By Adario Strange

“I’m the type who’d be happy not going anywhere as long as I was sure I knew exactly what was happening at the places I wasn’t going to. I’m the type who’d like to sit home and watch every party that I’m invited to on a monitor in my bedroom.”

-Andy Warhol

It’s February, and I’m sitting in a tiny London hotel room on one of the coldest days on record in the U.K. Recovering from a long night of Shoreditch pub hopping and attempting to watch the new local hit “The IT Crowd,” a sitcom about three computer support workers obsessed with everything but computers, I finally give up, shut off the television and decide to turn on what I really want to see. Not available on the BBC, or any traditional American television network, I wake up my laptop, which has just finished downloading, via high-speed Wi-Fi connection, the latest episode of my 12-month long obsession—“Diggnation.” Shot, edited and uploaded from a small home in Northern California, “Diggnation” features former mainstream cable TV hosts Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht discussing the tech news of the day (conveniently culled from their hugely popular website Digg.com) with a couch and numerous pints of beer as their props. Imagine a live-action “Beavis & Butthead,” where the grunts and snorts are more likely discreet meta-debates about the virtues of MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) versus PSP homebrew multi-player exploits, and you will begin to get an idea of what a “Diggnation” episode is like. 

Back in the offline world, MTV is celebrating its 25th anniversary and, amazingly, the channel may now be one of the most irrelevant video sources around for its target 12-to-24 demographic.  

One of the best-known photos of pioneering videographer Andy Warhol is of the artist sitting in a Manhattan studio next to a Commodore Amiga 1000 computer in 1986 as he talked about his upcoming MTV video show “Fifteen Minutes.” As the inventor of the “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” phrase reached old age, his multimedia tendencies began to strain against the confines of canvas and silkscreen and moved into video art and computers. Needless to say, if the artist knew that 20 years later, in 2006, a Harvard drop-out named Bill Gates and his technology behemoth called Microsoft would code-name their new venture into user-generated online video “The Warhol Project,” he would be overjoyed—and probably not just a little surprised by his own uncanny prescience.

Arthur Jensen: The world is a business, Mr. Beale; it has been since man crawled out of the slime. Our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality—one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock—all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

—from the 1976 film Network

The move on the part of Microsoft to enter the user-generated video content arena is just the latest on the part of several major companies to cash in on what has become the new currency of the Internet, and the possible end of broadcast television’s stranglehold on video content distribution. Amazon, the company that made its mark by selling millions of books a year online, will launch Amazon DV later this month. Described as an a la carte service, consumers will be able to download full-length, advertisement-free television shows and movies to their computers. Already in the offing is Amazon’s “Fishbowl,” a show starring comedian Bill Maher, complete with a live in-studio audience. The show is slick, highly produced and only available on the Amazon.com website. Maher opens the show monologue with an irony-tinged Mel Gibson riff, “What are you looking at sugar tits? I own Malibu!” Neatly tucked just underneath the video window displaying the show is an advertisement link for Bill Maher’s latest DVD, “Price: $14.99—Usually ships in 24 hours—Add to cart!” 

Finally understanding their creeping obsolescence, Viacom’s MTV network also launched mtvU several months ago as an online 24-hour college network designed to offer exclusive online video content. Failing to capture the imagination of the Internet’s cool hunters, the famously cloistered MTV recently admitted defeat and announced a rare move to partner with Google Video to offer video clips on amateur websites. Judy McGrath, chief executive of MTV Networks, announced to the media, “…this deal with Google will enable us to follow and lead them to new places.”

The offerings, which include video excerpts from “Laguna Beach,” “SpongeBob SquarePants” and the MTV Video Music Awards, will allow website owners to share in click-based ad revenue. The catch? Participating websites must have at least 100,000 viewers a month and MTV will have sole authority as to which sites are allowed to participate in the program. Attempting to protect the Viacom brand is an understandable exercise, but such restrictions reveal the graying of MTV and their continued inability to grasp the true nature of the Internet. When you try to play the velvet rope game with online content, people will either break your locks, or ignore you completely—either way, you lose. 

User-interface expert Chad Hurley, and programmers Steve Chen and Jawed Karim understood this when they launched YouTube from their California apartment in February of 2005. All former employees of PayPal, the team pooled their talents to come up with a video sharing environment that has become the de facto everyman’s Internet television network. Called by some “the Napster of video” and spawning scores of imitators (among them the all-sex PornoTube ) YouTube has become leading source online for any video (under 10 minutes in length) that matters. In addition to hosting videos free-of-charge, the site allows visitors to rate, recommend and comment on videos. But what started as a website populated primarily with amateur video has morphed into a place where television commercials, movie trailers and sitcom excerpts reside, often skirting copyright concerns. New York based Vimeo launched around the same time, but has failed to generate the same amount of excitement. 

Rumors that YouTube was up for sale for roughly $400 million raised the stakes for the team from tech hobby to mainstream media game changer. After Hurley’s conspicuous visit to Allen & Co.’s recent invitation-only Sun Valley retreat, where the likes of Rupert Murdoch (MySpace, Fox News), New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Howard Stringer (Sony), Tom Freston (MTV, VH1), Leslie Moonves (CBS), Richard Parsons (TimeWarner, AOL), Sumner Redstone (Viacom) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Paige hobnobbed, that rumored for sale number spiked to $1 billion. 

If the YouTube price tag seems inflated, consider the recent Pricewaterhouse- Coopers report entitled “Global Media and Entertainment Outlook,” which claims that the number of broadband enabled homes around the world in 2005 was 187 million, a sharp uptick from 30 million in 2001. The report goes on to assert that by 2010, that broadband penetration figure will reach 433 million. These numbers are important because broadband Internet access is the fuel that drives Internet video. 

Just a few years ago, that fuel was in short supply, leading to the stunting of an eager digital video community without wide distribution. Soho, New York-based Pseudo.com was the most famous online television venture to suffer from the Internet’s chronic “too early, too soon” syndrome. 

Founded in 1994 by Jupiter Communications co-founder Joshua Harris, Pseudo sought to give a voice to the local young artists in New York City by creating shows (first audio, then video) that could be accessed for free on the Internet. Early on the company generated enough hype to convince former CNN executive, David Bohrman, to hop on board as CEO. 

Appearing as a guest on one of the network’s first shows, I vividly remember the crowds of producers, hosts and guests—all sporting a mix of tattoos, piercings, skater gear and dreads—constantly buzzing as the next show was being prepared for live broadcast. Not since The Factory had lower Manhattan seen a loft with such creative electricity unbound and defying the rules of mainstream media production. Despite landing funding in the tens of millions, the company was finally forced into bankruptcy in 2000, claiming $4 million in debt and reluctantly laying off over 175 employees. In 2001 INTV picked up the pieces (which included hundreds of computer servers, video editing bays and the company’s massive Soho loft facility) for a paltry $2 million and relaunched the network. But today’s Pseudo is a shadow of its former incarnation.

Today the landscape has changed dramatically. No longer are huge studios and localized server clusters necessary. All that is needed is a camera and a microphone and you too can become the next Rocketboom. Hosted by Amanda Congdon, 24, and produced by Andrew Baron, 36, the daily online video show broadcast from Baron’s Upper West Side apartment cost a reported $5 per day to create and eventually earned the pair a $40,000 sponsorship from TRM Corp., a marketer of automatic-teller machines, after a heated advertiser bidding war on eBay. Unfortunately, once money came into the equation, Congdon and Baron parted ways, and now Rocketboom has a new host and the online video history books have recorded the first public producer/talent feud. Nevertheless, the tale of Rocketboom (which averages about 300,000 views per episode) has proven the viability of independently produced video shows on the Internet. 

Shows such as Binside TV, a New York-based entertainment review hosted by Shomari Harris, and the new online sitcom “The Burg,” (a scathing satire of the Williamsburg, Brooklyn hipster scene) created by Kathleen Grace and Thom Woodley, represent the opening of the distribution floodgates as video creators warm up to the idea that they are no longer required to chase the big studios for exposure, or, in some cases, profit. 

But as the tools for creation have become more accessible, and many of the indie shows debut more polished productions, the elephant in the room is the ugly question of what will happen when/if there are more people creating TV than watching TV? When everyone, everywhere, has their own video show, can anyone’s video really be considered something special anymore? 

As the rising tide of reality shows and navel-gazing weblogs have proven, there is large market for recursive ephemera. Nothing—from the mundanity of cleaning one’s bathroom to the random street attacks American teens are videotaping and uploading at an alarming rate—seems to be restricted from the menu. Anything is available, and nothing is taboo. But the finite event horizon for ubiquitous video creation/consumption is approaching and the attention economy of the public is increasingly fragile. In David Cronenberg’s classic film Videodrome, James Woods becomes so obscenely tethered to his television set that he is eventually sucked head first into it…and he loves it. As we move forward into the disintermediated future of online video, we’d all do well to remember the seemingly random mumblings of Andy when asked about his love of television: the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel. Fittingly, in such a new and foreign mediascape, the commercial break may emerge as our savior and lifeline to reality, breaking the pixelated spell. At least for 30 seconds.