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June 11, 2004
Explode Your Television
Via Cinema Minima: Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine is prediciting that TV is about to explode. He notes that the major barriers to producing and distributing television broadcasts are now being lowered. Jarvis comments:
Citizens TV will not look like the early efforts at TV online. It won't be all edgy Atom films (nobody watches them). Neither will it exactly mimic broadcast and cable (why bother?). But you can, today, turn out useful TV with little effort and expense.Now, I actually did watch Atom Films back in the day, but Jarvis makes a good case here. One of the major benefits I've encountered while blogging is the opportunity to network with people who had similar interests in local politics (I could also list dozens of academic bloggers, but that would take a while), and if Jarvis is correct, this would be another cheap way of providing access to this type of information. Jarvis has lots of links to articles that imply that TV is "exploding before our eyes." I do wonder how much the residue of current TV content, with the current heavy emphasis on "reality TV," will limit people's imaginations when it comes to content for these shows, but "Citizens TV" still sounds promising to me.For example, you could with one camera person and one host and a little editing create a house remake show like the ones my wife and I now love to watch. You could create local shows about sports or politics. You could review movies. You could test drive cars or gadgets. You could teach people how to use, oh, PowerPoint. Or you could create source material: Tape the board of ed meeting and put it online. And then you can distribute it. And then you can get people to watch it.
Update: Jarvis follows up on the "Explode your TV" post with a link to SpecSpot, a site where filmmakers can display commercials they've made on their own. Of course I'd like to see these technologies put to use for less explicitly commercial purposes. Why use the cheap production and distribution technologies to expand further the complete branding of everything that moves? But some of the spots are pretty cool.
Posted by chuck at June 11, 2004 12:40 PM
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