During the discussions that PK has been involved with around the National Broadband Plan, video has been a reoccurring theme. Everyone seems to agree that the next big thing to drive broadband (adoption, speeds, capacity, whatever) is the delivery of video over the internet. Someone will point to Netflix streaming, to Hulu, to Amazon, to Boxee, to YouTube, and say that they are merely the tip of the iceberg. Soon everyone will be sending and streaming video all over the internet, which is why we need more capacity.
In every one of these conversations, no matter what the context, there is always a point where people start to discuss what the video actually will be. And in every one of these conversations, a dichotomy quickly emerges: there will be user generated content (UGC) and there will be “real” or “studio” or “professional” content. On the “real” side goes stuff from television networks and movie studios. On the UGC side goes stuff uploaded to YouTube.
Either explicitly or implicitly, there is an assumption that the UGC is essentially commercially worthless – it is all first grade ballet recitals, dogs jumping up and down, or kids falling off of skateboards. The real action (and money) is around the “real” content. Since the money will only come from the professional content, the concerns of today’s professional content owners (usually having to do with filtering or kicking people off of networks) tend to dominate the discussion.
I’m going to set aside judgment about the value of what most people think of as UGC for the purposes of this post (well, at least mostly – ask someone who now makes a living doing parkour stunts in movies and commercials or is learning how to cook, speak Spanish, or to fix a bike if it is useless) and focus on the dichotomy. People who divide the video world into traditional content and low quality UGC are missing the changes going on around them.
Increasingly, there is a third category of internet video. It has high production values, is created on a regular basis, and is not made by existing television networks or movie studios. This content exists to do more than simply capture a moment. The third category of video includes content created by established companies that are using the internet as an opportunity to expand, such as the New York Times and Washington Post. It includes websites that are beginning to dabble in videos that provide entertainment, information, and analysis, such as the Onion News Network, GigaOM Video, Boing Boing Video, and our own PK TV. It also includes entire online networks with a slate of shows, such as Revision3, Vuze HD Network, nuDia.tv, TWiT Live, Pixel Corps, NextNewNetworks, College Humor, and Funny or Die (let me know the favorites that I missed in the comments).
While the existence of this third category of content is well known to many people, in policy discussions it tends to be forgotten. It is true that the coming wave of internet video will include established studio content, but it will also let new studios spring up. Just because the third category is mostly short form now, that does not mean that it will always be more cartoon cat in a Moroccan bazaar than NBC Nightly News. There will be plenty of “real” video content surging across the internet that is not being represented by people who work for television studios and the MPAA in Washington today. It is not safe to assume that today’s established studios have the best interests of their future competitors at heart.
Oh and for the record, I am not judging that hamster on the piano.
you are just astroturf for
you are just astroturf for google!!!!!! you hate hamsters!!!!!!
Those Aren’t Muskets!
Those Aren’t Muskets!
User-generated content is fine.
But who will pay for the bandwidth? It isn’t free, you know.
New studios for the new creators
Good points Michael,
Many of the most moving and fascinating media I have seen in the last few years has come through User Generated Content on Social networking and video sharing websites (and certainly the most humorous!).
New creators are popping up all the time, and the quality and types of works vary tremendously.
Issues that arise for these new creators are access to equipment (even though less expensive, many don’t still have access) and access to legal advice.
Here’s a link to our free public media studio in San Diego, where we also provide legal assistance.
http://www.newmediarights.org/newmediarights_studio
Art
Thanks for the heads up Art
Thanks for the heads up Art (although I got a 404 error with your link - http://www.newmediarights.org/newmediarights_studio worked better). It looks like you guys are providing a great service. I know that one of the main motivations for our New York music copyright project (http://nymusiccopyright.org) was trying to make the thicket of laws that surround music licensing accessible to people who would rather spend their time making great music than attending law school.
ISP, one of the reasons that I pay my ISP is to access video over broadband, so I guess I am paying for the bandwith. I don’t have access to the details of any of the services I discussed above, but something gives me the feeling that they all have to pay to upload and stream their content online.
branded networks is the buzzword
Your argument makes no sense if consideration of branded networks is added to the conversation. Newspapers, grocery stores, corporations at all levels, are able to utilize today’s technology to bring local broadband infrastructure to entire communities, if they so desire. You could, if you wanted, purchase a single open-mesh.com wireless access point for $50, and then sell subscriptions to your neighbors and their neighbors for a profit. The subscribers would then have access to several megabit speed broadband that you provide. Enough neighbors, and the network becomes a community-based broadband infrastructure. Your branded network becomes attractive to others that might want to access your network. No internet capability, but with little effort, it has a virtual world app working. Now, this level of broadband infrastructure becomes very attractive to hospitals wishing to access patients for their telemedicine programs. Can you think of other entities, businesses, etc., wanting to set up their studios in your virtual world? Would a newspaper like to have a revenue stream from subscriptions to their branded network, and, in turn, provide internet access as a glorified ISP, making additional revenues? Of course, this is too obvious for corporate thugs bent on living in last century, trying to preserve obsolete models.
I like the idea of mesh
I like the idea of mesh networks, Tom Poe, but I think that unfortunately you might be overlooking a few problems. First, depending on your ISP, reselling your broadband may violate your TOS and get you kicked off. Second, splitting a few internet connections among an entire neighborhood will have some performance ramifications. Buying retail and then trying to compete against your ISP will always either result in offering a slower connection or higher prices (unless you just resell at cost, at which point you can’t make any money).
Building a mesh network for a community LAN could be fantastic and do a lot of good, but until we fix the middle mile problem and let smaller carriers get access to critical infrastructure or the FCC mandates some sort of open access that allows different ISPs to compete for customers on residential networks, linking that community LAN to the larger Internet may be hard and frustrating.