Entries from October 2006 ↓

This article will appear on the Channel4 Ideasfactory website later on in November.

In the wake of Google’s acquisition of web wunderkind YouTube, everyone’s looking for the next big Internet phenomenon to push things forward again. And once we have the technology to make it available to all, argues Antonio Gould, live webcasting could be a front-runner.

In a nutshell, webcasting is the process of sending audio and video live over the Internet. Key word: live. The difference between a webcast and a piece of archived video (on YouTube, for example) is similar to that between a live TV show and a recorded one broadcast a month later.

People watch as the content is produced – it’s linear broadcasting, online. But it can afford to cater to a far more niche audience than television can.

According to AOL, 2005’s Live8 concert was watched by 170,000 people over the web in addition to those who watched it on TV. But it’s not all about the big boys – the smaller scale projects are where things will get interesting.
So why watch a webcast? Surely it’s easier to wait till the recording of the show has been put online, so you can watch it whenever you want rather than sitting at your computer while it’s happening?

It’s all about interactivity. Viewers can effectively direct the content. Webcasts normally have a text-based chatroom attached, through which you can ask questions or make suggestions as the show unfolds. 

All the advantages of user generated media also apply to webcasting. Ideally, it can make live delivery of content possible for anyone. Until recently, the best way to do this with video was to get on to a cable or digital channel – which in this country is usually far too expensive for individuals to consider.

Webcasting means that content which is much more tailored to specific interests will start to be produced. If it’s much easier to do, then you need far fewer people watching to make it worthwhile.

C21Vox specialise in webcasting for the arts and education, and recently worked with the British Association of Youth Clubs to showcase a Europe-wide drama project. Many of the participants couldn’t make it to the UK, so the event was webcast live so that countries could see each other’s performances live. A chatroom was provided, and viewers pitched questions to be fielded by the audience at the event.

Videoconferencing was used to unite four of the participants from other countries on a big screen for a Q&A session. The event was a huge success, achieving a level of international communication that could never have been achieved without webcasting.

As you can imagine, the possibilities are huge – and as usual creatives can push the boundaries. Currently most webcasts are fairly straightforward, but we’re going to see a lot of interesting stuff happening over the next few years.

How do you go about doing it?

As things stand, unless you’re very technically minded with plenty of time and money, you‘ll need to hire in a company to do it – but it’s worth explaining a bit about how it works. There are a number of distinct parts to the setup. The first difficulty is generating the video and audio in the first place – this could be anything from one person sitting in front of a camera (like a simple video blog) to a full multi-camera and sound set up.

This requires video and audio mixers, monitoring and a number of people running the show all with the ability to communicate with each other. This is not easy or cheap at the moment – most of the kit designed for doing this is built for professional TV studios and as such costs a fortune. There is cheaper kit available, but you’ll need to know what you’re doing before you start buying anything.

Once you’re up and running, you need to put out that signal onto the web so people can watch it. You need an extremely high-powered internet connection (which as of writing is not available as standard in UK homes, although some providers should start offering it soon) and an account with a provider who can take your signal and ‘multicast’ it.

Multicasting effectively allows a large number of people to watch it at the same time. The more that are watching, the more you have to pay – and at the moment it’s not cheap. At the time of writing a one-hour show watched by five hundred users will cost you hundreds of pounds in bandwidth alone.

Audio webcasting is easier. You don’t need such a high-speed internet connection (good quality broadband will do) and obviously no cameras or video mixers. If you’re doing a music show, you just need some decks or CD players, a DJ mixer and a mic. But you’ll still have to stump up for the bandwidth.

The future

Of course, just a few years ago the process of putting archived video on the web seemed out of the reach of most. Now everyone from school kids to Tory leaders is doing it. At some point the world’s first free webcasting service will be born.

It’ll enable you to plug your camera into your computer, click a few buttons and start streaming out your own show. This will lead to an explosion of individuals and companies starting up their own webcasts, covering anything and everything.

Of course this won’t all be positive. As with other forms of user generated media, some of the first to take up the power of democratic webcasting will be those who can’t find an outlet through traditional media for very good reasons – because their material is illegal, immoral or distasteful.

But complete interactivity at every stage of a show that covers any conceivable topic is the next step for the YouTube generation. And not for the first time this century, conventional broadcasting might well get a good shake.

99% of everyone I’ve spoken to over the last year still doesn’t believe that anyone’s going to make any money out of peer to peer content sales over the internet. (i.e. I cheaply make some video, music, e-books or anything else and sell a copy to you directly and cheaply over the web without there being a megalithic company somewhere in the middle).

Here are some of the favourite objections to this idea in rough order of how often I hear them:

• “Won’t it all be rubbish content if it’s being made by individuals?”
• “How will you find anything good if there’s that much of it?”
• “People don’t like sitting in front of a computer to watch video” / “People like books, not reading on a screen” / “people don’t like listening to mp3’s”. (Actually suddenly people do quite like that last one!)  

I’ve written extensively on this blog about why all of the above are all red herrings. 

For me one of the genuinely hard questions to answer is about intellectual property protection. If you can make one sale of a piece of content, how do you know it’s not then being copied another 10 times?

This obviously is a real problem in the music industry at the moment (just ask anyone who’s trying to run a record label and finds their entire back catalogue freely available to download on a blog somewhere) and getting around it won’t be easy.

I think the most likely thing to happen is that as the distribution methods change, those annoyingly clever people who always seem to live in California will start to come up with inventive ideas about how to make sure people get paid for the stuff they create.

Today I found a great example in the video upload site Revver.com.

It’s extremely simple. You upload a piece of video and it becomes “Revverised” which means a small unobtrusive ad is placed onto the end of the content. Every time someone clicks it you get paid. The more it gets copied, the more you make.

Obviously this won’t work with music but for video it could be one solution. And it won’t be the only one. Certain content will sell best with certain models and we’ll see more and more inventive new models appearing over the next few years.

Maybe copying isn’t quite so bad after all!