The wait for Apple’s iPhone in the United States was a non-story — but also, perhaps, the moment when teleÂÂvision news changed forever. In the queues were people with small cameras hooked to laptops using mobile phones to upload live video to the internet.
They are ”lifestreamers”, people who simulcast their lives 24 hours a day. They had already blogged, Twittered, Facebooked, Flickred, podcast and YouTubed their lives. Live video was the next frontier.
Because they were there this news, in live video format, was loaded on to websites and brought to the public by people who were part of the story, not reporters. The news came directly from witnesses.
Two months ago, after cellphone video footage of the Virginia Tech mass shooting was available for viewing on CNN’s website — just more than an hour after the event occured — there was speculation that some day we would see video from a news event fed live, directly to us, via the internet. Well, that didn’t take long.
This changes the relationship of witnesses to news and news organisations. When witnesses stream their live footage to websites, news producers are not able to edit, package, vet and intermediate. All they can do is choose whether or not to link to witnesses’ news.
This means that we might not see the news on BBC or CNN but on witnesses’ blogs via embeddable players from services such as uStream.tv and Justin.tv, which enable lifestreaming.
This presents a challenge for news groups and consumers: How will they know where to find this news? For a time we might go to portals for live TV, but they are overcrowded with content — and, anyway, portals no longer work.
Instead news organisations may devote people to combing live video to see what’s happening in the world. Or collaborative news collectors, such as Digg.com, will find and pass on the word.
The real value then will be alerting the rest of us so we can watch on the net … or on our iPhones. — Â