My friend Steve O’Hear alerted me to a post on the Last100 blog (part of the excellent Read/Write Web network) written by Guinevere Orvis, an interactive producer with the CBC — that’s Canada’s national broadcaster, for any of my non-Canadian readers — about how the network came to distribute one of its shows using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Guinevere says that the idea started with a post on BoingBoing about Norway’s state broadcaster doing the same thing with a show.
While it might have been nice to hear that the CBC got the idea from reading about it on my Globe blog (sorry, I couldn’t resist), it’s still nice to know that our national broadcaster is open to new ideas. And from the sounds of Norway’s experience, it should be one that they consider repeating. According to Eirik Solheim, who works for the Norwegian broadcaster, the show has been downloaded more than 90,000 times and the network has been “saving huge on bandwidth cost.”
That last part is important to note: BitTorrent may be known for piracy, but it is fundamentally a distribution method, plain and simple (ISPs argue that it is cheap because it piggybacks on their networks and sticks them with the bill, but that’s a topic for another day). Here’s hoping that the CBC decides to continue this experiment, and congratulations to Guinevere for helping them come to grips with the issues involved and spurring them on. Her full post on all the details is well worth a read.
It may not have achieved the 17.8 million views that Chris Crocker’s classic “Leave Britney Alone” video has — or even the 7 million views that the startled prairie dog known as “Dramatic Chipmunk” has gotten — but then, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech on racism has only been up on YouTube for less than 24 hours (as of mid-day Wednesday), and it already has over 1.2 million views.
That’s not bad. Another month or so and maybe it could get into the same territory as “The Evolution of Dance,” which has a mind-boggling 78 million views. Of course, Obama’s speech has an actual message that is somewhat deeper than the average YouTube video — hard to tell whether that will help or hinder its advance up the charts.
I was talking with a colleague recently about the Barack Obama tribute video made by Will.i.am from the Black-Eyed Peas and Bob Dylan’s son Jesse, and how fascinating it was to watch as it made its way through various media last week, from emails and Twitter feeds to blog posts and then into newspapers and media websites.
When I first came across the video, known as the “Yes We Can” video, people were describing it as compelling and passionate — many seemed impressed by the fact that it wasn’t official, and that it had young men and women of all colours in it, symbolizing the breadth of Obama’s reach and how people connect with his message.
Over time, however, you could see the tide starting to turn. Some people started to talk about how slick it was — filled with celebrities and very commercial, in a music-video kind of way. Then people started musing about how that was part of the problem with Obama’s campaign to begin with: style over substance, etc. The blog NewTeeVee called it an “appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation.”
Within a day or two, the video was being used as an example of how “user-generated” media isn’t always such a great thing for a campaign. The political site Hot Air called it “disturbingly cool,” while a blogger at The New Republic wondered whether it might not hurt Obama more than help him. One commenter on Twitter wondered when Obama campaign had started having his videos done by The Gap.
So the Obama video went from blockbuster media event and unadulterated success story to backlash in about 48 hours — less time than it would have taken for a typical campaign video to even be distributed to TV networks a few years ago, let alone watched by almost two million people, posted to blogs, commented on and analyzed. Fascinating.
Since its public launch a couple of weeks ago, a new video-oriented website and community called BigThink has been called snobbish and “a YouTube for smarty-pants.” But Montreal-born Victoria Brown, who co-founded the site with her partner Peter Hopkins, told me in a recent interview that the site isn’t intended to be elitist or preachy, and stressed that anyone is free to contribute their thoughts on just about any topic, including Britney Spears.
That said, however, it’s clear that BigThink is trying to take the high road when it comes to content. Anyone who has grown even a little weary of the funny cat videos on YouTube or the coked-out Amy Winehouse videos on gossip sites such as PerezHilton may find it a refreshing change. Brown and Hopkins have seeded the site with video interviews featuring people like such as Moby, psychologist Steven Pinker, activist Aayan Hirsi Ali and Buddhist scholar (and Uma’s dad) Robert Thurman.
The BigThink site is divided into two large content groups: Meta and Physical. The videos — of which the site has more than 180 now — are done in the style popularized by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, with the subject looking straight at the camera, as though talking to the viewer. Most of the interviews are an hour long (although Ms. Brown says the site will be doing shorter, more news-focused interviews as well), but they are segmented by question and by topic, to make it easy for viewers browsing BigThink to find videos they might want to watch.
Harry Shearer isn’t just a comedic actor — having appeared in many of Christopher Guest’s movies, as well as playing bassist Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap — but is also a blogger at The Huffington Post, and appears on other sites as well. One of the places he posts things is on My Damn Channel, a video site similar in many ways to Will Farrell’s FunnyorDie.com, and one of his recent “found items” was a video clip of ABC News anchor Katie Couric during her off-air moments at the primaries in New Hampshire.
There’s not much in the clip really, apart from Couric fiddling with her mike, making fun of herself for getting nervous — “I say oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” she laughs — and talking about how bad she looks on one of the monitors. She talks about how John McCain’s wife has eyes that are a piercing light blue colour, and jokes that she probably thought Couric was weird. She makes fun of her husky voice, and complains about the quality of the mikes, and some other miscellaneous banter.
The thing I find really interesting is the comments that the video clip has gotten, not just on My Damn Channel’s site, but on other sites as well. There have to be close to 300 comments on the My Damn Channel site alone, and they are a fascinating mix. On one end of the spectrum, there are lots of “Boy, is she dumb for not knowing more about the candidates — look what idiots the media are” remarks, but at the other end there are lots of comments about how the outtakes actually make her seem a lot more warm and human than many people seemed to think she was.
Plenty of people seem to feel that the video clip could hurt Couric, who is fighting low ratings for her news show, because it makes her look ditzy or uninformed. But just as many or more say they may actually watch her now because she seems a lot more human. Fascinating.
I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about the collision between media and the Web. I also have a Globe blog, which is here. Send me email at mathew (at) mathewingram.com, or for more info, click the picture.
