TeleSur goes online & the future of satellite tv media

Finally there is a basic, flash based ugh, website for telesur, the new latin american television network which will be launching on the 24th. Started by media activists in Venezuela with the support of the Venezuelan, Argentine, Uruguayan, and Cuban governments TeleSur is pitched as a kind of latin american al-jazeera.

I think there are amazing possibilities for the new pan national television networks which are starting up, but that’s based on the hope that they can realize the tremendous shifts in television which are starting to take place. And i don’t mean ‘digital’ RF broadcast in the US.

Aside from telesur, there is the totally unhip IWT which a product of the north american social democratic reformist ngo community. They are very genuine in their politics, but i fear they will produce a lefty version of PBS/CBC with even longer discussions among academics. Maybe my assessment is wrong…

The other effort is the quite centrist democratic party offshoot current.tv which is based here in san francisco. Their site reminds me of hotwired in the 90’s but they do have a lot of focus on participatory media, using the net, restructuring the way news and tv are produced, not just the content.

Indymedia and our allies Freespeech TV and Democracy Now have a functioning network which does get to millions of homes, produce a week day news hour long tv news show, and generally keeps broadcasting. But we’ve never had great production values, and those matter a lot in TV. Also we’ve had some experimentation with distribution online like v2v which is not very tightly coordinated but generally pretty good quality activisty content. It’s also mostly in english and italian which limits things.

It’s got to be possible to bridge these more high budget TV networks with real bottom up technology to restructure how we think of and view television. In the case of TeleSur they need to be looking at local transmitters if they want to get to a non-elite audience. The places where there is broadband we should looking at time-shifted tv. I’ve said it many times, podovision is not ready, but given a couple of years it could take off with the right kinds of boxes built with ties in to broadband in wealthy countries.

There are three aspects which need to be restructured:

1. Viewers – The last mile. How does somebody watch it. Is it on cable, terrestrial tv, satellite, the net? In South Korea they have a tv network of the unions which uses broadband connections of the factories to play the news once a week in the cafeteria during lunch break. In Brazil they have people with projectors and screens who travel around the favellas along with more permanent community radio stations and telecentros. The trick is, it has to be something the viewer can get at and see.
2. Production – Who’s making it and how. Gaba’s going down to bolivia next month with some other indymedia activists who are experienced in video editing to help those activist develop a more indepth video collective. Telesur is setting up bureaus in many latin american cities, but are they partnering with groups like MST to co-produce the coverage? Indymedia where it works well is embedded in social movements. What indymedia lacks is the resources and organizational force / model to distribute that beyond the web and a few local projects.
3. Distribution – How does the media get from the producers to the production hubs or media outlets and then get pushed back out to viewers. A TV network today should be using tcp/ip based systems and not falling back to the more expensive and restricted legacy systems. Using the internet will allow the TV networks to branch out horizontally like the BBC is starting to look at instead of having a vertically integrated closed network.

This gets me thinking about how chronology and broadcast mediums is about to breakdown. It’s something which occurred to me while using odeo. The time of something, it’s temporality, has been so critical to thinking about radio and television that we can hardly understand what what radio and television produced without it might look like. Tivo and all the DVR (digital video recorders) along with podcasting, aggregators, and the like are a bridge. It takes us a broadcasting model to something which is more like a dynamic library. There is lots of content added, and you can see the new stuff, but what has been said about a million things is more interesting that what might have been said today. Who knows what kinds of interesting things happen when we convert from a broadcast-consumer model to a library-browser model.