Freyburg

Max Headroom was one of the best television shows of the Eighties. In fact, it’s fair to say that Edison Carter is one of the reasons I got into television, along with Doctor Who director Graeme Harper.

Well, Wired has a tribute to our pixelated forefather, and the article makes the very good point that with the rise of Youtube, video blogging and web series we have all become Max. Everyone is a digital sound-bite, but the difference is we aren’t in thrall to all powerful television networks as portrayed in the show. Instead the internet has made everyone into a network, for good and ill.

Vancouver Sun tech reporter Gillian Shaw interviewed myself and several other technology enthusiasts on the day of the Apple iPad announcement, and you can check out my thoughts online on her blog (as well as in yesterday’s dead tree version of the Vancouver Sun.) Techvibes.com also reposted “The iPad cometh“. Neat!

In my capacity as a tech reporter for Techvibes.com, sometimes I get to check out some neat new tech, like these Sony E-Readers (the Reader Touch and Reader Pocket, in point of fact.) They don’t have a wifi or 3g connection, but they can read any format and can “borrow” e-books from the library.

It looks like web video series are finally hitting the big time, but not in the way the movie studios expected. Though TV networks and film conglomerates continue to try to appeal to an online audience, they do so with the same tired, lowest common denominator formulas that work n mass media, and the end result is pap like Quarterlife.

Enter The Guild. Created by Felicia Day, the web series chronicles the misadventures of a group of gamers involved in an MMO, or rather it milks the comic potential of what goes on beyond the game. The series has already been picked up by Xbox Live, and now a music video for the upcoming third series (which will also star geek hero Wil Wheaton) has hit over 1 million views, in addition to being the #1 tune on Amazon and iTunes.

How did this happen? Only a few years ago, this kind of traction just wouldn’t have been possible, but thanks to the internet, a small production company can target a sizable niche and actually do much better than studio product that targets everyone and pleases no-one. Plus the Guild just feels genuine, interacting with its audience about something they enjoy, rather than talking down to them and getting everything wrong.

According to a new article in Silicon Valley Insider, cable is starting to feel the pinch from online video, and no wonder. With old technology, no way to get a la carte programming, and a disdain for the customer that borders on the pathological, I’m not surprised cable is hurting.

Anecdotally I’ve talked to many friends who have dropped cable for online, some of them going so far as to get rid of their televisions. I keep my TV around as a video game monitor, but it doesn’t do much past that. And with the advent of iPhone apps like Al Jazeera English, it won’t be long before I pick and choose the channels I want (in my case, mostly news) and carry them around in my pocket.

Of course, Canada is even more of a monopoly than the United States, and to date we haven’t had anything as disruptive as Hulu arrive on the scene (though it’s likely on the way.) And our cable and TV execs are if anything in more denial than their US counterparts; when I was at the Banff TV Festival a few months ago one exec said with a straight face that “We’ll be just fine, we have HD!” Yes, never mind that all it takes is a clever bit of math and the web will soon have as good or better quality video than HDTV, you just wallow in your comfortable lies, TV exec.

Long term, I think the television industry as it stands is doomed. Eventually everything will come to our televisions, computers and other devices through the internet, and those who can adapt to that new reality will survive. Those that can’t…won’t.