hi Heath I hear you, and I am playing devils advocate here.
On 08/11/2008, at 4:29 AM, Heath wrote: > But given the fact we have companies who are trying to run TV over > the internet, in Hi Def mind you, these companies are "selling" to us > the "Bigger is better", mantra.....I mean how many times in this own > fourm have people stated "Traditional TV is dead, it's all going to > come over the internet"....well that can't happen at 5 gigs or 8 gigs > a month.... > [snip] I'm not disagreeing with any of this but taking it on a tangent. The "trad tv is dead", yep. That's already happened, that's why TV (certainly in Australia) has a lot of live sport and an enormous amount of 'reality' programming. Both of these work very well on live to air because in the case of sport we generally watch it live and rarely watch it when we know the results (there are exceptions of course). Reality TV, which is largely TV's incorporation of the logic of gaming (that'd be computer games, not casinos) into itself, has voting or some sort of deadline come competition element which also encourages live viewing. Who gets voted out? Or similar. While there remains quite a bit of drama many of us watch this via DVD, downloads and so on - and from an Australian pov while we get things like Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The Soprano's all on free to air it is clear that they are produced/paid for out of a non trad. TV model (US cable). However, the argument tht TV will come down the internet and still be TV is TV trying to colonise the internet in its own image. This is why things like YouTube have worked well, YouTube is just another big centralised network, at the end of the day in terms of its distribution model not that far from ABC, NBC and so on. This is first generation internet video, up there with when people first marked up HTML as vast slabs of text and we all read tomes that told us that links out would lose customers (etc). Blogs (which inaugurated Web 2.0) demolished that argument (as did Google). So TV, as a particular sort of institution (broadcasting via air, cable, or the internet) will stick around for a while, perhaps forever. Just like books and publishers. But around the margins many other things will happen. It is these other things that are the interesting part. (Yes, I'm rambling.) Now, YouTube requires lots of bandwidth, and TV as TV needs lots. Always did and probably always will (heck it required ownership of entire slices of public spectrum). This is also why YouTube etc has worked, by which I mean as broadband ramped up it become viable to view video in real time online, but also because of this the imperative for video practitioners to reconsider their practice in the context of the network disappeared. If I assume broadband as the common denominator then I don't have to address the network as a part of my practice in any meaningful way. An analogy (which Jay can tinker with). When we shot on film it was expensive, scarce, and fragile. We shot carefully, frugally. You checked light levels three times and so on. This was a problem, but it also created a constraint that allowed an art form to be defined and develop. With digital video (for example) shooting is damn cheap, approaching zero in cost. Because of this (as a teacher) it can be difficult to get students to 'think cinematically' because they don't actually risk anythign by filming. Now I quite like this as a digital video person. That's because my aesthetic is all sketch book back of the envelope stuff. dirty media, disposable mobile video. But as a teacher it means we frame much tighter constraints precisely to help the students think of what they're doing as a practice with constraints. Now, in relation to the network, with lots of bandwidth (this is just one facet of the network, there are others) bandwidth no longer needs to be thought about as a constraint (and combined with digital video where you can shoot, and shoot, and shoot, it leads to some bloody long winded nonsense, much like this email I suspect). As a network based practitioner who has used video online since somewhere around the very first real media pseudo streaming protocol (which allowed playing of video online before QT could) I might just be grey haired old school but resistance in bandwidth is for me a fundamental thing to think about online. It's up there with a rectangular frame in which to compose. A given. Anyway, traditional TV with lots of bandwidth has not had to change anything in its conception of itself to use the internet. (This is also why broadcasters have been able to take to podcasting so successfully, it requires no deep change on their behalf as to what they actually do.) This is why it is still first generation internet video. And I think that when we approach the network in the same way, assuming that bandwidth is not constrained as a given condition, then we have somehow colonised the network into either merely a distribution medium, or wannabe TV. I like lots of bandwidth, but do I want to watch most of the stuff online at full screen, full rez on my 21" macintosh? No. (And I'm a grumpy old bastard tired of hearing for 15 years that the future of video etc is online *once* we get all this bandwidth. To me that's like watching a film in 1905 and declaring it will be real good once they get synchronised sound, colour and a mobile camera, whereas the art was invented by accepting, testing, using and then building from those constraints.) Pick apart as you wish, and no, it isn't really very cohesive. cheers Adrian Miles [EMAIL PROTECTED] bachelor communication honours coordinator vogmae.net.au
