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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."
You chose the wrong crowd for this article.
Does anyone else find the term "Internetworks" annoying? After all, internet basically is short for internetwork already.
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
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
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.
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.
Up to this point, the reason has been that the bean counters at the cable company and TV production studios decided they would get more dollars per channel by featuring the BBQ network as opposed to an anime channel. Hopefully services like this will make it easier and more affordable for a company to put together a TV lineup, which means that something like an anime channel that may not have been profitable before would become profitable now. Not to mention, there won't be a cable company monopoly anymore with multiple networks available to each house.
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....
The RIAA does not have a chokehold on all music distribution. Musicians have no less freedom to self distribute, assuming they are not contractually bound, all their music as they see fit. Napster proved only one thing; people just want shit for free. The ensuing battle over copyrighted material being distributed over P2P networks on the internet further proves this point as more and more apps are being developed with the sole purpose of allowing anonymous distribution. People just want shit for free and they want to remain anonymous while they do it so they remain free of responsibility for their actions.