Vision of Open Media

The Possibility: A Nationwide Public Access Network

The public-access television community represents an enormous unrealized opportunity for public participation in the media. Access stations across the U.S. collectively produce tens of thousands of hours of original programming daily, but very little technology or content is shared. We have an opportunity to create an entirely new kind of television network that could build a viewership rivaling that of mainstream networks, but with the public—not advertisers—in the driver’s seat.

The Approach

User-Automation

In recent years, the user-automated business model has given small organizations the ability to have an impact rivaling that of any large corporation. Implementation of this model has allowed Wikipedia and its 5 employees to surpass Encarta and its staff of more than 2,000. It is how EBay is able to compete with Target, why use of MySpace is outpacing use of AOL, and how BlogSpot gained more readers than the New York Times. The approach is not to generate content, but to develop and maintain the structure within which the public can create, organize, and share ideas.

Denver Open Media’s model is designed to give people a level of control never before seen in public access: it aims to put the true power of the media in the hands of the community. With advancements in media and internet technology, we have the opportunity to level the playing field, to empower individuals to express their own agenda, and to use media as a tool for educating and mobilizing their own communities on a level we’ve only imagined before.

The Tools

All-Digital Content: Say Goodbye to Tape

In order to move forward, our content must be transferable, visible on the web, and easily accessible by both individuals and the public-access television community. Denver Open Media’s model is entirely digital, which enables producers to ingest their content into our broadcast system from any source format (and eventually via the web).

Computers Are the New TVs: Everything’s Web-Accessible

Deproduction and Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) have teamed-up to develop a $100,000 open-source Drupal web package for managing and automating every aspect of the digital access station. Free to any organization who wants to use it, this modular platform will enable access stations to move into a new realm of service to their community, and a new level of collaboration with their counterparts across the U.S. From equipment reservation to media rating and categorization, this evolving, collaborative web package is the backbone of the public-access revolution.

Rating and Categorization: Let the Viewers Choose, not the Advertisers

We must enable viewers to access the shows they want to see. With tens of thousands of hours of original content produced daily at access stations, combined with the hundreds of thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, and other sites each day, the choices are endless. Denver Open Media’s model is designed to simplify and standardize the rating and categorization process, which is implemented by users and follows open standards such as PBCore and MediaRSS. The end result will be a Googlification or Technoratization of the content glut, meaning that Denver Open Media will make it as easy for viewers to find content as Google makes it to find a website or as Technorati makes it to find a blog.

Licensing: Out with Traditional Copyright, in with Creative Commons

Traditional treatments of intellectual-property issues have no place in public-access TV and the web. Basic copyright is for proprietary fossils who care more about the monetary value their content represents to advertisers than they do about the value it holds for viewers. The idea is to get your message out, and Creative Commons allows for that while still protecting producers from being manipulated by commercial interests. All content created within the Denver Open Media model is released with a Creative Commons license.

Bandwidth: Yes, YouTube Really Spends $1 Million/Month on Bandwidth

The bandwidth to carry and share media on the web is a valuable commodity, and most public-access stations have access to enormous amounts of bandwidth not being used by government or educational connections. Those who don’t are able to partner with other stations or web-based media aggregators such as Archive.org and OurMedia.org for free hosting of media content.

Closing the Digital Divide

Access stations are here to serve communities (many of which are low-income) that lack access to the internet. Web-based and user-automated approaches are meaningless if people don't have to resources to take advantage of them, which is why access stations are in the business of providing technical equipment and skills to communities that need them. Both access stations and our communities benefit when new technologies are made available to low-income and other underrepresented neighborhoods: stations broaden their participant base, and community members can both make their voices heard and learn new technologies.