OK, so I watched Mitt Romney's speech on religion in politics on my computer this morning--indeed, from his presidential campaign website. Yes, the speech was carried live, on all three cable networks, and on all their websites too, I am pretty sure, but mindful of the issue of convergence--when all media are funneled onto one screen--I wanted to see what it was like to watch it from Romney's own website. (Screen grab above.)
Of course, I generally prefer to consume my news along with intelligent commentary from experienced journalists, or with fair & balanced commentary from experienced experts. So I don't particularly recommend the "Mitt.tv" route, and besides, the sound quality on Romney's site was bad. There's a reason why TV emerged as the art and science that it is--because there're distinct skills required, distinct forms of professionalism required.
So TV has a distinct edge, when it comes to doing one thing well.
But what if we want to do a lot of things--What if we can't decide? What if we want to surf around? Specifically, what if I had wanted to watch the press conference by the Omaha cops in the wake of that tragic mass shooting at the mall yesterday?
It goes without saying, sadly, that cable is at its best with breaking news, when there's genuine suspense as the outcome. And that was the case on Wednesday, as the shooting news broke. As The Cable Gamer has observed many times on this site, news is the ultimate reality show. So we don't need a fancy set for fake "friends," mixed up with fake drama among fake "enemies." Nor do we need a bunch semi-scripted, semi-rigged contests among carefully selected "contestants."
All we really need, to enjoy our daily dose of drama, is the whole big wide world out there--the universe around us is our best "set." Thanks to webcams and wireless, everything can be news these days; that is, it can be processed into news, and consumed as news. To be sure, there's not a lot of money in such processing, but many won't care--such as the Romney campaign, for example: the campaign was happy to provide the TV show live and without commercial interruption, and it's still up there, on the site, seven hours later, and presumably will forever.
In the meantime, blogs, vlogs, Flickr, MySpace, etc, are all providing folks with the rudiments of a "TV channel." Most of what's posted will be judged as trivial, of course, but everything is important to somebody. And yes, the audience for each little mini-performance and micro-event might be negligible, even non-existent, but to repeat, if somebody took the time to post it, then it's important to an audience of at least that one person. And in a world of unlimited choice and competition, the consumer is truly sovereign in his or her choices; we might pause to ponder, for example, just how many ways a news consumer could have consumed Romney's speech today, in live real-time form. That should put the best efforts of each discrete news provider in a perhaps depressing perspective.
It's no longer the networks saying, "You Sit, You Watch," it's now the customer saying, "Catch Me If You Can."
But to go back to my question above: What if I really wanted to watch the Omaha cops, or maybe pandas playing, or maybe the paint drying somewhere, courtesy of some webcam? The Internet provides that option, albeit in an unstructured way. And so the question is who will bring some order to that challenge, within the familiar framework of news.
Because the trend is going to continue. Because if young Europeans prefer the Net to TV, then the truth can't be much different for young Americans. And on both sides of the Atlantic, those youngsters will age soon enough, and eventually they will all be the prime consumers that all advertisers hunger for.
So the cablers will eventually have to figure all this out.
