Results tagged “live” from Future of Media Summit Blog

While on stage at the Future of Media 2008 Summit, I did have a bit of a brainwave, the crashing together of all my recent research on self-organizing social systems and the last five years thinking about media.

I had a bit of a vision, and it looks like this. There's an event - in Australia, it's arguably a footy game - which has many thousands of people in the audience. Many of these people have high-end smart phones (Nokia N80/N95 or iPhone, etc.) which have good cameras and 3G/HSDPA radios. Add in a nice piece of software, such as Qik, and you immediately have turned every one of these folks into live broadcasters.

OK, that's nice, and it's reasonably revolutionary. But that's not where this ends. That's where this begins.

All of that massive live coverage is essentially uncoordinated, at least to begin with. But as soon as the capability exists to have this massive live coverage, tools will begin to be developed which can coordinate and crowdsource this coverage.

Consider: these mobiles all have AGPS receivers - they know where they are. They can all handle a large amount of IP traffic (both up and down). This means that it should be possible to create tools which allow the users (live broadcasters) themselves to optimize their coverage. So that everyone is getting a unique shot.

Plus, all of this will be fed into a master "console" - again, available to anyone - so that the streams can be chosen, mixed, and rebroadcast out to a broader web audience - all in real time.

This is where Qik is going. Perhaps not this year. But certainly next year. And I can see a huge market opportunity for these tools, for the audiences these tools will aggregate, and for the events thus covered.

That's just the beginning. I've just scratched the surface. But this will be huge.