New frontiers

http://www.hindu.com/mag/2006/12/24/stories/2006122400040300.htm


MEDIA MATTERS

New frontiers

SEVANTI NINAN

The Internet provides a platform for personal publishing never dreamt
of before.

THE mediator is disappearing from media, and pretty soon we will have
to be grateful if anybody at all watches our channels or reads what we
write. Thanks to handycams and broadband, the audience has begun to
walk off and do its own thing. Call it voyeurism, or citizen
journalism, or self-broadcasting, it seems to be more fun than
consuming what mainstream media dishes out. If you need a platform to
air you creations, the Internet provides it.

2006 was the year when all of this matured. Time magazine has just
named Youtube.com, the online video hosting site, as the invention of
the year, and closer home, CNN-IBN instituted a citizen journalism
award. Even war reporting diminishes in importance when people want to
watch unfiltered videos shot by soldiers or bystanders with handycams,
because of their raw power. Between blogs and home videos, the media
consumer has now discovered that he has a choice.

Choice, nevertheless


Which isn't to say that there is great stuff out there. One tirelessly
self-promoting Indian blogger can't get either his spellings or facts
right. But who cares? He's got an opinion to air. It doesn't get that
much better when you move to the mother of all home-video airing
sites, YouTube, newly acquired by Google for a billion dollars plus.

The big draw on YouTube this week is Tony vs. Paul, with a million
plus views. Paul sends a note to Tony calling him a jerk. This is done
in a staccato, animated style, because the clip has been shot, and
then animated. Tony bestirs himself, goes over to Paul and socks him
one. Then they both go out into the open and slug it out: rolling down
grassy slopes, one burying the other in sand, in and out of a swimming
pool, in and out of garbage cans, and so on, for a long five minutes,
till they decide to shake hands and be friends again.

A psychoanalyst is probably better equipped than me to say why this
cartoon-like video should be such a draw. According to the honours
listed below it, it is a top rated all time Arts and Animation video.
The gratified filmmaker tells visitors that the video took two months
to shoot and edit, "and I edited it in Final Cut Pro." Time offers its
own explanation why all of this is clicking. Slickness of presentation
has had its run, now viewers and surfers are rooting for authenticity.
And there is a need waiting to be served: "YouTube had tapped into
something that appears on no business plan: the lonely, pressurized,
pent-up video subconscious of America".

In good old India, the trend seems to be less about anything pent up
and more about the garrulous need to share one's movie craze. On
me-too Indian video sharing sites with names like MeraVideo, ApnaTube,
Infeedia , and AapkaVideo, you get people uploading their favourite
scenes from "Dhoom", or "hot numbers" culled from a variety of B-grade
movies. Others helpfully upload interviews given by Aishwarya Rai to
Oprah Winfrey or David Letterman.

Enabled by technology


It is technology which is offering both a release from commercial
media, as well as a selective use of it. Video-sharing sites have made
the process easy as pie: you can upload videos using an easy-to-use
interface, and share it by creating a link and emailing them to
others. The scale with which this has caught on is truly amazing.
YouTube has something like 70,000 new videos uploaded a day. And in
come copyright issues because the site is also distributing media
content owned by others.

Associated Press reported earlier this month that a Japanese
entertainment group has asked YouTube Inc. to implement a system to
prevent users from uploading videos that would infringe copyrights. In
November, says the report, YouTube deleted nearly 30,000 files after
the Japanese group complained of copyright infringement.

The user at home doesn't care. The new accessibility is fantastic. It
does not matter anymore what channels the cable or DTH provider
blocks, you can get it online. When Al Jazeera English made its debut
in November it was not on any India platform and still isn't, but you
could watch the clip of Tony Blair telling David Frost that Iraq was a
mistake, on YouTube.

It isn't a great viewing experience, watching pixelated images as
jerky intermittent downloads. But people seem to like what video
sharing has come to represent — thumbing a nose at both commercial
news and entertainment outlets, as well as commercial distributors of
media.


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