Watershed Media Centre, Bristol

To blog, or not to blog
This week I attended the conference Up to Speed:The Potential of Broadband as a New Space for Research, Development and Production ( Arts and Humanities Research Council, Arts Council of England, and The Watershed Media Centre) at the Watershed, Bristol.

In his presentation Open Source:From Belgrade to New York (available here ), Drazen Pantic (- Serbian Internet pioneer with the pirate station Radio B92) asked the audience how many were blogging the conference.There was a dismal show of hands. "Mia culpa", I thought. We had plush cinema seats and there was wi-fi access throughout the building- this was a bloggers paradise. At our dinner gathering that night we also mused on the fact that few of us blogged.

From Radio B92 days, Drazen continues to explore the digital frontier in New York (- "I was amazed, New York was harder going than Belgrade when it came to support from the wider tech community"- my paraphrase). His experiments with non-profit NYC Wireless with a laptop-WiFi broadcast process, and with P2P-TV and video blogging in the unmediated project, have captured the imagination of many.



"The Revolution Will Be Sketched Out on Paper (Then Televised)", muses Glenn Fleischman's blog, "It’s not just a sign of things to come. It’s a sign that things have changed".

"On January 14, 2003, we met in New York's Bryant Park for the first successful live broadcast uploaded over a public wireless network for transmission over cable TV", explains Drazen,

We established a wireless connection through a local, public WiFi network maintained by the non-profit NYC Wireless, and broadcast from that spot to a computer at MNN studios. The video and audio was captured by the camcorder and fed into the laptop, where it was encoded as MPEG4/AAC streams, then sent out as a unicast stream via the WiFi connection. At MNN they played the stream through a scan converter — which converts the stream on a computer into a video signal — then broadcast it live on the air.

Braving the freezing winter afternoon of Bryant Park with two lap tops -one as a backup in case of battery failure due to the cold. The proof of concept exercise was both simple and profound:

The motivation for this exercise was to demonstrate that classical TV production equipment, requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars and a specialized infrastructure, is becoming a thing of the past. It is now possible to use a laptop-Internet system for on-the-fly transmissions from remote locations for distribution over a television network. The hardware and software we used was deliberately chosen because it is within the skill level of even a moderately technical person.

Read the whole of Drazen's essay P2P vs Infotainment here.

[Today I was online, viewed some blogs and the impulse took over to follow the link to blogger.com. And so caution to the wind, lets dip my non-tecchy toes in the water and start a blog].