Cringely harps on something I’ve been saying for a while, too:

The Internet television story, even as written here in columns going back as far as the late 1990s, pushed the idea of enabling the aggregation of widely-dispersed viewing audiences, allowing programming to thrive that might not be successful on any local station, much less on the national network. A good example is NerdTV, which wouldn’t attract enough viewers on most PBS stations to even generate a rating, yet when offered as an Internet download, drawing from a global population, makes some pretty good numbers. But there is no concept called “local” in this aggregation model, so stations tend to feel threatened by it; if the network can reach local viewers directly, what need is there for a local station?

But it doesn’t have to be that way, because the supposed strengths of centralization aren’t really strengths at all when viewed in terms of the much more imposing issue of bandwidth costs, where all the advantages are local. Local Heroes: Could the Key to Successful Internet Television Be…PBS? By Robert X. Cringely, PBS, June 8, 2006

What about the opposite of NerdTV? Local football!

Every high school in America dotes on it, so it’s the epitome of local content. Sure, every local TV channel currently carries a few minutes of every game. But Internet TV could carry all of every game. From multiple viewpoints. Any parent or classmate with a camera could contribute a viewpoint. See the same play from fifty sides. See reactions of girlfriends and competitors close up.

Other sports, too: baseball, basketball, hockey, etc.

See the whole halftime show. See the band competitions.

See the spelling bee.

See the academic awards.

Disks are cheap: archive all this content and make it available on demand.

Local content providers have a big advantage here.

In large part, this local advantage comes down to personal relationships. This is in stark contrast to my last two columns on Google -– a company that wants to avoid real human contact. Make friends with your local broadband providers, I said, then find a way to put your content INSIDE their network.

The advantages of this strategy are profound. Bandwidth costs go away completely, which not only frees up money for more programming or better servers, it becomes much more practical to display video with larger frame sizes, faster frame rates, and higher resolutions, creating a better viewing experience.

And while most of their viewers will probably be local, alumni, travelling parents, talent scouts, etc. may be anywhere else. The local provider still has an advantage in assembling the content.

Yet the local provider isn’t limited to local content. It can make deals with other local content providers, such as WGBH or WNET, which have been producing shows such as Nova and Masterpiece Theater for many years. Or with the networks and studios for the OC or whatever.

Or with the cross-town or cross-state football rival for their views of games. And I can see the perpetrators of this year’s great game prank documenting how they did it and the results showing up online after the show.

I do differ with Cringely when he proposes doing the whole thing on a not-for-profit basis. Profit is a great incentive for people to get things done. Competition in providing game video could be as useful as much an incentive to video as competition in football is to play the game.

-jsq

PS: Thanks, Johnny.