Wassenaar’s site also posted this good article “Chad Vader Creators Take Lightsaber to Tom Still’s Assertions About Cutting Funding For Local Cable Access” rebutting the internet vs. public access television nonsense coming out of the Wisconsin debate on cable franchising.

It is essential to keep in mind that the core value and importance of public access is not based on nor dependent upon any specific technological delivery process, such as cable TV, web file sharing, etc…, or whatever the prevailing technology device is at the time.

Yes, YouTube does not feature the same ‘fair use’ and equal access considerations that public access is based on, which is the heart of the point. Access is about just that - access. It is about the public’s right and ability to communicate amongst themselves via media platforms that are open and non-discriminatory, nor geared towards or dominated by a single form of speech or by discriminatory considerations (i.e. commercial speech).

Cable TV will change, evolve and transform into a completely different mechanism over time, that is a certainty. Let us not confuse the efforts to ‘preserve access’ as being efforts to preserve ‘cable tv’, but rather what the purpose of the work of the many involved in this public service really is. That is to ensure the ability (and just as importantly, the RIGHT) of people, all people, to have access to using whatever the predominant form of communication is for purposes of creating, distributing and accessing information content. This should be available to all citizens without that ability being constricted by allowing these platforms to be dictated and controlled, not by democratic principles, but by strictly commercial concerns (i.e. control), or through unwarranted or excessive governmental interference.

As Dave points out, the internet shows uncomfortable signs of heading towards becoming a technology that operates much along the lines that broadcasting operated on 50 years ago, with power consolidated into the hands of the ‘Big 3′ corporations who serve as gatekeepers and providers of content. If that happens, then we will have managed to have accomplished no meaningful change with the advent and implementation of all of this new media. Rather than creating new ways to provide for better methods of citizenship participation, we will simply have managed to establish more efficient ways for commercial interests to sell us stuff as passive consumers. Meet the new technology, same as the old technology.

- Andy Valeri, USTV Media

1) It’s free. I use YouTube’s first cousin, Google video, regularly to store and serve many gigabytes of video data — and I don’t pay a penny for any of it. I do this even though the company I co-own already has a streaming server in place and available. Why? Because storing and backing up 500MB files for every hour of video costs money, and if I can avoid it, I will. YouTube has since been bought by Google, and there are indications that Google videos and YouTube videos are sharing the same search space.

2) Anybody can use it, within the confines of their terms of use. They can also do it all from their own homes or offices. No extraordinary equipment or software is necessary, beyond what is readily available at your nearest BestBuy.

3) It’s incredibly easy to use. Got a video? Upload it and serve it to the planet. You don’t have to pay for Real Networks’ streaming Helix server, you don’t have to pay someone tens of thousand of dollars each year to maintain and configure the server, and you don’t have to personally have a fat pipe to serve up the content (or pay for that bandwidth).

4) From a viewer’s perspective, it’s 100% “on demand” programming. I search for something, I find something relevant, I watch it when I have the time. The Internet is beautiful for custom programming based on individual queries. The catch is that you have to know how to phrase queries and wade through the muck. This will change over time as search improves, which will likely make Google even more dominant.

5) People with a shoestring budget and something to say simply cannot reach the same kind of global audience with public access television that they can with the Internet + YouTube + Google video/search. Geographic boundaries mean nothing. (I’m disregarding Internet content filtering in place in some countries, like China, to make an apples-to-apples comparison of the mediums. I doubt that public access television signals from the U.S.A. makes it “legally” across China’s borders, too.)

I will add a caveat, though: these are the merits as of today. The net is glutted with content, and providing easy access to useful information is the continuing challenge for web content providers and search engine companies. What is, unfortunately, likely to happen is that more and more emphasis will be placed on the pay-per-click model, which means that those who pay more $$ for more visibility will get it, at the expense of independent information providers with smaller budgets. When this happens, it will be the modern version of the Big Three television networks selling commercial time to the highest bidder. If you can’t afford prime time costs you’re commercial will get relegated to the 2AM slot.

I heard someone in our office say this month that Google is now the single largest advertising outlet in the world. It took them less than 10 years to dominate that space, and nobody saw them coming. Internet players are extremely difficult to predict, as is the technological changes they will create and the regulatory/censorship challenges they will face. The public access points have their own threats and regulatory concerns, too, and are not without their own challenges.

It’s definitely an interesting time to be alive.

–
david mezera, president
david@donet.com

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