Tune in to visionOntv and join people who are making the world a better place!
What we do
visionOntv broadcasts video for social change and for saving the planet. visionOntv is a lean-in, lean-out experience. We give you the option to interact and find out more about the content, or to lean back and watch it like normal TV. Around all our programmes, we will enable people to link up directly for grassroots campaigning and direct action, but also for all the other forms of social networking. For us most importantly visionOntv is an outreach project and we aim to make social change via video a real possibility.
Outreach
visionOntv aims to inform, engage and inspire the wider public. In practice this means we will broadcast content with the widest possible definition of “alternative”. We believe that social change takes many different forms, and we aim to be a portal to them all.
Quality
visionOntv puts the viewer first. We are not an open publishing project and we have a quality threshold for all films featured. We provide training and tools for less experienced producers to enable their work to have maximum impact.
Ease of use
Our aim is to make viewing visionOntv as easy as watching traditional TV. The whole range of options for knowledgable people will be there, but never in a way that confuses the first-time viewer.
The tools we use
visionOntv strongly favours the use of open source tools for video production and distribution. There is an on-going battle for the soul of the worldwide web, between client / server relationships (what people need they have to get from a corporation) and ‘people to people’ relationships (people freely sharing skills and knowledge with each other). The internet is fundamentally based on peer-to-peer relationships, which we strongly defend.
We will not approach this dogmatically, however. At a given time we need the best tools available. For outreach to be successful, the tools need to be reliable and simple to use. We will help to develop these tools where they do not exist, but sometimes the best ones will be corporate and closed source.
Creative commons and media democracy
Digital information is innately free, but some corporations want to restrict that freedom. We defend that freedom via creative commons distribution, which makes up the majority of our content. This means that anyone can re-edit and re-distribute the films, or even the whole project itself, under a non-commercial creative commons licence. We also promote a view of media democracy which breaks down the social divide between those with broadband and those without. Viewers receive high-resolution copies of films downloaded into their computer. These copies can be independently distributed or projected in a cinema, festival or community hall. In this way a single broadband connection can serve a whole community.
We see visionOntv as one of many interconnected alternative media projects around the world.
Sustainability
visionOntv has substantial costs for its maintenance. We will work hard to be sustainable by generating income, to give project workers and content producers funding into the future.
We include only ethical advertising on the core visionOntv project - non-aspirational info-verts from ethical companies.
It is our aim, from monies raised beyond the running costs of visionOntv, to create a production fund, where producers of already-featured content can easily (and non-bureacratically) apply for production grants.
Log on to http://visionOn.tv and tell us what you think.
