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The Rise of the Internetwork
Thomas Hawk writes "The Seattle Times is out with an article today profiling Jeremy Allaire, the founder of a new internet television company called Brightcove along with, well, a program on 'hog cooking' to be broadcast on the Barbeque Network by DaveTV. DaveTV and Brightcove, along with companies like Akimbo, Total Vid, Open Media Network and OurMedia are part of a growing new group of companies called internetworks that are seeking to compete with regular network television and offer alternative niche video content. Look for these offerings in your living room through platforms like TiVo and Microsoft's Media Center shortly."
Why can we get a damn BBQ network, and yet still no *GOOD* anime channel?
Or will this finally fix this?
Will we finally now see John Dvorak back on the camera? I miss ZDTV and Dvorak's Prime Time style talk shows!
Why do I need a Tivo or a Media Centre PC in order to play this content if I already have a PC and broadband?
Aegilops
How do I get videos not on regular network television to play on a TiVo? To appear in a TiVo guide, so viewers know they're available?
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make install -not war
It seems reasonable that the next step after podcasting would be to add video and then look for outlets like these to be the distribution medium. it might also be a welcomed new outlet for independent film makers who are left only with IFC and a few other places for their films, especially "shorts" (films typically under 30 minutes).
At last, perhaps there will be more than "500 channels and nothing on".
-- Scott
Not big and commercial, but maybe paired with MythTV or some other kind of box, it could take off... http://participatoryculture.org/
I still prefer the term "nichecasting" for this kind of idea (microcasting implies "small"), and it's particularly cool when you look at it from a Long Tail perspective. So if we can [n]cast for virtually no cost, all we need to do is create stuff for virutally no cost. RvB is still, I think, the best example of that kind project. Does anyone know of any other FOSE[ntertainment] out there?
The world's only surviving livewriter.
No. The software that drives this revolution has been in the making for years. In fact corporations are fighting the switch to online programming hard. Their conservative stance that has made them so against change has for years has also left them wrong on every decision about content distrubution through the years.
This was foreshadowed by the Napster fight. The difference is that the television market is too diversified for any single group to put it in a chokehold. This means that home produced shows are able to make way into the home. In the end that means the consumer will win and eventually big business will come in and take over the market but until then be prepared for large corporations to fight this to no end.
What took so long was that the world at large hasn't widely adapted a fast enough internet connection to make these services profitable. Also you have to remember that the internet is still in its infancy. On top of that we haven't seen great inovations in video compression that would make it possible to deliever realtime streaming video at the same quailty as TV can. Couple all this with the fact that this would potentially be a huge shift in the industry (meaning that large corporations will fight the move) and you have your answer.
Though I must agree I wish it had happened faster.
You want tv downloads? Go make a tv show and license it under a permissive license. When there's a whole range of things to choose from the restrictive licensing tv creators will come around. It worked for software, it'll work for tv too. Can you imagine if RMS had taken the path that the warez kids of today had taken? We'd still have no Free Software. Now we have proprietary software companies making Free Software. What we need is a movement. Consider this, if everyone who fancied themselves as a script writer but was already happy in their current employment actually sat down and wrote a script now and then, and let others use their work we would have a wealth of good scripts available for amature actors to read from. Everyone who has a video camera should be filming everyone who thinks they have some acting ability. Then we should throw it all together and make some great shows.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here's just some oberservaions and predictions about how this industry will shape up:
1) We'll see the wide spread use of the internet slowly transform it into huge single communications network. Everything, telephonery, telivision, and radio will be done online.
2) We will finally see the advent of video telephones like in the Jetsons
3) This switch to the new distrubion medium will shatter traditional industry and decentralize content production.
4) The decentalization will lead to a decrease in professionalism and for the first years the content will suffer a decline in quality.
5) Online media interst groups will emerge offering higher quality content and reintroduce large corparations into the industry.
6) News types of content will result from the above processes and...
7) Maybe 50 years from now the internet will be free to all.
I don't know just some things I think will happen....
Either you can call it a amalgamation of the distribution systems (everything distributed by the network), or a glorious break in the holds of the cable companies on how and when we view media, but either way, I think its a good thing.
Personally, I haven't had cable in about 5 years because I just don't want to pay $50/month for 500 channels that I don't care about. I watch about 10 channels overall, and if I could pay for those ala carte, I would, but I'm not going to pay for all of them. This style of distribution is perfect for me and the way I want to purchase media.
However, its going to be hell on advertisers (ha ha), because now they're going to have to do even more market research to figure out where it is worth their time to put advertisements. Technically, it could be the end of in media res advertisements as well. It would be like watching programming made for HBO, purchased on an ad hoc basis. Oooooohhh... I like it.
Tell me again. How is this a bad thing?
I am working on a solo video documentary right now that I plan to release under Creative Commons license.
When I finish I hope it will encourge other people to collaborate over the Net to write scripts, find public domain & creative commons video footage & images, create flash animations, and edit them all together in copylefted, Creative commons entertainment and educational videos, free to download, anywhere, anytime. Such a copylefted production, if done well, could be traded over p2p networks for decades to come.
Hopefully, people will do this for the same reason that they make free software--for the resume enhancement, for the personal satisfaction, for the education.
One reason why public access TV is so bad is because so few people work on each project. THe reason why Hollywood is so much better than public access is because so many more people work on a Hollywood movie than on the public access stuff you see.
COLLABORATION is the future of video entertainment and news. And when broadband is more widespread in America, the market for such creative commons collaborations will be much greater.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I prefer "broadcatching" as it inverts one-to-many delivery with "many-to-one" access (and perhaps I'm partial, also, as I coined the word in 1983).
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins
I am part of a small start up http://www.vidiac.com/(Vidiac Networks) that is in this space already and I can say it's huge. There is oceans of consumer-generated media being created as inexpensive DV cameras become popular combined with, cheap bandwidth and home broadband connections.
While I admire the author for being aware of the consumer-generated video content revolution, I think his focus on pay-per-view and subscription based video is too heavily weighted. Our experience is that advertising supported video is less intrusive to a viewer as they are used to that paradigm growing up on TV. Never would you hear "Hey Mom, Will and Grace is about to come on, can I have $1.99 to watch it?".
Conversely There is a cadre of people that will not suffer ads, and will pay a one-time fee to opt out of them. (in effect that's what a TiVo is, a one time or monthly subscription fee to opt out of advertising). The problem here is that while TiVo works for television it "breaks" the broadcast company's business model, thus there is a ton of ruckus in the advertising world on how to deal with TiVo.
The Internet Solution most likely needs to focus on a dual-offering. Ads for free video, or micro-payments for no ads.
Now the second issue I have with this article is it's missing the number one biggest problem with consumer generated media. Where do you find it? Not until I read this article did I realize there even was a "DaveTV" to go to...and I live in the same city and even listen to "DaveFM". Where do I find videos online? Message forums, blogs, links from friends. Completely decentralized.
Now pardon me while I toot my own horn with Vidiac.com, but I'm actually rather proud of our solution to this issue. Our solution was to become a "Video ASP" We have a centralized server that offers brandable skinable video portals to message forums and websites. For example http//videos.streetfire.net http//video.freevideoblog.com. This is a win for the web site owners, because they get free video portals added to their site. It's a win for content creators as they get a free place to host with a consistent level of service. It's a win for viewers because they find chanalized content. And it's a win for us as every new domain we add grows our reach into new niche markets. Advertisers get to buy video ads in bulk across multiple domains (win for them), and revenue is shared between the site owners and content creators.....one of these days when someone invents the 25 hour day I'll program in a pay per view system as well, but so far none of my 300,000 viewers last month has asked for it.
What's nice about this is it creates a lot of synergies. For instance if I'm into the import car scene, and create a illegal street race video, I'll share it with people on my own import car forum. Visitors to that forum, are likely into import cars and the content is relevant to them. Thus all uploaded content becomes "chanalized". Instead of TLC, G4Tech TV, and Comedy Central, I now have video portals around various interests (just like websites, duh). What's nice too about our solution is the ability for a site moderator to move a video out of his/her domain, if the video isn't relevant to their site (say a Skate video on a car site). We allow moderators to put such videos into a general bank, then other forum owners pick up those videos to add more content to their site.
To sum up in the 90 days we've been live, I've seen our webtrends go from 100 users a day to 40,000 unique visitors a day. We're now serving 80,000 videos per day to 4 websites, and have 5 more in queue for launch. Every day users upload over 100 new videos into the system, so it's always fresh. It's a very exciting segment to be in.
Japan created an entire anime industry not with lots of money but with lots of creativity. You don't need money to create anime.