MEDIA MATTERS
New frontiers
SEVANTI NINAN
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The Internet provides a platform for personal publishing never dreamt of before.
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Photo: AP
Providing choice: YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, 29 (left), and Steven Chen, 27.
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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