I think it can safely be said that we’re all well and comfortable with online video.
Androgynous men whining about Britney Spears’ celebrity, Rickrolling, animals doing things that – by all rights – should be reserved for humans. We’ve been there and seen it.
So what’s the next high? Where is there to go from here?
The shocking answer is: Live video. That’s right, the baffling morons on YouTube will now be able to use “brah” as a pronoun live to your home computer.
In summary, this means every self-important moron who thought you’d care enough to get text messages from their Twitter feed will be able to lifecast their way into our hearts.
Unlike most of the words I use in my column, lifecasting isn’t just made up. It involves broadcasting every detail of your daily life from a mobile wireless camera – like a cell phone or massive cyborg laptop setup. Unfortunately, cyborgs don’t technically have human rights and cellphone video looks like crap.
But, unless you’re an awesome cyborg or someone whose life is so awesome that it warrants crappy cell phone video, lifecasting is almost entirely useless. Nobody wants to watch me sit around eating Circus Peanuts, drinking Full Throttle and playing Dolphin Olympics 2 all day. God forbid you people see what I actually do at work.
Luckily, there are more pedestrian uses for live video online.
My favorite thus far has been Joost’s simulcast of every NCAA tournament game live, as it happens.
Joost is a streaming video product from the makers of Skype (good) and Kazaa (not so good, except for a brief period in high school) leveraging their expertise in peer-to-peer distribution and shiny interface design to deliver surprisingly high-quality video to users at decent speeds.
This sounds like a great idea, right? Joost has been the target of brutal player-hating. The interface sometimes breaks, the scope of clips can be a little narrow and, frankly, broadband in the U.S. is almost as uncompetitive as mobile phones, which means we’re getting shafted on bandwidth.
But somehow, they managed to shine during the WSU/Notre Dame game. Perhaps I was the only person on Earth too cheap for cable TV and also too lazy (read: hungover) to head out to the bars to watch the game. Or maybe no Joost user wanted to see the Cougars stomp the Irish. Whatever it was, I found myself huddled in the soft bluish glow of my laptop screen, watching a surprisingly good stream.
The part that I love (in contrast to TV) is I’m actually able to choose what else I want to watch when the game is over. If this was on TV, I’d be forced to choose between an episode of “Modern Marvels” about forks or MTV reinforcing stereotypes. Thankfully, the internet provides a variety of other choices, I decided to watch an episode of “Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job” and then a National Geographic short involving an octopus trying to eat a bird.
Quality entertainment.
For those of you whose tastes extend into the more uh ... base, there’s BlogTV, a streaming site that, from my experience, vacillates between a furry speaking Spanish over a soundtrack of Van Halen’s “Panama” to a serious discussion regarding calcium absorption. One time when I watched, I was greeted by a split screen of some sort of shaggy hippie with a New Zealand accent talking while a woman with a Sharpie wrote something on her admittedly shapely hind-parts.
Of course, YouTube founder Jerry Yang will make this all go completely insane, as he plans on rolling out live streaming later this year. So build up your cyborg kits (and forfeit your human rights), it’s soon going to be time for people to start consuming the dry, uninteresting details of your daily life live, online.