Video Distribution Platform Aiming to Kill TV 207
skaterperson writes "I just read about Downhill Battle's new open source video platform - a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say "TV channels" will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop. There is a radio show on the project available at echoradio." The project is just getting underway, with a (hopeful) launch date sometime in June of this year.
This scares me. (Score:2, Insightful)
Granted, there is talent out there, but is the way to find them to give everyone a tv show and then filter out the bad ones?
Kill TV? Not to the trailer dwellers in Alabama. (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is that you can have all sorts of fancy delivery systems and video on demand stuff. Most real people will continue to turn on the TV and flip channels looking for "Reba" reuns for a long, long time. Don't throw out those rabbit earrs quite yet.
Content is king (Score:5, Insightful)
One such example is sports. I'm not interested in a low quality broadcast of the SuperBowl. I'll take the commercial production of the SuperBowl any time.
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:5, Insightful)
TV is harder than you think (Score:5, Insightful)
At best this will create a lot of 640x320 webcam videos being viewed by noone, and a couple semi-pro's showing their content before going "big time."
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:5, Insightful)
First -- textual blogs. Then -- foto blogs (Flikr, FotoLog). Next -- video clips, then continuous video-streaming, and so on with the possible future technologies (3D-video, avatars, etc.)
Not everyone has a blog today -- most people never will. This hobby (or profession) is not for all. Some prefer hiking, cars, computers...
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:5, Insightful)
That hasn't stopped pod casting has it?
All of these personal communication technologies, from email, through web sites, the evolution into blogs, podcasting and now this are full of crap. Really. After all, how many web sites of the ones you've surfed have you found interesting enough to check on a regular basis? 10%? And how many of those were personal sites?
Most of the net content is ego based, not quality based, and unless someone is prepared to put quality content on there it will remain as marginalised as the current ego trip hyped as pod casting.
Re:Oh, dear God... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds awesome but will it actually work? (Score:2, Insightful)
Popular channels = Great quality, great speeds
Crap = Crap speeds
Of course, let's hope that the original seed has a good connection.
Content? (Score:3, Insightful)
TV is good because it assumes that I watch the commercials and endure some content I'd rather not. That's the current model that pays for things.
In a choose your own feed senario advertising becomes pruned. So, who makes new content and who pays for it?
Re:Absurd (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:5, Insightful)
Content, content, content. (Score:2, Insightful)
Content - MY WAY! (Score:5, Insightful)
Meaning the networks are better at deciding what content the masses want rather then the masses is rediculous! It may be true in the sense that the networks are the only ones who can control the distribution of said content, good or otherwise.
What is happening now is more and more passive viewers are not plopping their arses down for several hours a night to watch advertising saturated "primetime" content. More and more are using technology to record and view what the want when they want.
Primetime and the telelvision advertising model is rapidly disappearing. That is the PRIMARY reason the industry is fighting so hard for the broadcast flag. They must control the hardware or the user will decide when and where the content is consumered not the network and their advertising model goes out the window.
What the Broadcast Flag is really protecting is the networks advertising model not content. Once users can no longer freely record and watch content the way they want, they will simply find alternatives or find another source of entertainment.
Don't laugh. This GARBAGE the networks call content is also drastically shrinking the "masses" that tune in at primetime. There is an ever growing list of more stimulating alternatives that do not require the user to sit through hours and hours of advertising. And that is what everyone is trying to protect... the MONEY!
Locking down shitty content will only cause viewers to find alternative content. Locking down good or better content will only PISS OFF and alienate an ever-shrinking audience!
Why.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe this is a bit off topic, but it has to be said.. Why is every other new tech story on slashdot about one technology/software/whatever trying to KILL another one? I think the appropriate word is "competition". Headlines like the above have lost their sensationalism through over use. Everyone take one step backwards towards reality.
That said.. unless your average 'other user' can spend millions to put together quality and/or entertaining programming, I don't see television leaving the picture anytime soon. (pun intended)
Re:Content - MY WAY! (Score:3, Insightful)
Given a chance at something different, I think a surprising amount of people will jump on it.
Re:TV is harder than you think (Score:4, Insightful)
having a million dollars in equipment will not make bad acting, bad writing and bad direction better.
your lighting kit can be built at home depot for less than $100.00. audio equipment can be low end lapel microphones or a cheap shotgun mic ducttaped to a broom handle. and the camera can be any DV camera made.
Examples? Blair witch was made with what I just mentioned to you. And many other indie films that are pretty darn good are also... check out rewindvideo.com for some more.
YOU DO NOT NEED EXPENSIVE GEAR.
Re:Kill TV? Not to the trailer dwellers in Alabama (Score:3, Insightful)
Never going to happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure, there's something to be said about content but not nearly as much as all this. And when it comes to content, people don't want ten million Internet broadcasters clogging up the Internet with pointless vanity crap they won't want nearly as much as a high cost well polished production like CSI or Queer as Folk or whatever.
Cable provides the best bandwidth out there as of right now and even that tops out at a couple hundred high definition channels. To broadcast over the net introduces new TCP/IP overhead robbing you of bandwidth further. Imagine if ten thousand people all choose one of a thousand broadcasts to watch simultaneously in one city alone. Imagine repeating this every night across every city and town. We'd need to start building fiber pipes measured like sewer pipes as in feet in diameter.
Okay, so we use a lower resolution and we settle for lag and breakup? No, I don't think so. Who would be willing to watch Battlestar Galactica if it were webcast at 320x240 when you could watch it on cable or satellite as it was shot? Doesn't that defeat the whole movement towards richly detailed hi-def content?
I don't see it happening for these interrelated reasons: bandwidth, resolution, content, viewing experience, etc. As much fun as some webcams can be, I can't see a future of all sorts of amature broadcasters ever going anywhere.
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:3, Insightful)
But how will the content producers get paid? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Content - MY WAY! (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning the networks are better at deciding what content the masses want rather then the masses is rediculous! It may be true in the sense that the networks are the only ones who can control the distribution of said content, good or otherwise.
I don't think that is what it means. I think what it means is the networks are better at making content. This is because they have money and employ lots of people who make TV professionally. Doesn't mean it is all good, but it has a better chance of being something people will want to watch that something made my Joe Random Person.
I also don't think "the masses" will ever be making TV. Few will have the inclination, skills and drive. It takes far more to be an active producer of content than an active consumer.
Re:Content is king (Score:5, Insightful)
People thought everyone would publish their own magazines when desktop publishing came around, and it would transform the world. Ditto with cheap video cameras, audio recording equipment, etc. The truth is, digestible content is expensive and labor intensive to produce, no matter what the technology involved.
Re:Kill TV? Not to the trailer dwellers in Alabama (Score:3, Insightful)
If you had some kind of measurable brain function, I was not speaking elitist. My point was that people are wrong to declare an embedded technology like TV dead. People in our business (tech) tend to forget the vast majority of people still like the simplicity of free TV and it's nice little remote control.
Feel free to shift that chip over to the other shoulder....it must be getting heavy.
Re:How many feeds will you monitor? (Score:1, Insightful)
Who said anything about functioning in the real world?
How many times have you passed a car that looked like it was being driven by a drunk, only to see that it was someone on the phone?
How many times have you spoken to someone while they were watching TV or typing on their computer, only to realize they don't even notice you're there?
People don't want the real world anymore, it just doesn't cater to their every whim as much as they think it should.
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Fifteen minutes of fame" (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure it is. Most TV material aims to meet the lowest quality of content and production that most people will still waste their time watching into the commercials.
You are forgetting the "Power of Collaboration." (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is the scripts for these public access failures. But when amateur content creators really start adopting the open source software creation model, where hundreds of content creators start using internet software to collaborate and create scripts, find public domain and creative commons video footage, and using cheap digital cameras to film events and interviews from all over world, and then divide up the work a la open source software, edit the video using hundreds of different computers using cheap or even free editing software, then, THEN it blow even Hollwood out of the water.
And the main thing that this copylefted content will offer is something that the TV industry is in REALLY short supply of--a more real worldview and a wider range of philosophical and sociopolitical viewpoints. For example, every friggin day on TV you see celebrities, politicians and other famous people being treated with kid gloves, like the alpha animals they are. But on internet tv, they are gonna get trashed. And people are gonna like that.
Re:Where is it going? (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't look tilted to the left if you're already on the left. The reason it looks so right-slanted in the first place is that there's nothing much to the left of them except grumpy soviet-era communists, and they often leftists consider themselves "centrists". To me (as a small-L libertarian), the media looks like it's tilted towards Authoritarianism, with a (to me irrelevant) wide array of left-to-right positions on which particular liberties they want curtailed. It's really a pointless argument to pursue, because everyone has a tendency to see themselves as being more "centrist" than they actually are, and from their point of view things will always seem to slant the other direction.
Re:what about rendered content (i.e. Red vs Blue) (Score:2, Insightful)
Sure the image quality of rendered content right now is such that no one is going to mistake it for live action. BUT, when you take a look at what engines like Unreal Engine 3 are capable of and you extrapolate out a few more years then you can see where this is headed.
I believe that TV of the future will include much rendered content being produced by small independent teams or individuals using the machinima approach.
Re:Manhattan (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say your show is on a subject that will be interesting to one person in a million. If you're broadcasting throughout NYC, there might be eight people who would enjoy your show if they saw it. And I guarantee you, unless it's a documentary on people who are addicted to public access TV, none of them will be watching when your show broadcasts.
But if your audience is global, there might be 6000 people who might be interested in your show. So the aggregate audience is much, much bigger. Not everyone lives in New York (though I hear that such people are oddballs, and really don't matter).
But still, finding that one person in a million should be just as hard. If you had to put up flyers on every corner in New York to get the attention of half of the eight Yorkies, then you should have to murder millions of trees in order to tract out every city in the world, right?
But the whole idea of creating Internet communities is that the oddballs who would actually suffer through your badly-produced show have a chance of finding each other. So you just find these little niches, tell them about your show, and (ideally) you have an instant audience of thousands.
More from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
The point is, there's more to connecting with an audience than "getting on the air". In order for this tool to work well, it can't just be a way to "publish" torrents, but to advertise them in such a way that people can quickly find relevant content. I think this project will live and die by its searching and indexing abilities.