 

Assuming that each video or single runs for an average of 3:50 minutes, a minimum of 93 to 95 fully contracted singles is required to launch an all-music channel. The Top 40 East African pop songs ranked in #TheYamboSelection for 2015 and 2016, respectively, amply demonstrate that the minimum requirement has already been met in this region.

Second, the rate at which new singles are uploaded to broadcasters on a monthly basis, as older ones are retained on longer loops or rotations, also matters -- if a channel's offerings are not to go stale, forcing it to revert to foreign alternatives in order to keep or grow audience-share. A monthly rate of 10% new uploads would do at the start.

Third, the subscriber-base must be large enough, and must grow with sufficient robustness to keep the channel in business. This partly depends on the percentage of the population within the catchment area with disposable income.

The means for delivering always-on music entertainment has only recently, almost all of a sudden, begun to take required shape in Africa. It is happening -- in terms of certain platforms or channels -- in plain view, but seemingly unnoticed by the broader media of which the music channels are a 'specialized' part. 

The spread has not been even. There are patches of dense digital coverage, and areas less liberally covered by different channels. There are also areas -- such as Burundi, the two Congos, Ethiopia, Namibia, Somalia and South Sudan -- seemingly with no coverage at all yet. Among these, the two Congos are the most surprising and the most disappointing. All in all, however, Africa has experienced tremendous change since 2010. I draw the outlines of the evolutionary journeys of the most prominent channels below:

DStv: MultiChoice, a South African company, first rolled out a 20-country, analogue TV channel across Africa in 1992. Its Channel O, launched in that year, became very popular with music lovers; but years later succumbed to serious technical and programming challenges. In 1995, MultiChoice adopted a decidedly leap-frog US innovation to successfully introduce a direct-to-home Digital Satellite pay-TV service (DStv) in South Africa. Between 1995 and 2010, it spread its wings to many Sub-Saharan capitals and their catchment-areas, as its bouquet of access-technologies expanded.

READ: A History of DStv

When the World Cup came to Africa in 2010, DStv and its affiliates, as well as their pan-African audiences, were ready -- for really Big Time. Partly by design and partly by default, DStv quickly became the indispensable pipeline through which music video broadcasts were to spread across Sub-Saharan Africa. In this, its owners, MultiChoice, had learnt important lessons from their Channel O venture.

Channel O: As already suggested, Channel O was the oldest, and even now still the longest running, music channel to have operated across Africa. MultiChoice wound it up in 2015, after 23 years of high-profile operation but increasingly outdated service (see Vutagwa, 2015). 

HIP TV: This is a Nigerian channel, mostly devoted to music, which was launched in July 2007. It began offering a 24-hour DStv service only in October 2013, on Channel 324. It is very focused on Nigerian pop music -- emphatically more so than AfroMusicPop. This has not helped it to grow audiences outside Nigeria, as other channels have offered more appealing choice in the wider field. Nor has its broadcast quality endeared it to discerning viewers. But it continues in business.

SOUNDCITY Africa: This channel was launched on DStv network (channel 327) in 2009. Until very recently, its African reach was restricted to West and East Africa. It became available to Southern African audiences, on the same channel, only on December 1st, 2016. The Southern African countries newly in its orbit are: Botswana, Lsotho, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Spice TV, its sister channel, which broadcasts fashion videos, was simultaneously made available to Southern Africa on that December date, on DStv channel 190.

READ: DStv (November 30, 2016) "Sound City, Spice TV launch."

Though based in Lagos, Nigeria, and owned by a Nigerian Company called Consolidated Media Associates (CMA) Limited, SoundCity Africa is less focused on Nigeria than one sees on AfroMusicPop and HipTV. Its 24/7 portal airs relatively few songs from the rest of Africa, though, despite its touted pan-African orientation. All told, in fact, the general impression, as pointed out below, is that it shows more Western music videos than African on any given day.


Through the link given below we see that, even after its December 2016 "integrated re-brand across Africa" -- dubbed "its biggest ever" -- SoundCity's old inclinations die hard. The airtime weighting of African pop songs clearly favors South African and Nigerian artistes. But artistes from these two countries are in fact overshadowed by a preponderance of videos from the US and the UK. 

There is admittedly a weekly series of Top Ten songs from six countries: South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, UK, US and Nigeria. However, each of the Top Ten rundowns covers only about three hours each week, with the four African countries having a combined total of 12 hours. That is half of a 24-hour day per week for all of them! This is clearly a huge gap of opportunity which the TRACE organization recently exploited and filled so emphatically.

READ: The New #SoundCityAfrica Unveils New Chart Shows, Expands Into New Markets

AfroMusicPop: This TV channel, dedicated to music videos, was originally based in Portugal. It is hosted on DStv channel 326. It pivoted its attention to Nigerian music in April 2013, and has generally offered little hope of exposure for non-Nigerian artistes. Though it has been available to East African audiences, its bias for Nigerian music has fed the narrative that Nigerian pop music, just like Nollywood movies, has little competition across Africa. However, more recently, faced with growing competition for viewers from other pan-African channels, it has begun to be more inclusive -- and in the process contributed to debunking that narrative.

READ: Michael Abimboye (April 18, 2013) "AfroMusicPop channel lists steps for submission of videos"

TRACE TV: Paris-based TRACE TV is majority owned by Modern Times Group (MTG), a Scandinavian media conglomerate, which acquired it in 2014. On September 1st, 2016, DStv admitted three MTG franchises into its fold: TRACE Naija (for Nigeria and the rest of mostly Anglophone West Africa) on channel 325, TRACE Mziki (for Eastern Africa, especially Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya) on channel 323 and TRACE Africa for Anglophone Southern African Audiences on channel 326. 

Awkwardly, however, viewers in East Africa have no access to TRACE Africa, as they have to TRACE Naija. Some evidence suggests that TRACE Naija and TRACE Mziki were actually hived off the original TRACE Urban in September 2016. Incidentally, TRACE Gospel was also made available 24/7 to Kenyan viewers at the same time last year as Zuku Fiber became the second host to TRACE Mziki.

The African regions covered by TRACE have been described by Olivier Laouchez, its CEO, as "the three biggest music hubs of Africa" (see the READ immediately below). Instructively, TRACE TV's motivation for this re-branding, adds Laouchez, was to "better serve the strong need of the local audiences for great local content." 

The wide exposure given to East African artistes by TRACE Mziki has probably been the most phenomenal result of the TRACE initiative. And the continent's consumers have clearly benefited from this sudden access to this surprisingly robust and deep talent pool previously "hidden", by a blend of circumstances, from them. East Africans also need to have access to Southern African music too. Music from Lusophone Africa is even less accessible, certainly to East Africa. For that reason, it appears non-existent to the larger African audience -- despite the fact that TRACE Toca is aired in Angola and Mozambique. Congolese music has been a favorite of East African audiences for some fifty years now, even though few are fluent in either Lingala or French.

READ: "Trace to launch three new music channels in Africa" (August 26, 2016)

TRACE Toca: This pop music video channel was launched on July 22nd, 2014 to cater to the interests and (Afro and Urban) tastes of Lusofonia -- that is, Portuguese-speaking countries. Toca means, inter alia, "to play music, to resonate, to produce a sound..." (see TRACE Toca). 

Among the countries served by the channel are Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, the Caribbean, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Portugal. The dominant musical preferences in these countries, and on TRACE Toca, include these genre's: Kizomba, Kuduro, Zouk, Samba and Afro Pop. For Angola and Mozambique, more specifically, TRACE Toca is available on DStv Channel 595 (see Asuquo, 2014). How the other countries connect to it remains unclear, but seems much more long-winded -- something akin to how 'search-activists' access YouTube videos. 

So, it seems clear, the rest of Africa has no direct TV pipeline to Afro-Lusofone music. Likewise, Lusofonia remains cut off, to possibly detrimental effect, from the burst of creativity that's going on in a much larger expanse of Africa.

MTV Base Africa: MTV Base started its operations in African, as MTV Base Africa, in February 2005. This had followed the launch of its European operations five and a half years earlier, on July 1st, 1999. In December 2007, however, a separate MTV Base operation was hived off the African franchise to cover only Africa's Francophone countries. Both were initially overseen by MTV Base, domiciled in Europe, on behalf of the holding company -- Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN) Europe. However, VIMN Africa was in recent years created to take charge of MTV operations all across Africa. 

As an umbrella brand, MTV Base is known as a multi-segment, all-music and entertainment channel. It offers the same mix of services, but accommodates some of the lingua francas of the countries it covers. In Africa as a whole, as already pointed out, it operates as MTV Base Africa; and has a presence in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and the rest of West Africa. It is hosted on DStv's channel 322.

Initially, "the rest of West Africa" encompassed seventeen Anglophone and Francophone countries (see the full list in the history link below). However, on December 21st, 2007, a branch of MTV Base Africa was created specifically to serve the interests of Francophone West Africa. This branch was renamed MTV Hits in November 2015.

On July 3rd, 2013, MTV Base Africa launched MTV South Africa to provide "opt-out feed" intended to deliver more definitively local content (music and advertising) and service (sponsorship) to South African consumers. The remainder of the feed was to remain the same as on MTV Base Africa. This very convoluted name-changing journey culminated in 2015 with the renaming of MTV Base South Africa as MTV Africa.


READ: A History of MTV Base Africa

TVE - Tanzania: This brand is the product of a well-established Tanzania-based TV channel -- TV East. In December 2016, TVE-Tanzania was launched as a 24/7 all-music channel. It is hosted on DStv channel 295. 

According to Mustapha Madish (2016), TVE-Tanzania is the brainchild of E-FM radio station owners. Their experience with delivering content on radio was crucial to their successful transition to TV (see also this conversation on JamiiForums,com). 

Despite its relatively poorer video quality and its lack of video annotation, TVE - Tanzania has very quickly succeeded in mirroring much of the video offering that one associates with TRACE Mziki.

As I conclude, let me just say this: DStv's pan-African dominance as the go-to host will increasingly be challenged by hosts such as GoTV and Star Times, to mention the most obvious ones, and more local channels such as Kenya's Zuku. South African enterprises venturing into the rest of Africa have had a nagging tendency to throw in the towel when things do heat up. However, conversation around all that will have to be the subject of a separate post.

REFERENCES
Asuquo, E (2014) "TRACE Launches TRACE Toca: A Brand New Music Channel Available in DStv in Angola and Mozambique." TalkmediaAFRICA.com 

Staff Writer (2014) "Timeline: DStv through the years." Johannesburg: ITWeb. 

Trace Mziki Team (2016) Trace TV Video Selection Criteria: Artiste Popularity, Song Popularity, and Video Coolness are Key. HiPipo.Com

Vutagwa, Caroline (March 18, 2015) "MultiChoice's Channel 'O' to shut down this Month." techmoran.com 

Yambo, Mauri (2003) Television Broadcasting in East Africa: Airtime Allocation to Local and Foreign Programmes, January-March 2002. Nairobi: Development Through Media.

Larry Madowo's Fine-Feathered Guests on #TheTrend, March 3, 2017: Prezzo, Kidum, Sana and MDQ

Last Friday (March 3rd, 2017), Larry Madowo hosted a fabulous edition of his #TheTrend show featuring a string of four celebrities. Each brought a distinct talent, worldview and presence to the screen, and none disappointed. Put it another way: It was a blast to watch each of the guests; a wonderful evening.

1. Prezzo: 
Prezzo was his usual self; a study in coolness. He really surprised everyone with his clever/presidential 999 call, using Larry's own phone. It all seemed, but only seemed, like a spur-of-the-moment stunt. Presidents do have their 'itineraries' all planned in advance, don't they? Larry was amazed and somewhat tongue-tied. Prezzo did his best not to be fazed by Larry's persistent 'inquisition', and won the mental chess-game. He ended his ample session with a sneak of his latest song (not in the video below) that's really good.

2. Kidum and Sanaipei Tande (Sana):
The 'reunion' between Kidum and Sana was obviously impromptu, and somewhat awkward. Kidum was quite tense, in fact. Sana, on the other hand, was in her fullness -- all that nite, in fact. But while they were at it, they did pull off a fine replay of "Mulika Mwizi".

3. Sana Sings A New Song, "Simama Imara"; Chats with Larry:

As I said, Sana ( the Maasai Girl from Matasia who grew up at the coast) was in her fullness that night. The usual fullness, I might add. Everything was finely tucked. And I was amazed at how good her Swahili was. I had never realized it. But she explained it all -- how it all came about. A bit like what we've heard from Akothee (who, as I understand, was scheduled to perform that very night in Vegas; not too long, I guess, after night arrived in that far, far place. Her singing was lovely, her conversation livelier.

Hear Sana Sing:

Here, Sana Chats w/ Larry:

4. MDQ: Muthoni the Drummer Queen:
MDQ was some kind of philosopher-queen that evening. Cleopatra, farther down the Nile, and the centuries, would have approved. She was an energetic bundle of opinion, and feeling -- all seamlessly strung together in a kind of stream-of-consciousness. I think that all who watched her couldn't believe how far ahead she was, already, from the usually mundane political talk.