Our pal Aarti Shah has been roaming the great Pacific Northwest over the past several days. Aarti is the Bay Area bureau chief for PRWeek, but her beat extends well beyond Silicon Valley. She covers the technology beat for the PR industry’s leading trade publication and was in Seattle to visit with MWW Group and several other Brand-X agencies.

While she doesn’t cover technology exclusively, Aarti is one of those reporters who understands the challenges of 21st Century tech PR. She listens well, asks tough questions, works hard to break stories and isn’t shy about calling for a timeout when some flak starts to max out her BS meter. But she also understands that the best reporting usually results from well-developed relationships, rather than pushing an agenda or asking a million questions. Last night was a great example of that.

We spent time chatting about various topics over dinner and wine at Purple in downtown Seattle. We only talked shop for a couple of minutes — traded a few rumors, dished some gossip, and so on. Sometime, somewhere, Aarti and I will have some news to talk about, and the relationship will be there to ensure that we both make the most of that opportunity.

I "heart" my MiFi

A couple of weeks ago I was at CTIA in San Diego with my client Samsung Mobile to launch a new phone. We had some issues with WiFi, which is to say it wasn’t working! Between needing it to power Internet for some pre-release phones and for media to file their stories — let’s just say: AWKWARD. It actually all worked out beautifully and we had a great event. But while I was there, Greg Kumparak at MobileCrunch.com was nice enough to let me borrow one of his five MiFi connections to fiddle with. This device is amazing. It fits in your front pocket (or back pocket if that’s your thing) and delivers about 30 feet of EVDO RevA or HSDPA speeds — which would have been perfect for our booth-side event.

I made an immediate note to self: buy several of these for team and have them at every event in the future. You should too!

Over the past two weeks, we’ve helped our client Volkswagen with the celebration of VAIL – the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory – on the Stanford University campus. (VW has the largest presence in Silicon Valley of any automaker and clearly is an industry leader in automotive innovation and technology. Need some proof? Check out Volkswagen’s ERL.)

Junior, the driverless Passat, waits for pedestrians

Part of the work included talking about super-cool demonstrations of autonomous cars – cars that drive themselves. This morning, we sent out photos of “Junior,” the famous driverless VW Passat developed jointly by VW and Stanford. That prompted this response from a reporter at The Wall Street Journal:

“Thanks for the information. The Highway Patrol has been calling mine ‘the driverless Passat’ for years.”

My good friend Mr. Biggs over at Crunchgear.com just wrote a novella about (my words) the future of on demand programming vs. the bloated channel line-ups most of America is forced to purchase with cable.

While I agree that this is ultimately a losing scenario for cable companies, I think that the majority of Americans are still in the rosy glow of HD programming and HD On Demand that there is still time for cable companies (or telco companies) to look at changing how they do business. But how should they evolve?

Telco companies are certainly evolving to bring more choice into the market. But as much as I love AT&T UVerse, at the end of the day (no offense to the engineering marvels here), it’s just an IPTV version of what cable is offering. Same content, same channels, but with some nice multi-room DVR controls.

But it’s still just a box. A box that does not play well with other content services — not to mention my own personal content.

So I have a TiVO and the future promise of a hacked Apply TV to solve some of these issues. However, I am not a case study for the average American.  Most American are still discovering the joys of time shifting with their cable (or telco) DVR.

So there is still time to evolve. But not much time. As more and more of the Gen-Y are getting jobs, their first apartments, and getting married, there better be some changes — because they will  will gladly choose iTunes On Demand to get their shows pushed to their TVs than pay for 200 channels they don’t want.

When Cable first arrived, people never thought people would pay for what they got for free (read this great article on the history of cable television). Well they did. And over time, the networks have lost a lot of power to the original “paid” programming offered by Showtime, HBO and others. And cable became the 800 pound gorilla in content distribution.

So what’s keeping things from evolving as fast as we are? When talking about cable companies, a lot of this is technology driven, a lot of this is copyright (see my previous post on copyright/drm and content), but a lot of it is that the modern cable company is a giant network of regional operations, mom and pop acquisitions, and nightmare processes for rolling out new programming — not to mention the customer service issues. It’s a monster with many heads where even something simple can not be simply integrated.

This gives a leg up to AT&T, which has brought to market the first IPTV offering with its remotely controlled home network. A network that update itself and easily role out new services. Lets give them a chance and see what happens!

Was just reading a story by Chris Foresman at Ars Technica about the future of AT&T sans iPhone exclusivity.

There is no doubt that AT&T gambled (a lot) and won (a lot) with their bet on the iPhone. So let’s call it a success and move on.

What I think is a more interesting question to ponder: when will AT&T better leverages its quad-play (home phone, cell, Internet and IPTV) offerings to begin really owning the digital home. I am not talking about discounted package deals and single billing statements. Yawn.  What I am talking about is going into an AT&T store seeing a big, beautiful HDTV and getting it for free or near free (say $20 per month) for signing a 2 year commitment for new IPTV and Internet service.

When this happens, AT&T would not only drive up subscribers, but drive HDTV sales and services through the roof. I love going into Best Buy, but if AT&T was willing to off set the cost of a new HDTV like they do for cell phones, I’d be the first in line.

If you are a tech-nerd like me, take a step back before you blast me on the disadvantages of bundling. I know the customer service issues needed to be dealt with first! But most people don’t want to be CIOs of their house. They want a simple solution to bring everything together. And think — what’s the next logical step once all these things are connected together? Access to advanced content and services. Not just movies, but critically needed services such as remote home network management, off-site file back-ups (documents, movies, photos and videos), managed DRM so you can move content from one device to another (legally), and much much more.

I am not the first to prognosticate about the future of telco and cable companies (sorry satellite), so believe this isn’t a matter of if this will happen, but when. And when it does… that will be a hell of thing to be able to promote. Much more interesting than bundled billing!

In filmed entertainment all the technology we need to share, move, and enjoy content on any platform imaginable is already here. The only thing we are waiting on is for the Digital Rights Owners to get it together.

Having said, this is a vastly complicated issue that requires action on the part of the owners (including their agents, lawyers, managers, promoters) 3^rd party sellers, their various intermediaries, and even all those artist unions. It’s an alphabet soup of crazy.

This is why intellectual property rights are the single biggest issue facing digital content distribution. Until it’s figured out, we’ll continue to get access to only a small layer of available content. This is why the channel line-up and on demand selection appears to be exactly the same whether you download it on your laptop via Amazon or access it via On Demand through cable, IPTV or satellite, et al.

With all that said, I was a little disappointed with Jonathan Miller’s (News Corp.’s Chief Digital Officer) answer to a question about copyright at today’s Tech 2.0 summit in San Francisco.

Q: Talk about copyrights.

JM: We need to have copyrights that are expected. Even in China they realize that. They have a budding content industry too. They’re very interested in copyright and piracy. I think we’ll have an Internet that respects copyright.

I get that News Corp owns a lot of content (you’ve heard of 20^th Century Fox, right?). We get that they have more freedom to move their own content around on their various holdings. But what the world needs now is more open debate about a global standard focused on letting people decide for themselves how they want to consume content.

For example, with mobile broadband speeds increasing, the need to side load content (move it manually from your computer to your mobile device) is becoming more and more unnecessary. In the future all this content will be managed in the “cloud,” and you will be able to simply push pause on one device, such as your TV, and push play to continue watching on another device, such as your laptop.

Does this mean that when we figure all this out that consumers will stop using the Internet, peer-to-peer services, usenet groups, etc. to get their content for free? No. But as any consumer survey will tell you, the vast majority of people want (and will) pay for digital content.

The industry needs to work together to figure this out. They need to focus on finding new ways to make more money, not obsess on the certain possibility that some people — people that would never have purchased the content legally anyway — might get access. It’s like a grocery chain closing down because they have a few shoplifters.

Okay, so it has been for a while… but this time we really mean it! Stay tuned for ridiculously fascinating observations about the world of PR in the 21st century.