Behind the Wheel with KQED: How Will Autonomous Vehicles Impact Public Media’s Business Model?
In 2018, a team of students from the California College of the Arts’ (CCA) MBA in Design Strategy program worked with the KQED Lab to explore business models for KQED in a driverless future. Read on to see what they discovered.
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Public radio fans have long tuned in to their favorite stations in the car. For Bay Area drivers, that means switching on KQED for their morning commute. For Northern California’s most-listened to public radio station, it might be easy to rest on current success. Nevertheless, KQED’s innovation lab has kept its eye on autonomous vehicles, recognizing the impact this rapidly-developing technology could have on how its audiences choose to spend their time in the car.
What do autonomous vehicles (AVs) mean for radio at large? Will drivers still turn on KQED? Can radio compete against the likes of music and video streaming services, gaming or even AR/VR? KQED posed these questions to our team of six students from the California College of the Arts’ (CCA) MBA in Design Strategy program in early 2018. We embarked on a semester-long exploration of business models for public media in a driverless future.
The AV landscape: known unknowns
Most experts agree that the arrival of autonomous vehicles in our cities is inevitable. By 2040, an estimated 90% of cars will be highly to fully autonomous. Locally, urbanization trends will continue, adding 2.4 million people to the Bay Area by the same year. Until then, the list of unknowns is long.
People may continue owning individual vehicles, as generations of Americans have. Or, they could embrace shared car ownership with services like Zipcar, GetAround and GIG and continue to use rideshares like Lyft and Uber. When eyes are no longer needed on the road and hands can leave the steering wheel, what entertainment will people consume in the car?
Two teams, many Post-It notes
With more questions than answers, the CCA team jumped into a rapid-fire brainstorm session with the KQED innovation team. Questions that challenged convention like, “What if KQED inverted their business model?” and, “What if their most important product disappeared tomorrow?” pushed both teams to think beyond potential constraints. This “blue-sky thinking” exercise produced two exciting concepts to think about with respect to AVs and public radio: an interactive experience for listening to local news and socializing with other riders, and an in-ride education game to expand education access.
Get out of the building (and check your bias at the door)
With clipboards in hand, our group hit the streets to test out our business models through qualitative research. We chatted up people in the backseats of Lyft rides, on the ferry, people on the street — anywhere we could.
The feedback surprised us. People overwhelmingly did not want to socialize during their morning commutes. They described the morning as a special time for routine and reflection, a way to prepare for the day. Similarly, people felt their commute was too short to engage in any meaningful kind of educational endeavor. Especially for individuals using ridesharing services, they wanted either peace or Zen-like time in the morning, or a fun, musical experience for going out in the evening.
Checking our expectations at the door proved to be challenging. We had altruistic notions for what the future of news could be: an opportunity for people to socialize, connect and learn during their morning commute. But we couldn’t force this outcome — rather, we’d need to let customers choose for themselves.
Our discovery: Personal preference is commute-agnostic
Our street intercepts covered many forms of transportation including boats, trains and ridesharing services. We found that the importance of choice is universal and that mode of transportation has little bearing on content consumed. People desire the freedom of mobile-based content at their fingertips, no matter how they get to work. Moreover, we observed that consumers were already absorbed in their own personal devices as an extension of their personal choice.
We realized that the looming AV age was a red herring distracting us from the threats already present today. KQED has an existing app that allows live streaming, but connectivity issues abound. Without the ability to download content, a listener might start their day with KQED but have to switch to a different content provider once they board BART, for example. If the full spectrum of KQED content isn’t available on personal devices, they might not be part of that listening experience at all.
Going beyond the commute: KQED’s place in the morning ritual
By focusing beyond AVs, an opportunity emerged: engaging KQED listeners before they even got into the car and long after the work day is over. Our conclusion? KQED must create a mobile-first content experience to meet consumer demands and expectations.
Streaming services are rising in popularity and capturing increasing market share, reaching 24.7% of consumers in 2018 and expected to hit 26.6% in 2022. Streaming services are making bold moves to consolidate their content offerings, evidenced by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post and Spotify’s price bundling agreements with Headspace, Hulu and the New York Times. As a result, we see strategic partnerships as the key to KQED’s viability.
Keep the conversation going
As transportation continues to evolve, so does the relationship with entertainment and media. KQED’s opportunity lies in creating an immersive experience with that media, one that allows absorbed listeners to keep moving — park their car, take their device with them, keep listening at home or in the office. It allows KQED to keep the conversation going with their listeners, uninterrupted and on any channel. By helping users out of the car and back into their day, KQED will be better poised to serve commuters of the future — no matter who (or what) is behind the wheel.
— Liz Demakos, Laurel Adams, Mark Anthony Tolentino, Norinne Cheng, Vanessa Hernandez, and Tobin Shreeve
In what ways do you see KQED combating the oncoming AV age? Tweet us @KQED!
