Felix Stalder on Sat, 14 Sep 2002 14:58:09 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> TV under the GPL |
This seems like an interesting experiment in terms of what constitutes value outside of copyright. OK, it's PBS, so it might be a bit different, but what Cringely offers as unique value is a) timeliness (he's the first to broadcast) and editorial authority (his way of editing the material is the best). This reminds me of J.P. Barlow, who once said that the closer you get to the source, the more expensive information becomes and as you move further downstream it becomes free. It seems like a good time to remind oneself that there used to be more optimistic scenarios for the Net and that not all of them were necessarily pure evil hype. Felix http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020912.html [...] We've been busy all this time -- John Gau and I -- doing anything for the show we could that didn't cost money. We chose a title -- "NerdTV" -- and figured out how to make a show remarkably like the one I described so blithely months ago. "NerdTV" will still be downloaded, not streamed, and a single technical standard will be used for all viewers no matter what kind of Internet connection they have or what operating system they are running. The show will appear each week in a dizzying total of five versions. Of the three video versions, one will be for nerds, one for suits, and the third version will be all the raw footage so you can edit your own version and make fun of me at parties. There will be two audio-only versions -- one MP3 and one Ogg Vorbis. Viewers will be free to share and redistribute the shows under the General Public License, which is something no other TV network in the world is doing. So there! I will now go into obsessive detail about the technology behind "NerdTV." If this bores you, I'm sorry, but the fact is that what we are attempting to do is something that really hasn't been attempted before at this scale. This is very difficult to do well and we are proud of what we've already accomplished. To make the video editable, it will be distributed as an MPEG-4 datastream. Right at this moment, an encoder shoot-out is taking place to determine what software we'll use. So far, Envivio appears to be winning the encoder battle, and NewTek's Video Toaster 2 looks to be the editing system of choice, but that could still change since new products and versions seem to be appearing daily. The "NerdTV" video player isn't a player at all, but an applet that is being supplied by the very nice people from IBM Research. This is not any shipping IBM product, but rather a custom applet IBM's Michelle Kim and her crew are whipping-up just for "NerdTV." Going with an applet means there is no player application to download and install. We don't have to make a choice between Windows Media, RealPlayer, or QuickTime (actually, I suppose what we've done is reject all three). And we'll run just the same under Windows, MacOS, Linux, Solaris, even on the odd IBM mainframe. No advantage is lost by going with this applet, which has surprisingly good performance and will run on even the grottiest old PC. You'll be impressed. In order to get the most out of our 120 kilobits-per-second -- a speed we chose because it would allow modem users to download a half hour show in approximately one hour -- some production habits have to change. Rather than using one very expensive camera, we're using five fairly cheap ones -- JVC miniDV camcorders. JVC is the only brand that offers true progressive scanned CCDs on its low end models. By going to progressive scanning, we save some bandwidth and avoid having to go through a de-interlacing process before encoding. By shooting in PAL, we save about 15 percent in overhead by displaying 25 frames-per-second rather than 30. Many streamed videos will run as slow as five to 10 frames-per-second, but we just found this to be unacceptable. It is perhaps ironic that in order to present a less-than-broadcast-quality show, we have to start with better-than-broadcast-quality video. Our raw video will be progressive-scanned PAL with 576 lines of vertical resolution -- slightly better than the quality Steven Soderberg got in his recent bad movie, "Full Frontal," which was shot using a Canon Dvcam. If any networks outside the U.S. would like to run a broadcast quality version of "NerdTV," please get in touch with me because we could sure use the money. Same for corporate underwriters -- we need a couple of those -- though don't expect me to not insult you. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net