I’ve written a lot about radio here, to the extent that you might get the idea that I really like radio. I do, and I think this might apply to a lot of people who habitually work very long hours.
One of my very favorite radio movies is Pump Up The Volume. It’s actually a teen angst film, I suppose, but the interesting wrinkle for me is pirate radio. In the end the protagonist calls upon his audience to set up their own pirate radio stations, to break the mainstream media monotony monopoly with thousands of new voices.
That much is impractical, of course: Pirate radio stations cost money and require technical expertise. But guess what? The there that could never be there turns out to be here, in weblogging. This is pirate radio made practical, 57 million alternatives to Dan Rather. Quality comes and goes, but — my goodness! — choice abounds.
Here’s a further development on the same theme: WatchItVegas.com. What is it? A net-based, on-demand TV station. The owner produces the videos used by the DiamondScan signs on Las Vegas Boulevard, so he has the technology and the content to set up his own TV station.
What does it mean? In the short-run, practically nothing. It’s net video, after all, small and crappy. But in the long-run…
I have an uncle who shoots trap and skeet. He’s good, maybe two or three rungs below the Olympic level of competition. The guys who do this are fanatics in the best web-based sense of the word. There aren’t many of them, but they are devoutly interested in what they do, and they are free-spending to the point of extravagance to get their hands on the absolute best of everything.
Can you say LongTail.TV? Sure you can!
We are graduating from five-hundred-channel television to five-hundred-thousand-channel television. If there is a niche, if there is content and if there are advertisers, there will be a net-based TV network. The advertisers are optional, actually. We don’t want them here, for example.
But: Advertisers want the biggest possible return for the smallest possible outlay. If an internet television network devoted to fanatical interests can deliver the eyeballs that print and television can’t — so much the worse for them…
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Brian Brady says:
Mainstream media will argue that the 500K channels will provide an information overload that the viewer/reader can’t process; the same argument was made when Ted Turner came on the scene.
I have much more faith in the ability of the end user to determine what is quality content (or funny, or heart warming, etc) and what is not. Sadly, the mainstream media don’t share that faith.
January 1, 2007 — 12:39 pm