Internet Video Streaming Workshop

Brian Drolet (Free Speech TV)

There is some thought that the internet is such a radically different and inherently democratic technology that government and corporate power will not be able to control it, or restrict broadcasting and publishing access to it. This is a false view. The internet, like any other tool of mass communication, will be employed by the hands that are powerful enough to seize it. The ultimate decision on use of the internet will not be settled "on the net" but "in the streets." It will be a protracted struggle, only a part of the larger battle to determine who rules the entire society.

This does not mean that those who do not weild society-wide power will be completely excluded. We all have the ability to publish a leaflet, or a pamphlet, or even a newspaper. But the reach of those publications is severely restricted. Nevertheless, the ability to use the 300 year old technology of the printing press has been of crucial, sometimes decisive imporance for those seeking to challenge the established order, or to overthrow it.

Likewise for the internet. With the added fact that we are at the beginning of the technology's development. There is more ferment, more experimentation, more room, more access. And we should seize the window of opportunity that the times offer.

Free Speech Internet TV began about five years ago. The first conception was simply to use the internet as a delivery mechanism for progressive videos. In the first few years, very few people visitied the site. In part this was due to the primitive stage of the technology. Compression technology was still very poor and access to fast modems was very limited. Hardly anyone had access to a T-1 line. Watching video was not a very pleasurable experience. For most it still isn't. We knew that the technology would advance, but we also knew that that development was not in our hands. What we could do was try to publicize what we were doing and build traffic to the site. So we began free and premium web hosting, particularly trying to attract people who wanted to use media files on their websites. In the last two years we have gone from about 1100 viewers a day on our home page to about 5,000. Overall, freespeech.org received about 60,0000 visitors a day to our entire site, overwhelmingly to our over 6000 hosted websites. On average we receive 48,000 requests per week for over 3000 separate media files. We currently have the largest archive of progressive video on the internet: over 500 films and videos, full length and clips that have been selected by our staff.

This week, for example, you can watch ah our long documentary made by high school students in New York, exposing the corruption and criminal conspiracy between politiicans and gangsters who control the toxic waste dumps in the Hudson Valley. Or you can watch Paper Tiger TVs video on protests at the G8 meeting in Germany last year. Perhaps one of the most moving and informative videos we have webcast is "Bitter Paradise", first aired by Working TV in Canada, a beautify and sad story of the struggle of the people of East Timor against Western backed Indonesian occupation.

We digitize and encode and post a new video every couple of days.

In addtion to webcasting the best work we can find, we see our primary responsibility to publicize and promote this work, so that it can become known to the largest audience possible.

The technical side of the project is actually quite simple. The original material can be in Beta, 3/4 inch or VHS format. We have used a variety of softwares to digitize the original video to avi files: Adobe Premiere, Avid Cinema, and most video cards now come with their own digitizing software. Recently we have simply used Real Network's Real Producer G2 to directly digitize and encode the video. At the moment we are not encoding for the Windows Media Player or Apple's new Quicktime streaming video software. The technology will continue rapid development. I would imagine there will be MP3 video available soon.

The bigger technology and political question, of course is broadband delivery and who will control it. This is a game for the big players only and the public will have little influence on the major decisions. This is not the place to sort out all of the issues. There are an number of excellent list serves for the US/English speaking audience. I'm not familiar with terrain in other countries. Bottom line is who gets the ability to upload. As my friend Bob Stein, the founder of the Voyager Company once put it: when the internet provides access to everybody's eyes and minds, everybody will have access to the internet....just like tv.

Of course, we are just talking about Internet I. Internet II is already up and running and provides the ability for near full motion, full screen video. Artists and engineers from Univiersities in New York are already plannning expeeriements with two way Internet II programs.

So if you stream video over the internet now, who watches? This is first of all an access question. The constituencies of labor movements are not in the vanguard of computer or internet users. So who are the streaming video's for? And what social impact do we expect them to have?

And what happens to "solidarity for ever" the "rising of the masses" and "collective power? The computer and the internet are very individualized experiences. It's your head in that box. Watching a video on a small computer screen is a very different experience than watching a movie in a crowded room with a group of comrades, or strangers.

Both these last two questions raise the question, for which I do not have a ready answer, what the role video on the internet can and should be as a tool for activists and organizers.