I’m a guest lecturer at the University of Lund this week. The theme is online journalism, a subject that interests me a lot. Apart from the irony of me lecturing at the same institution that I once planned to attend, a lot of interesting thoughts have come up regarding journalism. Web TV for instance. I had to write it down.
It seems some have misunderstood the whole point of TV, or moving images, on the web. It’s not the fact that it can be done, and it´s not that people have suddenly opened their eyes to it. It’s that TV on the web can do things that regular TV can’t.
So why is so much of Web TV just a cheap, badly edited excuse for not owning a real TV channel? Because the people doing it are old media. And they tend to look at other old media to try to understand what’s going on. Bad idea, considering that most old media sucks.
Here’s five aspects I thought of that makes Web TV superior, and that should be used more often:
1. It’s on demand. Nuff said.
2. It’s endless. Regular TV lacks the space, and therefor the versatility, of publishing alternate takes, edits, or angles.
3. It’s interactive. Reader commentary – text, chat or video response – adds a new dimension to the conversation.
4. It’s fast. Update as often as possible.
5. It’s there. You need a semi-modern mobile phone – that’s it. The possibility to catch moving images has never been better. You can, and should be, unique.
tags technorati : television webtv tv media