A Future for TV: The Collaborative Crowd?

At Ross Dawson’s Future of Media 08, Mark Pesce described a future for TV which I loved.

He described a way of filming sport in which the crowd collaborates on filming the event. I imagined hundreds of good quality, wireless devices in the crowd, sending the stream through an aggregator (possibly human, possibly not) that put the whole experience together into something that made sense.

The exciting thing was, the future was (crudely) already present. At that moment I was streaming the event live to 30 people who could not make it in person. I was also chatting with that group of people in the Tangler powered Chaser space that Pollenizer manages. I arrived at the event a bit late so I had a bad seat for the picture, but Stilgherrian was near the front and I was able to use uStream’s co-host feature to aggregate his stream with mine. So we had 2 cameras collaborating on the event. The future was present.

It was… salient.

Here is a recorded verison of my stream for the archive. Unfortunately it did not record the other stream.

Filed under Random Thoughts |