Do we really know how much we don't know?

Given the slightly left-wing bias of most British media, it can be rather unfashionable to declare a love of Donald Rumsfeld. But I thought I'd use this column to pay homage to him. Obviously, I need to qualify that statement. I don't want to pay homage to all of him. Starting wars on flimsy justification is hard to love. But there's one thing I think we all owe him for: the invention of the known unknown.

Before Rumsfeld, people knew there were things they didn't know. But it was a vague and fluffy kind of not knowing, not a precise, quantifiable state of ignorance like a known unknown. Before his coining the term, we might have been slightly embarrassed about what we didn't know. Since he made a lack of knowledge seem so sexy and important, we can proudly write a list of the things we don't know and declare them to be known unknowns, and seem more intelligent because of it.

This is very helpful in the world of new media because people keep inventing things and improving others to the point where no one knows what the hell is going on. Our known knowns are becoming unknowns as new media madness corrodes some of our previously comfortable uncertainties.

For example, the other day someone told me they'd watched one of the Six Nations Rugby games on their iPad in bed. I assumed they didn't have a TV in their bedroom, but no, they just preferred to use their iPad. Simple broadcast and network economics would declare this to be a bad thing. It's a known known that broadcast is cheaper than streaming for large concurrent audiences. This person had irrationally imposed an extra cost on the BBC, which had thoughtfully already provided perfectly good coverage of the game to the screen at the end of his bed.

If a programme is broadcast, the cost of distribution is fixed. Every person tuning in adds to the overall audience, so the marginal cost of delivery drops. If the same programme is streamed over a public network, then costs aren't fixed. There's a charge for every audience member. It was therefore a known known that broadband was unlikely to usurp broadcast for things like major TV channels. This was the kind of certainty that careers could be based on.

The problem is people keep inventing ways of squeezing more video down the same internet connection. I told this to a very clever boffin at the BBC and he said that while 50Mbps broadband wouldn't remove the incremental cost problem, the BBC would just [do something] to the network once a broadcast channel-sized audience starting streaming any particular content (he said what but it was gobbledygook to me). Apparently this would solve the problem. Even if that's true, for me it turned a known known into a known unknown. Will broadband ever replace broadcast? I used to say a definite no. Now I refer to Mr Rumsfeld.

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