[Nettime-nl] De Hoeksteen in Wired: "Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off"

[MauzZ <media@live.nu>]

Het inmiddels legendarische Amsterdamse TV/internet programma/project De 
Hoeksteen Live! van mediakunstenaar Raul Marroquin wordt genoemd in een 
artikel van het Amerikaanse Wired Magazine.
http://hoeksteen.dds.nl

Roll-Your-Own Net TV Takes Off
By Manny Frishberg


Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59623,00.html

02:00 AM Jul. 15, 2003 PT
Michael Weisman may not be a household name in his own hometown, but to 
people in the Netherlands, he is a TV star.

A community media activist and law student at the University of Washington, 
Weisman hosts segments of a live show, which he sends over the Internet 
from Seattle to a public TV station in Amsterdam.
He is one of a growing number of people creating their own programming and 
putting it on cable, satellite and the Web as live streaming video. Along 
with expanding the reach of their signals, using the Internet as a 
distribution channel has the advantage of giving viewers the option of 
seeing archived TV programs on demand.
Weisman's association with De Hoeksteen, a live show webcast from 
Amsterdam, dates from the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations, 
when the show carried feeds from the Seattle street protests through a 
combination of ADSL and cable modem. De Hoeksteen translates from Dutch to 
"The Cornerstone."
In addition to Seattle programming, the show carries live feeds from 
contributors in New York, Mexico City, Brussels, Belgium and elsewhere. The 
segments are edited together in the Salto Studios on the Amstel River in 
Amsterdam, co-founder Raul Marroquin said.
The four-hour cable show was started in 1991 by Marroquin, a media artist, 
and Dutch actor-director Titus Muizelaar. It went live a year later and now 
features interviews and round-table discussions using webcam hook-ups and 
videoconferencing, as well as live studio guests.
Audiences participate through a pair of IRC chat rooms and the telephone. 
Weisman sends chat-room discussions as a crawl that runs under the main 
image during his part of the program.
Despite regular improvements in the technology, adoption of Internet TV has 
been slow even in the more developed countries. For all the innovations in 
the past two years, Internet TV remains a choppy image in a small window 
opened on a monitor.
Even so, Internet TV is beginning to take off in a serious way. Over 700 TV 
broadcasters, the majority of them commercial stations, everywhere from 
Afghanistan to Colombia and Australia, are making programming available on 
56K connections. Internet portal wwiTV and its North American affiliate, 
TV4all, list 3,000 live and archived television and radio feeds from every 
part of the world.
Community media is nothing new, getting its start in the United States with 
the Guerrilla TV movement of the '60s. It grew up along with the spread of 
the cable industry in the '70s and '80s. Cities and counties entered into 
exclusive franchise agreements with the cable companies, writing in 
provisions for subsidies for studio space, equipment and training, as well 
as dedicated channels for local government and school use.
Streaming media has also been around since the mid-1990s, when Real 
Networks pioneered sending sound files over the Internet in real time.
At a conference of international community media activists in Tacoma, 
Washington, last weekend Ruud DeBruin, from the Dutch Community 
Broadcasting Association, describes how local neighborhoods are beginning 
to use wireless computer networks to create very local TV stations to 
communicate among themselves. He predicts this will become a major part of 
the community media landscape in the coming years.
As for Internet webcasting for a larger audience, DeBruin said broadcasters 
"use it in addition to what they do, but not as a main channel for 
broadcasting."
DeeDee Halleck, a professor emeritus of communications from the University 
of California at San Diego who has been involved with community media since 
its inception, notes several initiatives that suggest the trend toward 
Internet TV is growing in the public sphere.
"A group of local stations in Italy ... have pooled their money to start an 
Internet service that uses compression, so they can actually have a 24-hour 
service that they will all contribute programming to. I think there are 
about 70 local TV stations in communities that have left-leaning 
governments (involved in it)," she said.
Halleck also described a webcast TV project in Denmark that has grown out 
of a tenants' rights group in a senior housing project, originally set up 
to press their demands for home repairs and better services. "It's just 
spread like wildfire. They get thousands of pokes a day," she said.
The United States has about 100 webcasting TV stations, from local 
commercial channels and a network of Christian Web TV stations to 
community-access and local-government channels scattered around the country.
In Arizona, Access Phoenix, a community-access station, broadcasts all its 
shows simultaneously on two cable channels and over the Internet. Anybody 
with an Internet connection can view the programs at their regular 
broadcast time. The shows are also archived and available from the access 
channel's website on demand.
New York's Manhattan Neighborhood Network runs four channels of 
public-access television on the two cable systems and in streaming formats, 
live and archived, in broadband and 56K-modem versions.
On the Hawaiian island of Oahu, community-access provider Olelo has five 
channels, all streaming on the Web as well as over the cable system.
Weisman blamed the slow uptake of Internet TV in this country on the lack 
of public commitment to the underlying infrastructure for broadband.
"The cultural sector is hobbled by lack of high-speed connectivity," he 
said. "In the U.S., broadband deployment is spotty, expensive and unreliable."


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