Hey Livestream, your This Week On Livestream email depresses me. Every time it arrives it looks like you still reckon the most worthy thing to aspire to is being an old-fashioned broadcast TV network. Stars, celebrities, musicians, TV chefs, sportspeople, American Idol contestants, and this week — yay! — a royal wedding.
In other words, you’re promoting Livestream as being a wonderful new source of video, so very different from TV, by pointing to the exactly the kinds of people and things we can already see on TV. Gosh, there’s a unique selling proposition!
Now I get that you need to attract the attention of the great unwashed masses. Even though the royal wedding will probably be available on free-to-air and pay TV everywhere on the goddam planet, you still feel the need to wrap your lips around that revenue tit just like every other media business. You can’t help yourself. It’s in your blood.
But how about each week you highlight one, just one, innovative use of online video that simply wouldn’t have been possible before we had services like Livestream? Something made by and featuring no-one we’ve ever heard of before. Something that might only have an audience of a hundred people, maybe even only ten.
One.
Just one.
Please.
Because that might demonstrate how the ability for simply anyone to stream live video to a global audience will radically transform the media and, as a result, society itself. I’m assuming you do actually get that, right? And it’ll show people how Livestream can be a part of that.
Oh, and a few more things that aren’t white middle-class Americans speaking English wouldn’t go astray either. President Obama doesn’t count: see “celebrity”, above.