THE acceleration of content development and how it can complement the growth of broadband penetration in Malaysia was the topic of the P1 Expert Net panel discussion at Packet One Network's (P1's) auditorium in Petaling Jaya on 28 January, 2010.

The panellists comprised Pete Teo, a musician, actor and producer of the P1 sponsored  Malaysian Filmmaker Showcase – the 15 Malaysia project http://15malaysia.com; Hasnul Hadi Samsudin. head of the MSC Malaysia Animation and Creative Content Centre (MAC3), James Chong, chief executive of ruumzNation which operates and manages ruumz, Malaysia's first fully-fledged social networking site at www.ruumz.com; Kanchei (Ken) Loa, a research fellow with the Institute of Information Industry, Taiwan; and moderated by Michael Lai, P1 chief executive officer.

Absent was Harold Thwaites, associate professor and dean of the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University.

“Malaysia's household broadband penetration now stands at 32% and one of the ways to further encourage broadband adoption is to have relevant and exciting content catered to specific interests of different people. Therefore it's important to create more local content that complements the varied lifestyle of Malaysians to bridge the relevance gap and the momentum will help Malaysia realise its goal of 50% household penetration by the end of this year,” said Michael Lai.

Language is another controversial barrier to Internet adoption, since with English being the main language of the Internet, it alienates many Malaysians, especially those in the rural areas, whose primary language of communication is not English, and this tends to broaden the digital divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” in accessing the abundant information on the Internet.

The link between language and broadband adoption was reinforced by data collated from P1's proof-of-concept P1 Pusat Internet Komuniti (Internet Community Centre) in Chini Timur, a Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) settlement on the way to Lake Chini in Pahang state. It's Malaysia's first community broadband centre to use WiMAX wireless broadband technology and it implements and establishes best practices for building connected communities.

“We've implemented several programmes on targeted P1 Internet Community Centre groups to spur their interest in online content development but learned that it's a challenging task,” said Lai. “We also acknowledge that encouraging local content creation within a community is a long term and continuous effort. Moving forward, we want to continue working closely with the community members to generate more of these,” Lai added.

These key findings from the Chini Timur experience are applied to other community broadband centres that P1 is establishing in selected FELDA settlements under the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission's Universal Service Provision projects.

A matter of quality not quantity

“There are lots of digital pipes being built across Asia and lots of pipe owners are looking for content but it's the quality and not the quantity of content which matters,” said Pete Teo, whose 15Malaysia website features a series of 15 short socio-political films.

“Much of the media does not realise that programmes that are generally perceived as glamorous are in fact watched by very few people than they think. For example, the media may think that hip-hop music is popular when in fact few people actually buy hip-hop records, while Malay and Hong Kong pop music are most popular.

“With social media, the public must have a feeling of ownership – ie. quality of content – so 15Malaysia hooks up with unveiled pent up frustration with pent up demand and the proof of its success is in the 15 million visitors both local and from overseas which it attracted over 60 days,” added Teo, for who promotes content based on Zeitgeist - or the mood of the times.

The traction from the community comes from the connection to the community and how it democratises people, rather than mono-directional distribution as with radio and TV and this gives audiences much power.

Teo also questioned how surveys conducted actually know what people are watching on TV since such participants could record their viewing practices without actually watching but with online content, all their activities are known.

There are other issues which stifle creativity amongst Malaysians. “One of them is the traditional Malaysian education system  and media do not encourage the development of creativity, while the second issues is that most pipe owners don't want to take risks,” said Teo.

“Also, creative people tend to be rule breakers and studies have shown a correlation between creative persons and criminals.

“The Malaysian public sector is very resistant to new ideas, while young people don't relate to government propaganda, so on the Net, reality works while propaganda doesn't,” Teo added.

Role of government

“The government must bootstrap and initialise the learning process to boost the use of the Internet such as for eText filing,” said Ken Loa. “It is not sufficient to get people to key in their information online but the government must create a database online, for example to be able to capture all of a person's income and automatically list all details of it when a person plugs in their smart card and once this basic use takes hold, the rest, such as mobile and other online payments and e-services automatically falls into place,” he added.

It's fundamental that government also digitises all basic cultural content, such as the Taiwan government has done with its national archives where it's digitised all archival material on Taiwan and China as well as cultural material and made it available for access online.

“This helps develop creativity which cannot be trained,” Loa added.

It should be noted here, that while it's been much reported that China considers Taiwan a part of itself, hardly reported is that Taiwan regards China as a part of itself as well.

Meanwhile, Loa's compatriot Lin Min-Li cited a project by a Taipei city hospital for senior citizens, many of whom live alone in the city, whereby they were small netbook which they used to read their blood pressure and other health-related measurements and a nurse would monitor them remotely via video.

Another government service is public hotline providing 18 different services available in several different languages to cater to the different ethnicities of residents living there. One of the service is to receive public complaints, such as of double parking and the police must be on the scene within 15 minutes and file a report within two hours.

Now don't we Malaysians wish we have that kind of efficient government service and quick response time but then again we like to double park, don't we, so perhaps inefficient government service and chaos is a boon after all.

Wasn't it former prime minster Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi who said that Malaysia has first world infrastructure but a third world mentality.

As old as mankind

Content creation is as old as mankind but it cannot be easily disseminated. It's also important to provide people with the tools to create content and to make money from it as well.

“Forget killer apps and let people choose what they want and network operators must provide a healthy incentive to content creators, such as the 91:9 and 70:30 revenue share in favour of content creators provided by NTT DoCoMo and Apple iTunes respectively,” said James Chong. “Give people social networks and they will make use of it.

“Also, technology is very much driven by technology professionals who expect the rest of the population to be like them and at the same time they want to converse in English and expect everyone else to know English.

“Why not create comics like at the P1 e-community and don't force people to uses social networking sites like Facebook,” Chong added.

“We give content creators 100% but where Internet penetration is lacking or where people are reluctant to go on the Net, there's always the content pirates,” said Pete Teo.

“Apple has shown through its devices such as the iPod Touch, iPhone and the iPad that content must be intuitive and a confluence of design and technology, while Samsung has both great technology and artists behind them,” said Hasnul. “Applications must be intuitive enough and we at MAC3 aim to encourage that,” he added.

Hasnul cited results of surveys of rural folk who want entertainment over broadband.

Animation and e-learning

“MSC Malaysia regards it important to promote cooperation between the pipe owners, content creators and government,” said Hasnul who arrived a little late after staying awake all night in the maternity ward awaiting the birth of his third child and a proud father of  a baby boy.

For example, funds have been made available under MAC3 to co-production of animations, games and visual effects, while an e-Content fund has been established to fund home-grown intellectual property, mostly in post-production, animation, games development, e-learning as well as mobile and interactive content but excluded is film, which comes under the National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (FINAS) which manages the Film Art & Multimedia Development Fund.

MSC Malaysia, its development agency the Multimedia Development Corporation and its initiatives such as MAC3 come under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, while FINAS comes under the Ministry of Information, Communication and Culture, hence the separation between the animation and other digital content creation assisted by bodies such as MAC3 and film development under FINAS.

The government established a Creative Industry Masterplan and MDeC required funding under the 9th Malaysia Plan to help kick start local content development, as well as a server and network to display the educational content, community content and so on.

“For example, MSC Malaysia-status company Les Copaque Production's 3D animation characters, the twins Upin and Ipin have been featured on The Disney Channel and people now look to Malaysia for world-class content, so the government must help,” said Hasnul.

“So will MSC Malaysia fund controversial projects such as 15Malaysia,” asked Pete Teo.

“Yes. MDeC will consider if 15Malaysia can prove to have development capabilities and provide a bang for the buck,” Hasnul replied.

You can't commercialise all content!

However, Pete Teo disagrees with MDeC's attitude that it will only fund content which will produce a return on investment.

“We've had an overdose of Neo-Liberalism and Chicago School economic models. How can you put a commercial value on cultural expression of a community which consumes it but it where it has no monetary value but in Malaysia, we want to put a monetary value on everything,” said Teo.

“Take Mak Minah for example, a ceremonial singer of the aboriginal Temuan tribe and an aboriginal rights activist. The government doesn't fund her as it does not see the monetary value of doing so and if the funding process places value only on money, then it won't work and this applies to Singapore too.

“The government must realise that the guy out of film school ends up competing with productions by the likes of Steven Spielberg and no government with progressive public arts policies will treat creativity like a commercial product.

“The downside of the digital technology which lets you access content worldwide is that it at the same time makes content cheap and plentiful, which in turn makes individual pieces of content like the proverbial needle in a haystack, with a high signal-to-noise ratio where individual content creators end up with having to compete with millions worldwide,” he added.

For those who are unfamiliar, the term Chicago School refers to an economic ideology held by around 70% of the professors at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago which adheres to neoclassical price theory and libertarianism in its support of lower taxation and private sector regulation, but differs from pure free-market economics in its support of government-regulated monetary policy and is opposed to Keynesian economics.

A similar school of economics is the Austrian School in which Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk were prominent. However, while von Hayek taught at the University of Chicago for a while, he was not a member of the Chicago School.

This school emphasised spontaneous organising power of the price mechanism or price system, that the complexity of human behaviour makes mathematical modeling of the evolving market extremely difficult (or undecidable) and it advocates a laissez faire approach with minimum government intervention in economic affairs.

Government leaders who subscribed to these schools of thought include Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the United Kingdom and former President Ronald Reagan of the United States, which led to de-regulation, the privatisation of state assets, coupled with globalisation.

These schools of economics rose to prominence in the 1970s and dominated economic policies and thought especially after the end of the Cold War and they also especially dominant in the right wing, cyber-anarchist Internet culture.

However, today the pendulum has swung against these schools of thought as the U.S., the U.K, and  other major western economies are is mired in a deep recession which is forecast to dive even deeper this year.

Good bandwidth is key

“Do roads or the destination come first,” asked James Chong rhetorically. “Well, for content to thrive, good bandwidth must come first,” he added.

“Chung Hwa Telecom in Taiwan used to be government owned but now all telecommunication service providers are privatised,” said Ken Loa. “However, Taiwan has an open access policy where the government builds the telecommunication ducts and charges service providers equally for their use to lay their own cables and fibres in to interconnect their own switching and routing equipment, and this provides for fair and equitable competition,” he added.

“Be patient, said Hasnul. “The government has wanted to see the quality of broadband get better since two years ago and now Telekom Malaysia has embarked on the High Speed Broadband project together with the Ministry of Information, Communications and Culture and we can complain if broadband is still bad after the HSBB project has been completed.”

“In fact, the state of broadband within Malaysia is OK but it's the international bandwidth which is the bottleneck,” he added.