501derful.org
A post on NetSquared’s blog alerted me to an article titled "The Revolution will be Televised." It’s about a group of young idealists (is there any other kind?) who want to establish a non-proprietary, non-advertising-driven platform that enables people to distribute videos without getting involved in all the commercial rackets that are coming. They’re with the Participatory Culture Foundation. The key word here is "participatory." You and me, we participate in culture and media? What an idea!
First, blogging revolutionized print media. Now podcasting is reshaping
the way we listen online. In the near future, it’s a safe bet you’ll be
treating your computer more and more like a TV. Cheaper bandwidth, more
and more people with broadband connections, peer-to-peer technologies,
and proliferating tools for Internet video publishing mean there’s
already a lot of video content on the Web. Some bloggers are trading
their keyboards for video cameras, screening news clips and offering
snarky commentary in between, like ersatz Jon Stewarts. (The "vlogger"
is born.) And, with more and more companies racing to offer more
copyrighted works online — music videos, TV shows, even movies —
there’s much more to come.
I agree fully that in pretty short order the dominant mode of the internet will be audio and video. Low bandwidth text will recede into the background. If you want to communicate you’ll do it by video. But it’ll be fairly easy and cheap, unlike video production of the past.
So the people at PCF have gotten financial support from Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor to put together a system called DTV that won’t be owned by Microsoft, cable companies, RealNetworks, or Apple. Says Mitch:
"They really get the vision. DTV is this end-to-end system that makes
it easy to publish, and easy to consume and subscribe to videos. It’s
so much the right thing. And they’re doing it in an open-source,
nonprofit kind of way, which I think is the right way to do it."
