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Future of Media Summit Blog
The Future of Live Television
While on stage at the Future of Media 2008 Summit, I did have a bit of a brainwave, the crashing together of all my recent research on self-organizing social systems and the last five years thinking about media.
I had a bit of a vision, and it looks like this. There's an event - in Australia, it's arguably a footy game - which has many thousands of people in the audience. Many of these people have high-end smart phones (Nokia N80/N95 or iPhone, etc.) which have good cameras and 3G/HSDPA radios. Add in a nice piece of software, such as Qik, and you immediately have turned every one of these folks into live broadcasters.
OK, that's nice, and it's reasonably revolutionary. But that's not where this ends. That's where this begins.
All of that massive live coverage is essentially uncoordinated, at least to begin with. But as soon as the capability exists to have this massive live coverage, tools will begin to be developed which can coordinate and crowdsource this coverage.
Consider: these mobiles all have AGPS receivers - they know where they are. They can all handle a large amount of IP traffic (both up and down). This means that it should be possible to create tools which allow the users (live broadcasters) themselves to optimize their coverage. So that everyone is getting a unique shot.
Plus, all of this will be fed into a master "console" - again, available to anyone - so that the streams can be chosen, mixed, and rebroadcast out to a broader web audience - all in real time.
This is where Qik is going. Perhaps not this year. But certainly next year. And I can see a huge market opportunity for these tools, for the audiences these tools will aggregate, and for the events thus covered.
That's just the beginning. I've just scratched the surface. But this will be huge.
Mark - great extension of so much of we can see happening now across so many dimensions (perhaps across all of Ross’ 7 Driving Forces Shaping Media).
I can see in the not too distant future a time when 3eep offers a service to the very interested grandma who can’t attend little Steve’s u13’s footy grandfinal, but she can view the game live from two or three of the mums/dads on the sidelines streamed directly into their TeamZone.
It’ll be interesting to see how ‘big sport’, ‘big advertiser’ and ‘big stadium’ handle this - we’ve already seen Bayern Munich sue YouTube for hosting vids of their goals within minutes of them being scored, and before the game has been completed or viewed via a very expensive traditional TV model.
Rob
I can see individuals gaining a reputation for ace moshpit shots, bass players focussing on their bass heroes… A hundred different flavours of “the” concert footage, each more relevant than a lowest common denominator master.
And, yes, a feed that focusses on the underclad teens in the crowd…
Will an elite class of masher-uppers emerge from this ubiquitous media sharing? If some expert Media Jockey were providing me with a high end/ artistic remix of all the best stuff, then I would probably tune in…
Add some in depth commentary and we back to where we began, except this time we have crowd sourced our camera operators, editors and commentators. But could a MySpace style megacorp still own it all?
This already Happens especially the rebroadcasting of live sporting events so every one can watch it worldwide without any restrictions and Pay per View events .
Check out http://www.myp2p.eu/ that has operated for the past 3 years and has one of the best organized live streaming communities on the web NewTeevee did a great report about them also .
http://newteevee.com/2007/04/02/myp2p-index-of-live-sports/
Mark’s Piracy is Good mentions sport as an example of how advertisers should use ADBugs for advertising its a shame that Sports Organizations and Broadcasters didn’t take Marks advice and allow global live streams of sport that are wrapped in advertising and try to close the market up when they are fighting a losing battle although some are opening up like the March Madness Basketball that is broadcast world wide on the Internet by CBS and was also broadcast as a test on Joost a streaming p2p platform that sells advertising around a broadcasters content .
Pesce’s Piracy is Good http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1720068211869162779
Mark its Time for Piracy is Good Redux …the Live Sports edition to be done
Mark Mogulus can already do the Qik Aggregation and create a channel from multiple Streams
http://www.mogulus.com/blog/?p=194
Indeed, this already did happen during the Future of TV session in Sydney.
Using webcams and mics built into our laptops, both Phil Morle of Pollenizer http://pollenizer.com/chaser and me at sent video uplinks to Ustream.tv. I had mysterious audio problems but a crisper camera angle, so Phil used Ustream’s “cohost” feature to insert my pictures into his feed. Some people stayed with my feed to chat, though, and sourced the audio from Phil themselves, because their friends were chatting on “my” text chat.
The combined audience was about 50. Hardly a ratings-winner, but it cost nothing to produce and brought the conference to Europe and Asia who’s have missed out otherwise.
All done spontaneously, no planning.
Bleeding edge today, perhaps, but it won’t be long before it’s just another button on the phone…