Media Disintermediation

I'm assuming that most people who read this site have at least once or twice visited YouTube. You probably went there to view some disgusting or amusing clip. If that's all you think of it as you are doing yourself and injustice and you are missing some interesting and very important trends in the media. YouTube and similar services, especially The Democracy Player/Project and Current TV are beginning to pry eyeballs away from the media conglomerates and to so-called user-generated (or amatuer) content. And a lot of that content is very, very good.

Channel Federator collects animatated shorts and classic cartoons in weekly episodes of a quality only seen in art house cinema.

New Hope Seattle is a Gospel Church in Seattle. Their vlog documents their work building up their community and their new church.

Make Magazine is the weekly vlog of Make Magazine, the hobbist's guide to... making stuff. Very cool.

Entertainment abounds. The Tiki Bar provides an ongoing storyline while teaching how to make a different exotic drink each episode. Siren is "an action/adventure seires in the tradition of the old movie serials. It is the story of a beautiful and mysterious industrial thief with a talent for marital arts and a taste for revenge." Think Alias meets Buster Keaton.

And of course there is lots of stuff on politics and current events from prog-fave Media Matters to Willie Nelson

So, based on all that there is some alarm in the DIY Video community about news that Current TV owner, Al Gore (Yes, that's, what he's been doing when he's not hectoring us about global warming.) has signed a deal with Rupert Murdoch to carry Current TV on BSkyB extending Current TV's viewership to 8M households in the U.K. and Ireleand.

The pair have now come together to promote user generated content in the UK and Ireland. Current TV’s agreement for the channel to be carried on BSkyB’s satellite platform is its first international move outside the US.

Mr Gore said that the channel was one of the few on the cable network to break even in the first year and was looking to make profits in the second year. He rejected suggestions that viewer created clips was about gaining cheap content.

The deal with BSkyB brings Current TV to some 8m households. In the US, it is available in nearly 30m homes through cable and satellite television. With Current TV, viewers and producers upload their clips on to the channel’s website, where content which gets the most votes is broadcast on its television channel.

Mr Gore compared Current TV to the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century, which led to enlightenment. He said: “The television medium for 50 years has had the depressing effect on the conversation of democracy by excluding individuals. But the new affordable digital tools of both cameras and digital video cameras and laptop editing systems now make it completely feasible for individuals with accessible training to participate in the conversation.”

Mr Murdoch said that Mr Gore’s channel TV was “an elegant way” to marry user-generated content on the web to the broadcast medium. He said: “Current TV is bringing the web’s sense of empowerment to television for the first time.”

Current TV is already broadcast on a number of cable systems. But that's not the point. Current TV or Democracy (which is where most of the content listed above is aggregated through), don't care whose network they ride to the end user. It isn't about the delivery mechanism, satellite, cable or internet. At the end of they day they are all the same. At least right now.

The important thing is that fresh, open and interesting content become more accessable; the most voices avialable to the most people. The end result is (hopefully) more local programming, a less mallebale mass media and (probably least "important" but most "interesting") better quality entertainment.