The Washington Post sums up a lot of what we’ve been looking at here in the explosion of TV as it spreads to the internet and the internet seeps back.
Posts about Exploding_TV
YouTube killed the TV star
HBO brought together the superstars of viral video: Gary Brolsma of Numa Numa Dance fame; Stephen Voltz, “who has captivated millions with elaborate fountains created by dropping Mentos in Diet Coke bottles;” Charlie Todd, “from Improv Everywhere, a New York-based website that recently created mass havoc when they sent a team of hundreds to move in slow motion through a Home Depot store;” the Urban Ninjas, “famed for dazzling leaps from the tops of buildings;” Marco Tempest, the Virtual Magician, master of head-scratcher camera-phone-taped tricks.”
The organizers said, according to the LA Times, that they’d been seen by 300 million people.
What’s broadcast?
What’s the point of broadcast TV anymore? Eighty-eight percent of Americans receive TV via cable or satellite. And now, of course, there are more ways to get video: the internet, mobile, and soon mobile satellite. Our kids have no idea what the difference between a broadcast and a cable channel is. Soon, they won’t have any idea what the difference between cable and internet TV is. And before you know it, they won’t know the difference between professional and amateur TV.
So do we tear down the broadcast towers? Not yet. But very soon, the cost benefit of owning that license and equipment will fall to nearly nil (one wonders when delivering via wi-fi mesh networks in cities and satelllite in boonies will become more effective and profitable — perhaps even now). Local TV licenses used to be money machines; now they’re shrinking. Viewership for networks of those stations continues to fall year after year, of course. The barrier to entry to making and now distributing TV is gone. Radio is arguably in better shape so long as we drive and satellite and radio-via-phone grow to critical mass, joining the iPod. And the radio business sucks.
What’s the point of broadcast? What’s the power of it? There’s far more perceived value to broadcast — by us older folks — than there is real value anymore. The business and regulatory attention given to broadcast is overblown. So what happens to broadcast? Does it matter?
The zero-sum schedule of TV time
Stowe Boyd looks at the great McLuhanesque Mandala of one medium turning into the next as the BBC reports that internet video viewing has grown large enough to start cutting into old TV viewing. Says the Beeb: “Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.”
Uh-oh, the video me
Jeff Pulver just put up free video from his Video on the Net conference in Boston, which was an unusually good confab, at least the part I could attend (I’m going back to the next in California in March). Here’s my spiel, in which I tried to put the explosion of TV in a historic and cultural context and push the participants on what we need next.
