Video Sites, Indymedia, and the future of non-linear television

There has been an explosion of online video sites, mostly due to the ease in which flash integrates in to the web. Other streaming platforms such as Quicktime, Real, and Windows Media Player all tried to force the producer and viewer in to the television context. With Flash 7 and now 8, the act of streaming has become integrated in to the standard flow of the web as opposed outside of it. This in an of itself is an amazing step forward, and really positive indication in terms of media freedom.

See the existing players in the streaming video space all thought of their work as taking television to the net. The created a walled garden, sure you could click to load videos from out on the web, but their primary focus has been inside their player. Controlling the viewing experience and driving the users to content they want.

With Flash we now have an easy way to reach users outside of the box. Quicktime could have done this, and you can do what all the new video hosting sites with javascript and quicktime, but nobody wrote the right sets of libraries or build an example, so Flash won. The experience and openness of the flash video experience is more web native than the half TV / half web model which is embodied in the older streaming platforms. It’s emblematic of how differently people see the flash based video sites that they are referred to as non-liner ‘watching’ tv and video as opposed to the geeky and not user focused activity of ‘streaming’.

The most famous of the video sharing / hosting sites is YouTube. The site is good, they get a lot right, the right balance between easy of use, features, and openness. They aren’t alone, there’s vimeo, guba, videoegg, google video, and a thousand others. YouTube won out partially by luck, but a lot by making it easy, you upload, and you go, it just works. Google Video which has been around for quite a while, has much better hosting and downloading features, but they do pre-screening of videos for copyright violations which makes things less dynamic and real for users.

The thing about all of these sites is that they take video out of the world where it’s separate and parallel to the web, a semi-walled garden, and they bring it in to the web. Video ceases to be thing thing on the side where you load a slow ugly plugin, or launch a separate application. You watch video in line with how you surf the web. Your sources are your friends, who create the blogs, sites, and myspace comments you read. The editor has been unseated.

In myspace there is a tremendous amount of traffic, it’s possible for a band to become incredibly popular. The folks who run myspace noticed this so they created a special subsite called MySpace Music where they could feature bands. Being in LA and having connections to the music industry, i’m sure some of the features are based on some promotion contracts. It could be a scandal, payola, and all that. But here’s the deal. Bands featured on myspace music don’t get much attention. It doesn’t work. Bands featured there got very little bump in their profile.

What does work are people ‘pimping’ bands. I like this, therefore i post stuff about it. You like what i like, and we are constructing identities around our cultural interests, so we share and promote this. People like listening and watching cool shit, so they send it on, and start to value the person who told them about it. It’s a bit similar to how free software communities cultivate leaders, except in a much more open and decentralized way where more people can participate.

So we assume that people will find videos in many ways. One way is they will to go activist websites for information on the campaigns. Indymedia is one place where people go for information. Up until now we’ve thought of indymedia and related sites as destinations. We let people upload content, we publish information, we cover events, and we want people to come to us to get the information. Now we do some to help people who don’t come to us, we provide rss feeds so they can track information, and people also include those feeds in other sites. One meta site which is mostly syndicated from other indymedia sites is the main www.indymedia.org page. When they work best, local indymedia sites like indybay or indymedia italia become major hubs for communication within the activist community.

But we don’t reach out. We don’t make it so our media can be placed where people live, breath, and communicate. We have come from a model of broadcast media where we opened it for everybody to participate and tied it in to social movements. What we haven’t done is think of our work, within indymedia and more broadly as media activists, as engaging in a social media struggle. We are creating media to change the world, to do that it needs to be engaged and embedded within people’s worlds. You can’t blow up social relationships. The revolution needs us to provide the space by which our relationships are deconstructed and rebuild in a radically more egalitarian form.

What that means in media activism, indymedia, and a video sharing network is that we need to provide tools which let our media reach out and exist within people’s world. We need the organization and networks of social movements. This is a struggle which won’t get won simple by a few bloggers talking about how the world should be a better place. I don’t think that’s an issue, indymedia and many other media activist groups who are dabbling in video are along the right track in that respect.

There are a few projects in the corporate web world which are clearly trying to reach out and understand this concept of media embedded in the world. One is the aforementioned youtube, they are doing hosting and make it easy for you to take their videos elsewhere. Now youtube and clones are making it easy to transfer the video to your psp, ipod, tivo, etc….

There’s another approach which is interesting, the idea that you could, but really don’t need to host the videos. Making them available, giving them a page, linkablity, and embeddablity, is enough. This is the approach behind the not yet launched dabble.com and the recently launched yahoo video projects. They take videos from the net at large. It’s easy to find, organize, and watch. Linking happens to their pages, out to other sites. But the point is it’s easy and decentralized.

We need to look at how indymedia and radical media activists in general deal with our video work. I firmly believe that we are on the cusp of a real shift in how television is created and consumed. There is an opening for radical media activists to use this shift to inject the agenda of social movements and shape the future of the medium. There is a conference next week in Rome, transmission.cc where many online video media activists will get together. Hopefully they can tackle these issues.