AllaireTV
Scott Kirsner points to the loads of creativity the Boston area is applying to the TV tech. (The link will break soon.) Of special interest:
Jeremy Allaire’s new company.
In the mid-1990s, Allaire’s first company, Allaire Corp., helped to simplify the process of building and maintaining a website. Last year, Allaire joined the Cambridge venture capital firm General Catalyst as technologist-in-residence. Now, he’s starting a company with backing from General Catalyst. He won’t say much, but he’s interested in what he calls the democratization of video. “We have this situation where the number of people who can produce video programming is poised to explode, with inexpensive digital cameras and editing tools, and the existing distribution systems can’t support it,” he says. “You can’t have 100,000 people producing shows for cable television. The only thing that can support it is the Internet.” We’re all familiar with the Internet of text. Coming soon: the Internet of video.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Ah, but we beat him to it, yesterday. :) http://video.poorbuthappy.com
What’s Jeremy up to?
Nothing on Jeremy’s blog since Sept. but David Weinberger is reporting that the co-founder of Allaire – is using some of his VC buddie’s money to start a new company based around video – somehow. I actually know – but I’m not telling. :-)…
What 100,000 people is that quote talking about? Are there even 100,000 people who are producing video on a regular basis right now? That simply doesn’t exist. The democratization of video has almost nothing to do with distribution. Yeah, sure, the democratization of text happened with word processing and blogging and the web. But think about it. Think about video. About expressing yourself using video. About sitting down at a computer and expressing how you feel and what’s going on in your life and the lives of the people you know and care about and saying it simply and honestly and publishing it across the internet. Please. Go ahead and do this using video. Go ahead and name 10 people or sites that are doing it (let alone 100,000). The problem has to do with video cameras more than it has to do with distribution. Look, you learn cursive handwriting in elementary school (or at least I did). So of course we can blog and use text to share ideas and realities with words and paragraphs and punctuation. Of course democratization of media starts with text. But video is young! Motion pictures are new to human beings. When did you get forced by the State to learn how to shoot or edit video? When did you learn how to write what you feel and think using a camera? How much text does a 14 year old consume? How many images, how much audio, and how much video does a 14 year consume? You see the problem? The problem is not distribution. The problem is education. Production. Transparency in production. Until then, better distribution doesn’t mean anything.