The Universal:
Television, The Internet and
The End of Space & Time
By: Jason Hammond (jason@hammond.net)
For: Professor David Spencer
MLIS 532
University of Western Ontario
Dec 5, 2006
Appropriate topic for my final presentation as a FIMS student and also for our final
presentation of the day.
Huge topic so this will be a pretty fast-paced overview…I hope.
1

On July 2, 2005, viewers
watching the worldwide Live
8 concerts on TV saw this…
-On July 2, 2005 viewers watching the worldwide Live 8 concerts on TV saw this.
But they also saw VJ’s talking, commercial breaks, cutaways to backstage and
random jumps from any of the ten worldwide locations to other locations – all while
performances were happening.
2

Viewers watching online
saw this…
The Internet allowed viewers to watch any of the venues they wanted as the day
progressed, constantly via streaming video. Each performance was later available
from the AOL web site for a limited time period and, as with so many things today,
most eventually became permanently archived on YouTube and other video sites.
3

David Bauder of the Associated
Press observed:
“Television seemed shockingly old-
fashioned in how it followed Saturday's
worldwide concert for poverty relief. AOL's
coverage was so superior, it may one day
be seen as a historical marker in drawing
people to computers instead of TV
screens for big events.” (Bauder, 2005)
Television seemed shockingly old-fashioned in how it followed Saturday's worldwide
concert for poverty relief. AOL's coverage was so superior, it may one day be seen
as a historical marker in drawing people to computers instead of TV screens for big
events
4

The Past
A quick overview of traditional broadcasting.
5

For the past 50 years,
television has been the
dominant communication
medium in our society.
For the past 50 years, television has been the dominant communication medium in
our society.
6

The Present
(I told you it would be quick!)
Today, TV is struggling to “survive”
Image not just for the pun - also appropriate as Survivor was one of the first
programs available to download from iTunes.
7

We are at the beginning of the
next communication revolution,
a quickly accelerating one
unlike any the world has seen
before…
We are in the midst of the next communication revolution, a quickly accelerating one
unlike any the world has seen before
8

TV’s Successor?
• Radio took 30 years to reach an audience
of 50 million people
• TV took 13 years
• The Internet took only four, from 1997
when it first entered popular
consciousness to 2001 when 9 million
people alone “tuned in” to a webcast of a
Madonna concert
(source BBC, March 22, 2001)
Radio took 30 years to reach an audience of 50 million people
TV took 13 years
The Internet took only four, from 1997 when it first entered ppoular consciousness
to 2001 when 9 million people alone “tuned in” to a webcast of a Madonna concert
9

A Brief History of Broadcasting
On The Internet
• 1995 – first streaming audio (RealAudio)
• 1995 – AudioNet (later Broadcast.com)
• 1997 – first streaming video (RealVideo)
• 1998 – iFilm
• 1998 – Google
• 2005 – YouTube
• 2006 – Google purchases YouTube for
$1.65 billion
-text and pictures, no a/v
-Leapfrogging technology in terms of content and form.
-Google has huge impact but Google Video doesn’t (8%)
-Can’t “beat ‘em, “buy ‘em”, Google (8%) buys YouTube (30%) = nearly half of
online video serving
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On the Internet,
Space and Time
Disappear
-As we learned in class, each previous communications medium had time or space
bias.
-My contention is that the Internet eliminates both for the first time in history.
-Think of Live 8 example
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Time No Longer Matters
-Videos from your childhood – whether that was the 50’s or the 80’s - are popping
up on YouTube
-Videos from any time – long ago or last night (last week’s Grey’s Anatomy is a
couple clicks away)
-Changing viewing habits – Tivo and “don’t ruin it” rather than “did you see that?”
12

Space No Longer Matters
-TV streams from around the world are available
-Amateur “reality” clips of everything and everywhere as well
-Impossible 10 years ago
13

Today
-Time of flux – what is the relationship between TV and the Net?
-TV & Net cross-pollintate – Lonely Planet group find following online, are recruited
to TV institution SNL, have one of their digital shorts become viral on the Net
14

Resurrection
-Other aspects of move to Net - resurrection
-“Nobody’s Watching” show produced but not picked up by WB Network
-leaked to YouTube
-300 000 viewers there gains negotiations with much larger NBC network
15

Do It Yourself
- besides commercially backed work, today, amateurs are producing sitcoms and
other programming that rivals mainstream fare for creativity and content
16

Audience Size –
“One-Time”
-online audiences are beginning to rival TV audiences
-1.5 million viewers when broadcast traditionally for “The View” talk show v. 1
million online viewers for viral clips like this one
-Barring takedown, Net clips will always be there unlike TV clips/shows (unless
repeated via syndication or DVD which is rare)
-“hidden” to protect full length (ie. PeekVid)
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Audience Size – Cumulative
-Surprising (?) (and significant) that the most viewed YouTube clip = non
commercial
-This number of total views is higher than the 21 million who watch TV’s current
highest rated show Desperate Housewives on a weekly basis
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Issues
Obviously, just as there are a number of advantages to online broadcasting, there
are also a number of issues.
19

Clearance
-Clearance for ~20 music clips behind this performance probably need royalty
payment to be legal
-(nature of “public” performance – is this clip public? Private viewing? Fair
dealing?)
20

Copyright
-how do traditional media companies deal with copyright laws which are being
outpaced by technological developments?
-Left hand of a company will disagree with the right (legal right to content v.
marketing buzz)
-Sony and other companies like it makes content but also players – which wins?
(DRM isn’t cross-platform and is another huge issue)
-Comedy Central took all their shows down then made a deal with YouTube and put
them back up
CBS recently became the first major television network to partner with YouTube and
they are very happy with the results.
“The network announced that in the first month of having its own CBS Brand
Channel on YouTube.com, the more than 300 clips it posted were viewed 29.2
million times. That's an average of 857,000 views daily since the Oct. 18 launch,
which is well and good, but the correlation the network claims to see is what's really
interesting: It believes the YouTube exposure has helped bring more viewers to
CBS shows, particularly in late night. The Late Show with David Letterman saw a
5% bump and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson saw a 7% bump in the
ratings.”
21

English-Speaking Bias
- 75% of web pages are English but only 5% of people worldwide speak English as
their first language
22

Google Dominance
-traditional media is dominated by 5 conglomerates (Time Warner, Disney, Viacom,
News Corp and Bertelsmann)
-Shaping up to be worse online – 3 companies (Google, Yahoo, MSN) control most
popular sites/traffic and Google is heading for a singular monopoly in many ways.
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The Future
-So what will the future bring? Media and content companies are actively exploring
online options.
-Join Youtube via licensing agreements? Put up their own proprietary content?
Digital rights management issues or let the content be free? Can users download or
just view? (Always workarounds – YouTube officially doesn’t allow downloads but
there are many plug-ins that allow this)
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TV’s Not Dead
-The first thing to remember is that TV’s not dead
-Just as TV didn’t kill off movies or radio when it came along in the 1940’s and 50’s,
the Net won’t kill off TV completely.
-We still need TV as a society for “water cooler moments” like sports, awards, news
and finales
-TV is a mass media. The net is a micro-medium.
25

Traditional Media Will
Come On Board …Slowly
Convergence, caution.
26

Many To Many
-biggest shift is 500 channels (but really 5 in terms of the conglomerates) to many
before
-now becomes many millions to many millions
-Individuals can reach vast audiences themselves cheaply and easily
-(This is the world’s oldest video blogger – he gained an audience of over two
million with his clips)
27

Citizen Journalism
-related to the last point, when everyone has cameras, we get our news clips of
major events – Katrina, 9/11, Tsunammi – from amateurs
28

“Broadcatching”
The Democracy player is a combination of Bit Torrent and RSS technology to allow
you to subscribe to specific “channels” that automatically download whenever new
content is added.
29

NewTube?
-YouTube could be done tomorrow. Ask Lycos, Excite and AltaVista, all leading
search engines before Google came along. There are dozens of competitors to
YouTube although they’re very small right now.
-Revver is paying for highly viewed content.
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Ubiquitous Media
-We’ve reached a point where digital cameras, cell phones, video survelliance and
other technologies have made video ubiquitious
-Some people don’t like the term but this is Web 3.0 aka people power. Think how
Wikipedia outguns Britannica in many ways simply by the volume of people working
on it.
-If everybody is carrying a camera, everything is getting recorded and things that
never would’ve been known ten years ago are now worldwide incidents that
everybody knows about.
-Can traditional media compete? CNN’s Exchange program asks viewers to submit
content (http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/07/29/cnn-news-
video_cx_lh_0731cnn.html)
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In Summary…
-I’m going to die for this but here’s a clip that illustrates everything I’ve been talking
about.
-It removes space, it removes time, it’s amateur, it’s many to many. If somebody
sees it who thinks it’s funny and passes it to two of their friends who pass it to two of
their friends (or it gets posted to a video clip aggregator site), it could go viral and
have thousands or even millions of views.
-And if my mother-in-law kills me for showing it (which she probably will), it will still
survive on YouTube, presumably forever.
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Omnipresent Media
The next step…omnipresent media both going forward and backwards. Every
episode of every show may be available online someday (it sometimes feels like
they already are.) Cameras everywhere all the time. Impossible to imagine
technologies we’ll have but here’s one example - wearable cameras that take
advantage of their small size and advances in storage options to record every
moment of your day (with automatic wireless backups sent to your computer or an
online host). Good, bad? I’m out of both time and space to discuss so let’s see
what these people have to say…
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