PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Julius Fisher
(Working TV)
I get excited about streaming video. Seriously. Every time I put a video on the internet I feel like I have won a small victory for the good guys over the forces of reaction and darkness, or like I have given global capital a good swift kick in the ass. But given the extremely poor quality of streaming video most of us see on the internet; the tiny jerky, blurry images, the muffled or distorted sound; I know this is quite ridiculous. Let me explain.
I produce working TV, a weekly half-hour long labour / left television show in Vancouver, in the province of British Columbia, on Canada's west coast. For myself, as with every other alternative media producer I have known - whether working in print, radio, video or broadcast television - DISTRIBUTION is a constant concern and preoccupation. It is very frustrating to work hard on a video or television program, to make it as powerful, concise and engaging as possible, and then find that only a very small audience can see it. Streaming video offers a solution. It gives producers the power to simply bypass or to go around television network program managers whose job it is to keep alternative viewpoints from a mass audience.
Unfortunately, from my experience at least, this power is somewhat illusory. Streaming video has the potential to provide an alternative to broadcast television. It has not yet delivered on this potential. I might feel better subjectively, by putting a video with a progressive message on the web, but objectively I am not sure I am really making any difference in the world. . . at least not yet.
NECESSITY, THE MOTHER OF INVENTION
I began streaming video motivated by sheer frustration in early 1998. In January of that year, I taped a packed public lecture and produced programs about the MAI, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. For those who haven't heard of it, the MAI is a kind of Charter of Rights for corporations, the kind of thing the IMF and the World Bank and the World Trade Organization love. It gives sweeping powers to corporations and takes away powers from National governments. Most people have heard about so called free trade agreements. Critics called the MAI free trade on steroids. It was a kind of super-free trade agreement that was negotiated in secret by several G7 national governments, including Canada's government.
I was outraged as much by the content of the MAI as by the blackout or censorship of any news about it in the mainstream media. And I was frustrated that my community access television show - the only window on television that was dealing with the MAI out of the 59 channels available in my city - was available to only about 1 million cable subscribers. So out of necessity, I found a solution. I had heard about video on the internet so I asked friends to help figure out how to get our MAI programs on the web. We began with still pictures, a kind of slide show with sound, but quickly learned how to digitize video and produce a crude, tiny but effective webcast (http://www.workingtv.com/real/realmai.html - 28k version).
The results were very gratifying. working TV got e-mail from around the world thanking us for making this important information available. My first webcasts were basically radio on televison, two half hour programs of people talking at a public meeting, but it was a webcast.
Since then I have webcast practically every one of my weekly programs and several one hour special programs. It just makes sense, given the amount of time and energy I put into these programs, to make them available to a wider audience.
As for the MAI, it was de-railed, temporarily at least, which was a huge victory for the popular movement that had been building in several countries against it. Nearly 1000 websites, including my working TV site, were dedicated to spreading the world about this anti-democratic trade deal. This victory, however temporary, also served to wake up many activists to the power of the internet generally.
LESSONS LEARNED
In the nearly two years I have been webcasting I have learned a lot. The first lesson is that very few people, with the exception of media activist types, share my enthusiasm, or even seem to give a damn. The audience is very small, at least here in Canada. It has taken quite literally till just now, till just this past month, for anybody in the Canadian labour movement to officially notice. This morning, Tuesday November 9 1999, I learned that the Canadian Labour Congress was going to contribute $2000.00 to my webcasting efforts. This is a tiny amount compared to what they spend on print and on other forms of media, but its is important in a symbolic way. It marks a kind of seal of approval from the top body in the Canadian labour movement. Earlier this month a local teachers' union paid me to webcast a video I had produced for them in several languages as part of their campaign to elect a better school board in the local Vancouver civic election. ( www.freespeech.org/workingtv/VSBBluesEnglish.ram ; ../VSBBluesSpanish.ram; .. VSBBluesMandarin.ram; . . /VSBBluesCantonese.ram; and ../VSBBluesPunjabi.ram ) This was the first time I have ever been paid to webcast, yet I have spent thousands of dollars on hardware and software and hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of my time doing it.
Probably this lack of interest has as much to do with new media fatigue as much as anything else. We hear about so many new technological breakthroughs that it becomes difficult, particularly in the labour movement, to get the bureaucrats who hold the purse strings enthused. This is compounded by the tendency in Canadian labour to want to do things the way they used to be done. The labour movement used to communicate with print, not with the internet, and certainly not streaming video on the internet. Therefore, the logic goes, print should damn well be good enough today. Fortunately, since last May, we have new leadership at the CLC so this is changing.
But I am sure that the lack of interest in my working TV webcasts is mostly because of the content. If I webcast live sex or sports or entertainment it would be much more popular. I produce left wing, sometimes quite radical videos and television programs. I also webcast many videos produced by others which have the same world view and often the same relatively dry, pedantic approach. Rather than bouncing breasts or high speed car chases, I webcast images of struggle and lots of talking heads. As important as this kind of programming is, there is a relatively small audience for it. Its a niche market. So its fortunate that webcasts, by definition, can be viewed around the world, so that those few viewers in each country can together comprise a large enough audience to make the webcast worthwhile.
The second major lesson I've learned from my webcasting experience is that it takes money. Yes it can be done cheaply, for next to nothing, using a cheap video capture card and free software, but the end result looks, well, cheap. Most of what I webcast for the first year or more fits this category. It was a novelty to get video on the web, but it was very hard to watch for any but the most dedicated viewers.
Its takes relatively expensive hardware and software to produce the best possible, or at least better quality streaming video. Without going into too much technical detail, I have spent quite a bit of money so that I can now export digital video directly from my Media 100 edit suite ( on a Power Mac 9600 ) to a fabulous program called Media Cleaner ( 4.0 ) which create files which van be viewed on a variety of web based formats (RealVideo, Quicktime, Windows Media etc.). But a server with a fast high bandwidth connection (T1) is just as important. Most are outrageously expensive. Fortunately, FreeSpeech TV in Boulder Colorado provides an affordable and democratic, if somewhat imperfect alternative, for which I am very thankful.
(At this point I suggest you watch the short video I have produced about the webcasting process itself, which accompanies this document.)
The third and probably most difficult lesson I am just now beginning to learn, is that the distribution mechanism has a big impact on the content and the aesthetics of the video. In other words, I need to learn to produce video differently for webcast than for television broadcast. This is partly because of the current technical limitations of webcasting, which are improving rapidly, but are still quite primitive. This is also partly because people view webcast video with a different attitude and in a different context: it is something they search out quite actively sitting at their computer, unlike television which many people passively allow to wash over them as a kind of mind-numbing electronic drug while sprawled on their couch.
The difference between video production for television and video production for webcast starts, ideally at least, at the earliest stage. Given the current technical limitations of webcasting, it is better to shoot still images with little motion. Backgrounds need to be simpler. In editing, graphics need to be larger to be readable on a tiny webcast image. Straight cuts work better than fancy digital transitions or even dissolves - transitions tend to make the webcast freeze up during playback, while the audio continues. And programs need to be shorter, much, much shorter. It seems the optimum length for a typical viewer to watch a tiny, jerky, blurry image with bad sound is about 1 minute. ( http://www.freespeech.org/workingtv/vvtv3.ram ) Obviously the better the quality of the webcast, the longer a viewer might stay.
IN CONCLUSION
Webcasting is no magic bullet. It won't resolve the marginalization and censorship of labour from mainstream television. But it does make producers like me feel better knowing that those viewers who don't mind the inferior image and sound will get to see my programs because they are webcast. And its encouraging to know that the technology is improving very rapidly. Better software and hardware is helping create better video on the web, and greater bandwidth is becoming more readily available at lower prices. But webcasting is no substitute for full screen television broadcasting as we know it today. I am not sure it ever will be.
Regardless, I think the most important issue with webcasting, and with all other new media is that labour get in on the ground floor. In a working TV interview, Joey Manley, formerly of FreeSpeech TV, said that we (the left) shouldn't get left behind with internet television, the way we did with cable tv and I couldn't agree more. It is shameful the way the left and the labour movement in North America ignored the potential offered by community access (cable) tv. This happened, in my opinion, largely because labour media activists deferred to the leadership of the labour movement to initiate and fund community access television activity. When it comes to new media, I believe, if we wait for the leadership to lead, we will never get anywhere.
The beauty of webcasting, and of the internet generally, is that individual activists like myself can initiate projects without needing the endorsement or support of the labour bureaucracy. If they want to get on board once the ball is rolling, as they are doing now with working TV's webcasting, that's great. If not, our activism need not stop.
Finally, I want to stress that webcasting is but one of many forms or one of many mediums. I think the single most important lesson for labour media activists to keep in mind is to be media neutral: to value and support all media forms, from print, to radio, to video, to the internet. Each form has its own audience, and each form is converging with others. Just as we are stronger when we work together, so will our media products be strengthened if they are shared across many forms of media.