Project Lightspeed in Wired Magazine
Super Network, Wired Magazine, September 20005.
"For its part, Yahoo! is working with SBC and Microsoft on an IPTV/fiber-to-the-curb initiative called Project Lightspeed."
Yahoo! and
Google Video are both betting that television and video searching, sharing, and distribution will be a a big part of the Net in the near future. Yahoo! even put a 10-year lease on a big-old Hollywood building.
I'm working on
Project Lightspeed at SBC, and last semester I brought my students to see a private beta of IPTV. I think the non-disclosure agreement was three pages long, or I'd tell you all about it. I can tell you that I was working with some people from Yahoo! in Chicago a few weeks ago, and that they all seemed pretty cool, and not bent on world-domination, or anything.
As the giants toil, smaller organizations like the
participatoryculture.org and the
Open Media Network are taking a different route and creating non-profit driven ways to remix television, radio, video, and the Net.
What is "Internet TV", after all?
Open Source Internet TV: DTVLike Tivo for your hard drive, DTV is a new, free, and open-source application for viewing and distributing television and video over the Net.
Back in 1998 I talked to some people at Sony about a job. They wanted someone to help design what was then called "Interactive TV." The interviewer asked me what I thought about "convergence" (the buzz word of the week back then) and how Interactive TV might work. I said something like: interactive TV should allow people to connect with each other, and to trade not with dollars, but with the currency of ideas. I had in mind something that would be similar in spirit to the Usenet (a/k/a Newsgroups) and would allow users to share their favorite shows with each other, and someday, even to create their own shows and distribute them via a personal "Internet TV station."
At the time this sounded slightly crazy, and it was. I didn't get the offer. "Create your own television channel and view it on the Net?" I can hear my inner 1998-critic say, "People can't even download that 'skip intro' animation I made last week, how are they going to download a hi-resolution video? What were you thinking?" Then Moore's law kicked in.
Fast forward about 7 years, combine broadband access with peer-to-peer distribution tools such as
BitTorrent , syndication services such as RSS, and then throw in applications like DTV and
del.icio.us and Internet TV is not so crazy. DTV offers a glimpse of a kind of DIY, grassroots, Internet-based "TV service" It combines the communitarian, cooperative, and do-it-yourself spirit of Usenet, with newer technologies and capabilities (such as
creative commons licensing). It's not totally polished and simple, but the building blocks are there. In just a few minutes I created my own "station" (though I lack content for it) and subscribed to it and several other stations. Hats off to the DTV team, and Cory Doctorow for helping to get the word out about it at
Boing Boing.
