Philip Nelson

Interview – Dallas Morning News – “Tech puts TV Production in your home”

Tech puts TV production in your home

Low-cost systems let almost anyone become a TV producer

12:00 AM CST on Tuesday, January 8, 2008
By ANDREW D. SMITH / The Dallas Morning News
asmith@dallasnews.com

Video companies say they’re already redefining live entertainment with systems that let anyone with a few thousand bucks produce live television shows and stream them over the Internet.

High schools can broadcast road games to fans back home. Rock bands broadcast concerts around the globe. Churches broadcast sermons for vacationing members.

But only time will tell how many new types of entertainment Americans will make and view, thanks to products from both tech giants and lesser-known names like Plano’s ViewCast Corp. and San Antonio’s NewTek Inc.

“Live television broadcasts have always required million-dollar equipment and armies of expert operators,” said Philip Nelson, NewTek’s senior vice president for strategic development.

“With new technology cutting those costs more than a hundredfold, we’ll see an incredible flood of new programming. The lower cost of failure will free people to gamble with new concepts. I don’t think we can even imagine some of the stuff we’ll be watching 10 years from now.”

Mr. Nelson’s grand predictions belie the humble appearance of modern production equipment.

Many products, like Adobe’s Visual Communicator 3, are nothing but software for regular computers. ViewCast’s best-selling conversion cards look like electronic scraps. Even NewTek’s TriCaster, which the company bills as an entire production studio in a box, looks more like the back of a small television than the leading edge of a revolution.

Enormous capacity

But humble looks hide enormous capacity.

The anonymous sockets that line a TriCaster accept audio and video from cameras, microphones and computers. Users hook the TriCaster to a keyboard and monitor, which shows a virtual production studio.

A big box on the monitor displays the outgoing video feed. Several smaller boxes display the various incoming video feeds, along with any audio or video clips that have been stored.

Producers control the device by clicking on whatever feed they wish to air. They can even put graphics over the images – such as names and titles for speakers – or insert people into virtual sets.

Assembling a show on the fly feels much like playing a video game, which is exactly what NewTek wants.

“Much like Windows made computer operation visually intuitive, the software in these systems makes video production visually intuitive, so you don’t have to be an expert to do it,” said Tim Siglin, a contributing editor for Streaming Media.

However, Mr. Siglin noted, system operators better be prepared to work hard.

“These systems don’t just allow one person to produce a show,” Mr. Siglin said. “They force one person to do the job because there’s only one workstation. It’s very intense to be one person scrambling to do the work that once occupied several folks.”

Still, experience shows that the technology really does enable lone operators to make broadcast-quality video on the fly.

MTV used TriCasters to produce segments of The Hills. Fox Sports used TriCasters to produce its online pre-game and post-game reports from this year’s World Series. The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences used them to produce its broadcasts of the Daytime Emmys.

The TriCaster has even revived at least one entertainer’s career.

Comedian Tom Green, who rose to fame with a series on MTV, looked like a has-been after a bout with cancer and the failure of his movie, Freddie Got Fingered.

No one would support a comeback by risking the money needed for a traditional television show, so Mr. Green began broadcasting a talk show from his house and streaming it over the Internet.

Such low costs free Mr. Green to follow his passions rather than formulas designed to maximize viewers and ad revenue. If he’s having fun talking to a guest, he keeps talking – sometimes for hours.

Keeping costs low

And aspiring broadcasters need not even spend as much as Tom Green.

Anyone with a camera, a computer and an Internet connection can post videos to YouTube or Google Video without spending a dime. Anyone with a webcam and a few bucks to spend on Web hosting can send live programming over the air.

But YouTube videos lack the excitement of live television, and single-camera webcasts bear little resemblance to professional television.

To create something like broadcast-quality television, users need a good video camera, microphones, a computer and some editing software. The total cost of such a setup falls well short of $1,000, assuming that people use their existing computers.

Folks who want to go a step further and do live broadcasts probably need to add $5,000 to $10,000 for production equipment and another few bucks for Web hosting, which comes cheap from companies like Akamai Technologies.

Sports, sports, sports

Such low costs have led to an explosion of sports programming online. Small colleges that never appear on ESPN or the networks have begun broadcasting their football and basketball games on Web sites. Schools of all sizes have begun broadcasting minor sports over their Web sites.

Even high schools have gotten into the act. Locally, NewTek has sold TriCasters to schools in Dallas, Forney, Waxahachie, Lovejoy and Wylie.

The world may soon be able to see any athletic contest that takes place anywhere in the nation, starting with the Super Bowl and moving all the way down to elementary school water polo.

The real question is whether the technology will move beyond specialty uses and really begin to change entertainment.

Yes, dramatically lower costs should attract more people into video production, but there hasn’t been any stampede so far, not even in the feature film industry, where cost-cutting digital technology began appearing a decade ago.

That technology, by eliminating film costs and reducing post-production costs, led independent film lovers to predict a flood of cheap, innovative films that would bury Old Hollywood and its expensive, clichéd products.

Is this for real?

The movie flood has yet to begin, so it’s fair to ask why anyone should expect newer technology to create a deluge of alternative television.

“Because Internet connections are finally starting to get fast enough for good video,” ViewCast president Dave Stoner said.

“The mistake people made with film was to think that production equipment was enough, but you need a cheap way to distribute your video, too. Now that Internet connections are speeding up, quality content will start to come.”

So all the technical problems have been solved?

“Not quite,” Mr. Stoner said. “We need to develop an easy way for people to find content online, and we need an easy way to get it from computers to televisions. We’ll get there pretty quick, though, and then you’ll see some huge changes in video.”