There is another avenue slowly opening up for progressive TV: internet TV, which is taking baby steps toward broad adoption. The past two years have seen an explosion in Internet TV technologies, from traditional-TV-on-your-PC Joost, to internet-video-made-easy Miro, to iTunes-to-TV solution AppleTV and video-on-demand-via-Tivo Amazon Unbox. Of these technologies, I think we should be most interested in those which bring video from the public internet onto the living room TV sets. This kind of technological innovation has the most potential to distribute progressive voices in a widespread way, since most people still like to watch video, especially video clips that are longer than 5-10 minutes, on their living room TV sets.
So it's exciting to see that AppleTV and Amazon Unbox (the latter of which garnered some well-deserved harsh criticism upon its initial launch in Sept. 2006) will soon be getting competition. Netflix will be offering its video download service via set-top boxes later this year. And StumbleUpon is latching onto the Wii to launch Stumble.TV for the Wii, which will give StumbleUpon users the chance to enjoy user-acclaimed video on their living room TVs.
At this point, the market for Internet television devices is still too cluttered with proprietary devices, awkward computer-to-TV interfaces, smarmy insider media deals, and similar cruft to make it ready for prime time. But it's clear that the day that Internet TV is a widespread phenomenon, and has the maturity to take on cable TV as a mechanism for distributing niche content, might not be far off. My belief is that widespread Internet TV will be a boon for the progressive movement, because it will enable us to more widely distribute our news and opinion, communicate with and grow our base, put an end to the ridiculous way politicians kow-tow to conservative print and TV news media, and more fairly compete with conservative news and opinion outlets. If I'm right, then accelerating the Internet TV industry, and preparing for the day when Internet TV is widespread, should be important priorities for the progressive movement. What can we do to meet those priorities?
The key to building a mature Internet television industry friendly to the progressive movement is an open, fast, cheap, and user-friendly pipe that goes directly from content producers to content consumers (and possibly in the reverse direction as well.) In particular, that means building (or latching on to) a cheap set-top box that attaches easily to a living room TV, and works with a reasonably easy-to-use remote control. It also means a set-top box that offers programming from an open network, and doesn't lock viewers into a closed network.
Perhaps the best model (and also, perhaps, a good partner) is Miro. Distributed by the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, Miro which embraces open technology and democratic content. (Indeed, it was formerly known as the Democracy Player.) The software is open source, the platform is open, and the interface is slick and relatively easy-to-use. The main trouble with the player is that it's limited to computer viewing. What we need is a solution that brings the open technology spirit and user-friendly interface of Miro into a TV set-top box. A good near-term solution would probably incorporate video game consoles, which are now complex enough to rival desktop computers for versatility, if not raw processing power. A port of Miro to the Wii, PlayStation, and Xbox would bring us a long way towards an open-access, user-friendly Internet TV experience. (I imagine that porting Miro's search interface, which assumes a keyboard, into the living room would be a fairly significant challenge. It would also be the crux of the problem of making Long Tail content available in the living room. But I'll leave that to the hardware entrepreneurs.)
Hardware is only half the problem, however. If Internet TV ever gains enough market penetration to rival cable TV, we will still need to work on offering attractive, compelling content, and properly distributing that content. There are some valiant efforts along those lines already, ranging from Democracy Now! to Free Speech TV, Link TV and The Real News. While I do think we can get a lot of mileage out of simply marketing this kind of existing progressive TV programming to a wider audience, I think we will also need to develop more - much, much more. After all, Internet TV is a Long Tail medium, and we will need a Long Tail of progressive content to match it. In other words, we'll need progressive TV that matches a very broad array of diverse interests. The progressive programming that's currently available is something akin to the limited content available at the dawn of the broadcast TV era - it's trying to be all things to all (progressive) people. At the same time that we try to expand access to Internet TV, we are going to need to boost the amount and diversity of progressive TV programming.
Of course, the progressive movement has succeeded emphatically, at making a very diverse range of content available through one medium - the blogosphere. The key to this success was the low barrier to entry in blogging, and the lack of daily updated progressive news and opinion in print media. Our challenge is to extend that success into the sphere of video content, and in particular, into the arena of regularly updated video channels, through podcasting, vlogging, or other means. There has been a bit of success along these lines, as evidenced by the mushrooming of green Internet TV, including Earth Focus (a production of Link TV), Green.TV, Tree Hugger TV, and others.
I'm hoping that barriers to progressive Internet TV will soon be lowered. The fact that Democratic candidates readily adopted YouTube as a mechanism for distributing their message means that there's now a solid chunk of Democratic campaign staffers with significant know-how and experience in working with online video. As the campaigns wind down over the next few months, some of these staffers will inevitable begin to look for work elsewhere. Just as the demise of Howard Dean's campaign, and the dispersing of his Internet team, led to the creation of progressive web development shops like Blue State Digital, I'm hoping that the end of most of the Democratic presidential campaigns over the next two months will lead to a boom in progressive Internet TV stations.
The final challenge in making Internet TV work for the progressive movement is organic adoption. We will have to ensure that once the hardware and content are readily available, consumers begin watching our content. There are a number of ways to drive this kind of adoption. First, by creating "progressive set-top boxes" which are pre-programmed with progressive TV channels. Second, by spurring netroots activists to digg, stumble, and otherwise socially recommend progressive video using the social bookmarking venues available. Third, by embedding progressive content within our blog posts.
Existing progressive Internet TV producers are already exploring these avenues for organic adoption. The Real News, for example, has a volunteer "blog squad" whose goal is to evangelize Real News programming on blogs and social networks. On the whole, unfortunately, I think we are not yet at the point where these efforts are very successful. Outside of the three left-leaning shows on cable - Countdown, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report - there are very few progressive video clips which regularly get embedded and virally spread online.
However, I believe that our present moment is a perfect opportunity for liberal entrepreneurs to create an Internet TV infrastructure for the progressive movement. On the consumer side, we have widespread demand for a la carte cable TV, and we will soon see deep dissatisfaction over the lack of original programming caused by the studios' greed in the writers strike. We also have incredibly expensive cable TV (PDF), and with Stumble.TV, we now have a model for leveraging existing hardware into set-top boxes for Internet TV. The technology for creating an easy-to-use, cheap set-top box for Internet TV, and the demand for it, are readily available; what we really need is an entrepreneur capable of packaging and marketing the technology properly, and doing so while under-pricing existing cable TV offers.
On the production side, we will soon be awash in progressive professionals exiting Democratic campaigns and capable of creating Internet TV channels, and their availability coincides with the writers' strike. (Indeed, some writers are already looking into the possibility of creating startups which will produce professional online video.) So there is a lot of loose talent available, and there's an opportunity to create compelling, progressive Internet TV that's free of corporate control.
I'm curious to see what will happen to Internet TV in 2008. My guess is that the industry will mature considerably in 2008. The only question is, how will the progressive movement use this potentially powerful tool to communicate its message?
Powered by ScribeFire.
Comments
It's true that one of the