This is old media thinking writ large. People pay for products - Tivo, DVRs, iPods, TV series DVDs - that turn streams into files they can watch when they want to.
We've solved how to send video over the net many times already.
The rare cases where millions of people want to watch the same thing at once — Presidential Inaugurations or faux Gladiatorial contests like American Idol, the World Cup Final or the Superbowl — are great uses for broadcast TV or satellite, and lousy uses of the net. What works is watching the event with friends on IRC or Twitter or a social network, sharing comments. That's what you need to stream over the net with low latency.
Cuban is conveying the last gasp of the self-important TV broadcast mentality that dreams of intoning "here we are, live to the nation", and all we can do is listen. But we can all talk back in parallel now, and build our own narratives with our own publics. That's what the net is for. As Douglas Adams put it last century:
I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this.‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’
‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’
‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’
‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.’
6 comments:
"Cuban is conveying the last gasp of the self-important TV broadcast mentality that dreams of intoning "here we are, live to the nation", and all we can do is listen."
Exactly.
It's worse here in Dallas, where Cuban's properties are pervasive, concentrated. Billboards and local TV commercials "command" you to passively consume Cuban owned sports, HD satellite, etc.
We'll be seeing more and more of these death rattles from the dinosaurs this year as the economy takes it toll on Old Media.
Yup. It's really not rocket science.
I love how your narrative used mannerisms of interaction between child and adult that haven't been seen since Charles Dickens ("please miss..."). Seriously, though ...everyone with money in broadcasting is scrambling to find the next big thing, which they can't get a handle on. The media outlets are being forced to follow in an area where they have led for ever.
It's Douglas Adams' narrative. Hence the Dickensian style - he's taking the p*ss.
idk i find myself watching multiple live things at once - right now i'm watching the shorty awards.
anyhow the big problem is it really doesn't scale - try watching 3 live feeds and monitoring twitter and posting to a blog at once...
but i'm watching more and more live things all the time.
Being the producers of a "main stream" national television series in our 10th season (www.HippyGourmet.com), we find ourselves living between two worlds: Traditional broadcasting and time shifted internet audiences.
The first offers us access to a wide group of people who equate seeing our series and brand on PBS and syndicated TV with 'validity.' The second offers us a world of opportunities to share full-length episodes and/or segments across many social network platforms and to leverage our vast library of content in a way traditional broadcasting just can't do (as yet).
We predict a marriage between the 1950's style television ad models (never cutting for commercial by keeping all the product placements and promos internal to the show), and the power of todays social networking.
As for live? The jury's still out on the best types of content and events people will be drawn to in the moment.
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