Why do we need Big Broadband?

There are now emerging a number of reasons we will soon demand Big Broadband. Participatory Culture and their open source project DTV and most especially their Broadcast Machine is but one.

Broadcast Machine is software you install on your website to easily publish video files and create internet TV channels. Broadcast Machine gives you the option of using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs, even when you are posting high quality video to thousands of people. It is free, open source software, and is designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. It also creates a browsable archive of videos on your website. Broadcast Machine is the prefect publishing tool for making channels that work with DTV: Internet TV.

A second, but not yet released, driver of demand for Big Bandband will be Six Apart's Project Comet. The goal of the project is to bring multi-media "webblogging into the mainstream."

A third, but more conventional, driver of demand for Big Broadband will be Super HD [4K TV]. This is the best TV today's technology can deliver. It requires 1.2 gigabits per second. But hey, we all want the best.

At the same time that these developments are emerging, the cost of connectivity is dropping significantly. One gigabit of connectivity that sold at wholesale for $20,000 per month in July of 2004 now sells for just $13,000 per month. This is an amazing reduction of 35% in just one year. Consider also that well over half the fiber optic strands already in place in America is still unused, or "dark fiber". It is simply waiting to be lit.

Taken together, these developments have very serious implications for a remarkable growth in demand for upstream bandwidth. Imagine if only 10% of the U.S. population, using the Broadcast Machine or Project Comet, took to uploading creative video works on a regular basis. Sudenly we would have 30 million new TV "channels". Suppose our educational system started to require students to create projects using full multi-media? How many student TV stations would that create as they sought to share their projects with teachers, friends and family members scattered far and wide? What happens when students want to use Super HD for their productions?

Could this happen? My guess is that 10% is a low estimate. Why?

As James Burke says in episodes 5 and 6 of his 1979 TV series "Connections", the era of "modern" and "scientific" mechanized mass production has us all living in the same city, with the same twice a day traffic jams, wearing the same clothes, driving the same cars, with the same sorts of stuff in our houses and pockets and worse, as the environment degrades.

Perhaps the current right wing counter revolution, a turn back to the dark ages of dogma enforced by inquisitions, with a rejection of the notion that if you can not prove it you can not believe it, the "fact-based" reality approach, is simply a classic reaction to the conditions Burke describes so well.

Could it be the case, however, that offerings such as The Broadcast machine, are, in fact, modern solutions to the modern condition of technologically imposed sameness? The ability of every person to have the ready ability and where with all to make unique content that nobody else has, that is not mass produced and not in everyone's pocket nor in everyone's house, is an important new development. After 100 years of monologue imposed by our exclusion from mass media, for reasons both technological and capital, we suddenly now have the ability to express ourselves in our unique and authentic voices when, where, and how we please. This is revolutionary.

As Marshall McLuhan observed, new technologies at first imitate what has come before. Films imitated stage production for a number of years before D. W. Griffith made Birth of a Nation in 1915 and showed the world what movies could be. Or take photography in its first decades, it too often imitated painting. TV began by imitating film and radio.

The internet has not been an exception to McLuhan's analysis. The internet and the world wide web have, in effect, spent the last twenty years exploring new ways to do text, numbers, graphics, radio and TV. So far we have basically only seen old solutions incrementally improved and in new easier to access guises.

The new Peer to Peer tools that allow individuals at the edges of the networks to easily cooperate with each other, while by-passing all of the obstacles created by governments, corporations and the significant hub and spoke inefficiencies found in the center, are some of the first truly new things to emerge from the internet/www synergy.

All of the required pieces, ala Connections, are now seemingly present and suddenly, and unpredicted, we have open source DTV and the Broadcast Machine, Project Comet, as well as the coming Super HD. This is a radical departure from the notion behind all of the traditional broadcast models of the past. No more technological or capital barriers to entry. No more having to ask governments for permission. No more government agencies acting as agents of Speech Control. No more government enforced unequal voices. No more barriers created by regulatoriums artificially creating spectrum scarcity.

90 years later, could this be our Birth of a Nation moment? Now that we can all have our "authentic" voices back again, how will we use them? Can we over come the McLuhan's warning in Gutenburg Galaxey as quoted in the Wikipedia?

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture. (Galaxy p. 32)

Posted by Jock Gill at September 28, 2005 10:36 AM | TrackBack