hyperpeople :: the world is my hard drive :: the doors of reception

When I arrived in Australia in October 2003,  I brought a gigantic suitcase stuffed with clothing and computers.  Everything else I owned - my books, furniture, kitchenware, geek gear, everything that I’d collected in twenty years of adult life - I distributed among family members or locked away into long-term storage.  Moving halfway around the world meant I’d have to start the game of material acquisition all over again.  Some friends in Sydney took pity on me, loaning me a beaten-up couch and dented coffee table, so at least I’d have somewhere to sit, and somewhere to support my iBook.  I took care of the priorities first: a bed, some basic kitchenware, a high-speed Internet connection.  This last was more necessary than might first appear; that Internet connection became my lifeline to the country I’d left behind.  I could email my friends and family and complain about my homesickness, or extol the virtues of Sydney’s Summer weather, or just gossip.  I could maintain my connection to my community of origin.  That’s a common element in the experience of every immigrant, to every land.

With the basics sorted, it came time to look toward another, less essential, but still important possession: a TV set.  To fully participate in a modern nation’s life - particularly when you’re teaching at a school which trains television producers - you need to invest yourself in its electronic culture, and broadcast television is both the most visible and most influential of these cultural elements.  Intellectuals often treat television as beneath contempt, a device which only hypnotizes the mass mind into a somnambulistic simulacrum of life.  I’ve never shared these feelings, perhaps because I grew up in a “golden age” of television, when such archetypal programs as “The Brady Bunch,” “All in the Family” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” all graced America’s television screens.  Television, like any other art form, is a matter of taste.  You needn’t like all of  it, but it is important to know what you like.  Everyone has their guilty pleasures, the sinful indulgences of “Jerry Springer” or “Doctor Phil,” and there are near-universal favorites, shows like “The Simpsons”.  There are also those few, rare programs which so transform the television experience that they lead you to redefine your expectations.  For me, one of those programs is the HBO series “Six Feet Under.”  Although “Six Feet Under” is shown on a subscription cable channel in the United States, in Australia it airs on Nine Network, a commercial television station.  I needed a television to watch “Six Feet Under,” and that alone was reason enough to purchase a set.

Across the world, television broadcasters are entering the digital era; they’re moving from the transmission of low-resolution analog signals to high-resolution Digital Television (DTV) broadcasting.  DTV comes in two flavors: standard-definition broadcasting (SDTV), which gives you DVD-quality picture and sound; and high-definition broadcasting (HDTV), which provides an image which is very nearly the same resolution as a film shown in a theatre, with the same Dolby surround sound.  The difference between an analog television broadcast and an HDTV broadcast is remarkable; the eye wanders, mesmerized, absorbing the detail revealed in the image, trying to drink it all in.  HDTV is the future of television broadcasting, and (so my internal logic ran) I needed to have an HDTV set, so I could be a competent teacher.  One problem presented itself: HDTV sets are still very expensive.  Because they present images in great detail, the HDTV screen is a very high-technology item, hard to manufacture, and produced in relatively low volumes.  A large-screen HDTV set costs at least $4000 in Australia - far more than I could hope to afford.  What to do?

As I researched my options, I discovered that I could, for just $300, purchase a peripheral for my PC which would turn my PC into an HDTV receiver.  This DTV tuner card is similar in nature to the analog TV tuner cards which have been going into PCs for the last five years; this one had the electronics necessary to receive digital broadcasts, and would use the PC’s microprocessor to convert the digital signal into an image that could be displayed on my computer’s screen.  It wouldn’t be the full 42-inch glory of a $4000 HDTV set, but it would be more than adequate - and I could afford it!  I ordered the device, popped it into my computer, and installed the accompanying software.  That software gave me the capability to tune into any of Australia’s five digital television broadcasters, several digital radio stations, and a number of “datacasting” channels, which provide still images of the weather, or stock market information, or news reports from the Australian parliament.  As is the case with analog TV tuner peripherals, I could record broadcasts to the hard drive of my computer.  The SDTV signal, which is the standard for most Australian broadcasts (only a minority of programs are broadcast in HDTV, either in Australia or America), is almost exactly the same as the MPEG-2 format used to store films on DVDs.  In other words, I could record an SDTV broadcast off the air, and immediately burn it to a DVD.  I’d have a perfect copy of the broadcast, bit for bit.  That recording would be indistinguishable from a commercial DVD copy of the same TV program - the bits would be exactly the same.  I recorded programs for my Sydney friends - programs they’d missed when they went to broadcast - and gave them DVDs they could play in their living rooms.  I started recording so many programs that I had to buy another hard drive for my computer.  It quickly filled up, so I took those recordings and burned them to DVDs.  My drive filled up again.  I became a television collector, something I’d never been when I owned a VCR.  It was so easy to record a program and burn it to a DVD that anything which caught my fancy - a drama, documentary or news program - went onto my hard disk, and later onto a DVD.

My PC is attached to the Internet, as are all the computers in my home.  I have a fairly broad selection of software on that computer, although I rarely use any of it, because that PC is doing full-time duty as my television set.  But one particular piece of software, known as Apache,  is always running on that computer - indeed, Apache is  always running on all of my computers.  Apache, like LINUX, is an “open source” software program, created by the collective efforts of thousands of engineers working around the world.  Apache also happens to be the software which runs most of the web servers on the Internet - nearly 70% of them, as of this writing.   Apache transforms nearly any computer into a web server.  A fairly sophisticated piece of software, Apache is not terrifically easy to set up, but I’ve been using versions of it since it was first released, back in 1995, so I’m quite familiar with how to make it do my bidding.  After I installed the DTV tuner on my PC, I configured Apache to make the new disk drive, where I stored all of my TV recordings, visible on the Internet.  Anyone, anywhere on the Internet, could now type in a URL and have access to the TV recordings I’d made.  I did this just so I could get to my TV programs, but the full implications of what I’d done struck me a few days later: I’d become a digital television broadcaster.

If bits are bits, it matters not at all whether those bits come through the airwaves - as in the case with DTV broadcasting - or from my hard drive, through my web server.  They’re the same bits.  And while I can’t reach an audience of millions with my PC - it would overload my Internet connection - I can provide television programming for a few.  This is hobbyist DTV, television broadcasting for the masses, because it’s broadcasting by the masses.  Although I had to jump through a few technical hoops to get it all working perfectly, that isn’t really necessary.  There are a number of commercial software packages which do everything that I had to do by hand, but do it automatically.  Anyone with an Internet connection can become a DTV broadcaster.  You don’t even need a TV tuner card, if you have another source for your recorded TV programs - a source such as BitTorrent.

Although Nine Network in Australia airs “Six Feet Under,” there’s a delay of several weeks between the premiere of an episode on HBO in the United States and the premiere of the same episode in Australia.  When the fourth season of “Six Feet Under” began to air in the US, I got email from my friends in America - fans of the series - asking, “Did you see last night’s episode?  Wasn’t it amazing?”  I could only reply that I was at the whim of Australia’s television programmers, and I had to wait until they saw fit to begin airing the series.  A few weeks later, I got a terse email from a close friend which said simply, “Tonight’s episode of SFU was the best thing I’ve ever seen on television.  Find it.  Watch it.  Now.”  The search for that episode - the fifth of the fourth season - led me to my discovery of BitTorrent.  Within a few days I had learned that nearly every TV program, aired anywhere in the world, was available on BitTorrent.  I quickly downloaded the first five episodes of “Six Feet Under” (my friend was right, that episode was incredibly compelling viewing), and, as new episodes premiered on HBO, I picked them up off BitTorrent.  I was keeping up with my friends in America, able to email them about the best dialogue in each episode, commenting on character arcs and story twists, just as if I’d been watching beside them on the sofa.  By the time the series premiered in Australia, I’d already seen the first eight episodes of the season, and didn’t bother to tune in.  After all, I already had those episodes on my hard drive; I could watch them any time I wanted to.  What’s more, these episodes were available through my web site, so if any of my Australian friends missed an episode, I could sit them in front of a computer, click a few times with the mouse, and invite them to sit back and enjoy the show.

Although Nine Network wouldn’t have seen a perceptible drop in their TV ratings, they’d lost at least one viewer - myself - because of BitTorrent.  I used BitTorrent to free myself from the tyranny of the broadcaster, who buys the programs, sets the schedule, and earns money from the advertising sold into the program.  This power relationship which the broadcaster holds over the TV audience is particularly noticeable in Australia, because, for reasons that no one has ever adequately explained, television schedules here are, at best, rough approximations of reality.  Programs advertised to start at 9:30 might start twenty or thirty minutes later.  That fact makes it nearly impossible to record a program to a VCR - or a computer equipped with a TV tuner - because you never know when to start recording, or when to stop.  Australians frequently complain about how a recording managed to miss the last, pivotal minutes of a television program, because of this scheduling anarchy.  If you’re not there, glued to the TV set, waiting for a program to air, you’re out of luck.  And, because television broadcasters have been the gatekeepers of television programming, they held all the cards.  Until now.

Just as file-sharing is hollowing out the recording industry, BitTorrent is having the same effect on the broadcast television industry.  That effect is barely noticeable today - with the exception of certain notable examples such as Battlestar Galactica - but, as BitTorrent becomes more ubiquitous, and ever easier to use, more and more TV viewers will turn to BitTorrent, because it offers them a freedom and flexibility they can’t hope to receive from a broadcaster.  The broadcaster must satisfy the desires of millions of viewers, while BitTorrent is tailored to satisfy the desires of a single one.  There’s no way that any broadcaster can compete with that.  This trend, toward on-demand viewing, is going to have a very specific effect on television broadcasting over the next few years: the broadcasters will move away from pre-produced programming, focusing instead on live broadcasts.   Sports, news and “event” programming (which includes such things as awards shows and “reality TV”) will become the mainstay of the broadcaster’s schedule, because these sorts of programs don’t translate well into the find-what-you-want-when-you-want-it model of global digital superdistribution of television programs. 

This transformation is already well underway.  If you look at the most popular programs in America or Australia, you’ll find that sports broadcasts (the Superbowl in the US, the AFL final in Australia) top the list.  After that you’ll see the finals of such shows as “American Idol” and “Australian Idol,” live broadcasts that must be experienced as they happen.  Because of the transition to digital broadcasting, broadcast television is being forced to return to its beginnings as a live medium.  A live broadcast provides an experience you can’t get anywhere else.  It’s the only way that broadcasters can hope to compete for your attention with ever-more-desirable media experiences - video games, DVDs, the Internet, and, now, BitTorrent TV.

All of this means that the producers of television series are facing exactly the same pressures as those experienced by the recording industry.  The more popular their productions prove to be, the more widely they’ll be shared.  This is already obviously true, because shows like “CSI” and “The Sopranos”, among the most popular shows on television, are also among the most widely shared.  These production companies will have to develop new economic models to pay for their programming, because the television broadcasters will not be interested in allocating valuable airwaves to programs which a large portion of their audience has already seen.  But, although this seems like a formidable economic obstacle to the future of television program production, it’s actually the least of the industry’s worries.   File-sharing creates a far greater threat, one which the industry can in no way overcome - it creates a level playing field for the distribution of every television program, created by anyone, anywhere in the world.

Television broadcasters, in their role as the gatekeepers of the broadcast airwaves, have, through their programming decisions, defined our expectations for a television program.  “Professional” television programs have high production values; they look and sound well-made.  “Amateur” television programs - such as those which can be found on community-access cable channels throughout both the United States and Australia - have an “amateur” look precisely because they don’t reflect “professional” practices in cinematography, editing, and sound recording.   (A side note: as a teacher at a film school, I have become acutely conscious that the low quality of “amateur” TV productions could be raised to a quality nearly indistinguishable from a “professional” production with only a few hours of training on lighting, cameras, and location sound recording.  It isn’t rocket science - though it certainly requires training, practice and an aesthetic sensibility.)  However, just because a television program is professionally produced, that doesn’t mean a television broadcaster or cable network will purchase the program.  Many more TV programs are produced, every day, than ever find their way onto the airwaves.  The airwaves are a limited resource, and the broadcasters act as the filter, using their own formulas to determine which programs they’ll air.  Broadcast television is a mass medium, and this means that programs must appeal to the greatest number of people - a program which is well-tailored for a small audience will never find a broadcast outlet.  Thus, as is the case with the recording industry, television broadcasters focus on hits, driven by the economic logic of advertising to consider ratings as the ultimate arbiter of worthiness for the airwaves.  Sometimes ratings and quality meet happily in a television program - “The Simpsons” is a good example - but, more often than not, popularity simply means pandering to the mass taste.  Hardly anyone is thoroughly satisfied, but no one is dissatisfied enough to change the channel.  That’s the logic of scarcity: this program may be a stinker, but it might be the best thing on TV.

The days of scarcity are over.  Suddenly the television productions of the entire planet have become available over the Internet.  The doors to the world of television content have been thrust wide open, and, more often than not, an individual will find something far more desirable online than can be found on broadcast television.  Even more significant than this, the gatekeeper function of the broadcasters has been obsolesced; now it is not up to the broadcaster what a viewer sees on the TV.  That power has come to rest with the viewer.  Productions which might be termed “amateur,” but which still relate a compelling story - to someone, somewhere - will compete, on equal footing, with productions that cost millions of dollars an episode to make.  People will put up with low production values if they feel a story is speaking to them; faithfulness covers a multitude of sins.  And, as television becomes a global, universally accessible resource, the “professional” producers of television will have to compete with a planet of “amateur” television producers, each intent on telling their own stories.  Each one of these “amateur” productions will be compelling to a small audience of viewers.  But there will be so many of these productions - indeed, there already are - that a viewer forced to decide between a meaningful “amateur” production and a less meaningful “professional” production will nearly always opt for the “amateur” program.  That’s where the viewer’s heart will lead him.  When the tens of thousands of “amateur” productions do battle, on the level playing field of global digital superdistribution, with the few “professional” productions, the “amateurs” will win.  Every time.

All of this means that, in this new era of television, the distinction between “amateur” and “professional” is a false one.  (That’s why I’ve been using scare quotes to distinguish these terms.)  A professional gets paid for his work; an amateur works for the love of his art.  All things being equal, which of these two is more likely to produce something you find compelling?  You might want to watch an episode of “CSI,” but you’ll have to decide between that and a thousand programs, from all around the world, which speak directly to you.  Which will be more desirable?

There is no way around this explosion (or, perhaps, implosion) into a world of globally accessible television programming.  We won’t turn the Internet off, and people won’t stop using file-sharing to distribute the television programs which have delighted them.  Instead, the commercial organizations which have benefited from the age of mass media will be forced to adapt to the new reality of global superdistribution.  And here, as with the recording industry, there are no easy answers.  Some producers will opt for advertiser-sponsored programming (as FOX does with “24,” sponsored by Ford), but they’ll still find themselves competing against an ever-filling reservoir of television productions, all of them just as available, and all as desirable, as any episode they might produce.  It is not clear to me how a television series producer will be able to find an audience when the entire world is competing against him for your attention.

We shouldn’t dwell on the fate of commercial television; it had its heyday, and perhaps that day has passed.  It makes more sense to focus on the opportunities being presented to the rest of us.  Suddenly, each of us has the power to become a television broadcaster, and a television producer.  I would be very surprised if this didn’t lead directly to a renaissance of television, an explosion of offerings that will completely transform our expectations of the medium.  Individuals, working with nothing but love and time, will make their own TV series, and share them with the world.  In fact, this is already happening.

In March 2003, a couple of college students at the University of Texas dreamed up an idea to create an computer-animated comedy series.  As none of them had a background in computer animation, they hijacked the popular videogame Halo to create the computer graphics, recorded these to digital video tape, edited it on a computer, recorded voices and a soundtrack, mixed it all together, and published their show on the Internet.  “Red vs. Blue” was an instant smash hit on college campuses across the United States.  The series features two groups of soldiers (one red, one blue, the colors given opposing teams in Halo), and their ridiculously existential exploits as they mostly fail to fight one another.  Although the computer graphics are crude to an eye educated by Pixar and Dreamworks, they’re more than sufficient to convey the story.  And, in any event, “Red vs. Blue” isn’t about digital eye candy, but comic timing.  The comic sensibilities of the creators of “Red vs. Blue” -  Burnie Burns, Matt Hullum and Joel Heyman - are as finely tuned as Larry Gelbart, who gave America “M*A*S*H” back in the early 1970s.  “Red vs. Blue” explores the same issues of futility, authority and SNAFUs in the chain of command which made “M*A*S*H” such a success, and does it with the same comic sensibility.  Although amateurs, the creators of “Red vs. Blue” create better comedy than most writers working in Hollywood.

Because the creators of “Red vs. Blue” had limited Internet connectivity - their web site couldn’t handle the millions of download requests for each episode as they were released on the Internet - they were early adopters of BitTorrent.  (I saw links to the “Red vs. Blue” torrent tracker on their website many months before I knew what BitTorrent was.)  This meant that millions of copies of each episode could be distributed to computers around the world, without using very much bandwidth.  And that meant “Red vs. Blue” got a big audience, globally, almost from the very beginning.  Although the episodes are only a few minutes in length, the crew at Rooster Teeth (the name of their production company) have already produced 38 of them (two seasons of 19 episodes), and offer them for sale on DVD, if you want a higher-quality viewing experience than what you’ll get over the Internet.

In “Red vs. Blue” we can see every force of the new digital world described in these last fifty pages put into play: global superdistribution of digital media, embracing piracy, and the rise of the amateur over the professional.  It’s all here, and it’s all working, because the creators of “Red vs. Blue” chose to play into the current, getting a speed boost from it, rather than trying, futilely, to paddle against it.  Already, Rooster Teeth has announced a second series, “The Strangerhood,” which looks like a crudely animated version of “Friends”.  These amateurs are giving the professionals a run for their money.

Everyone is a broadcaster, at least potentially.  And everyone, if they have the time and dedication, can be a television producer with access to a global market.  All this means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can roll their own television network.  A broadcast network is really a collection of programs, together with a scheduled airing order for these programs.   (In that, it’s a lot like a song playlist you might create in iTunes.)  And, although a network isn’t strictly necessary in the age of global superdistribution, it might not be a bad thing.  Networks serve as filters, editing down the wealth of content into an easily digestible stream.  As more and more television programming becomes available online, it will get harder and harder to find what you’re looking for - because there’ll be so much more to sift through.  That’s where network programmers have a role to play: they can tailor their program selection to cater to a specific audience, with specific needs.  But, in this new world of superdistribution, there won’t be six networks, or a hundred, or a thousand.  There will be millions upon millions.

One example of these networks of the future launched in Los Angeles on the 25^th of September 2004.  The brainchild of artist Jeff Cain and technologist Doug Goodwin, RHZ Radio uses a combination of AM broadcasting technologies and Internet-based superdistribution to create a roll-your-own radio network.  There are two parts to the equation: in LA’s Chinatown district, a “micropower” radio transmitter sends a low-power radio signal throughout the neighborhood.  Anyone is free to receive the signal, and listeners are encouraged to rebroadcast it. (The RHZ Radio web site provides instructions how to retransmit the RHZ broadcast, using a $25 AM transmitter kit.)  Cain and Goodwin specifically claim no copyrights over the content of the RHZ broadcast, and all of RHZ programming has been freely donated by individuals who want to share their own audio productions with the world.  Listeners in other corners of the world (such as Australia) can receive the RHZ broadcast over the Internet at rhzradio.net.  That signal can then be piped from the receiving computer and pumped into another low-power radio transmitter, and - presto! - you’ve got a radio network with global reach, all for just a few dollars.  The simplicity of RHZ radio demonstrates just how easy it is for any individual to create their own global media network. 

RHZ has a potential reach of billions of listeners - but, of course, as others copy the RHZ model (something Cain and Goodwin encourage), there’ll be a lot of competition for listener’s ears.  RHZ Radio is the shape of the future, but it’s already here.  And so, the giant radio networks - firms like Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting - now find themselves threatened by the same trends which are remaking television.  The trend toward global superdistribution of “amateur” productions is universal across all mass media, and transforming the media landscape irrevocably.

 

© Copyright 2005, Mark D. Pesce
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