WNEG our Entrance Ramp to Information Superhighway

“I’m not giving you a car. I’m giving you the road.”

My sixteenth birthday car was truly crappy. Three wheels and a cement block. A door missing. And when you tried to shift gears, the lever came off in your hand. Yeah, it sucked.

My Mom could tell I was underwhelmed. She grabbed my hand that was fiddling with the rust masquerading as paint and looked me right in the eye.

“I’m not giving you a car. I’m giving you the road.”
She has always been crazy wise and she was on target then. She helped me look past the thing to what that thing enabled. Past the vehicle to where I wanted to go. Smart, eh?

On June 25, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication (the New Media Institute’s parent unit) announced that it was purchasing WNEG Channel 32 out of Toccoa, Georgia. When word got out, I started getting emails right away. You see, I have been telling people for years that the Grady College is dedicated to exploring to NEW media. Sure, television was a highlight in the “World of Tomorrow” – at the World’s Fair in 1939! And if a medium debuts with a speech by Franklin Roosevelt, well it is stretching to call it new. Nope, it looked like Grady was committing itself to OLD media. And WNEG with its lightning damaged tower and programming that resembled a Saturday Night Live parody was looking a lot like Thunderball (that is what I named my car – after I got it running).

But to paraphrase my Mom, we didn’t really buy the station. We bought the channel – and everything that goes along with it. Look closer and you will see that this purchase is about as sophisticated a new media move as you can make.

Let me lapse into professor mode for just a minute to explain. Broadcast television uses airwaves to send the signal to antennae on your set. OK, most of us don’t have rabbit ears any more, but the cable company gets broadcast TV through its rabbit ears and sends it down that expensive pipeline to your house. These airwaves are part of what a scientist would call the electromagnetic spectrum – or just spectrum. The cool/weird/problematic aspect of spectrum is just about all the post web advances in new media use it. The WiFi connection at Starbucks uses spectrum. And so does your cell phone. Did you ever wonder why there are a limited number of cell phone companies? Because those carriers bought the enabling spectrum from the government. That spectrum ain’t cheep. In fact, in January, the FCC sold some of that spectrum for over $19B.

OK, professor, so what?

In buying WNEG, Grady gets 6MHz of spectrum. And with digital compression technology, you only need a fraction of that to send out a television signal. Now we have a capability that only two other universities in the country have. We can use our spectrum for a TV channel – and a host of other cool new things.

So what are we going to do with this extra spectrum? Wouldn’t you like to know!
Alright, here is a hint. Call it a sneak preview. Who rules in mobile video now? Yep, the carriers: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, etc. Why do they get to call the shots? You guessed it – spectrum. What if there was a new spectrum owner on the scene pushing video in a whole new way? What if this new spectrum owner had decades of expertise in making quality video content that people like to watch? What if consumers had the option to watch mobile television – cruising up and down channels not on a remote, but on a cell phone? What if this new player also understood advertising and had an efficient business operation in place charged with selling commercials? What if a broadcaster with a commitment to public service could offer an alternative mobile video service? Well things would be very interesting, wouldn’t they?

With WNEG, the station isn’t really important – it is what we are going to do with a new wealth of potential that matters. In short, Grady owns a new type of road. There are sure to be a lot of twists and turns, but you can bet that it will be an exciting ride. Stay tuned!