E-mail to the mainstream - MGEITF 2007

Sent to the organizers of The Edinburgh International Television Festival

Dear Amy and Peter,

One of my colleagues Paul o’ Connor of Undercurrents spoke at the festival back in 2001 with Chris Cramer of CNN. Just as that session provoked debate about the use of domestic camcorders to provide the ‘news you don’t see on the news’, we now think It is time to re-spark a lively debate within the corporate media space.

I notice you have Joost's Janus Friis as an example of the IPTV’s challenge to traditional broadcasting. In many ways joost’s future strategy is not that of new media, just as Brightcoves wasn’t last year. The internet is based on open standards and open content – Joost has gone against this openness and chose both a closed standard as well as closed content.

To quote a recent blog post
“Both Joost and Babelgum are gated communities. Joost and Babelgum remind me of the early Internet, both platforms are to watching TV online, what Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were to the early Internet, gated communites with no direct access to the WWW.”

Joost is likely to go the same way as these Internet dinosaurs, but not before millions of corporate dollars are invested. I think a much more grass roots view would spark off a lively and useful debate at the Edinburgh TV festival

I am one of the co-founders of Vision On Tv, a grassroots internet TV channel providing a working example of what Bit Torrent and open source can offer the future of broadcasting.

Hamish Campbell
http://visionontv.com
http://www.undercurrents.org