Highlight: Justin.tv
November 4, 2007
It’s official. TV Sucks. I’m not a fan of so called reality TV tripe that is fed to viewers. Particularly Big Brother, yet I came across Justin.tv a while back as it’s creator took a camera around with him 24/7, documenting his actual life to the growing online community. Justin.tv then developed to allow the community to begin creating their own channels within portals from the site. These are essentially webcam sessions that can be viewed by a plethora of visitors. As with any other form of user generated content, the quality ranges greatly.
This is truly live, and the realist form of reality television, so obviously includes the boring things that occur in real life. Unedited, live sessions can be quite tedious, yet group chat sessions allow viewers to communicate with the “lifecaster” on screen. This allows an element of interactivity. Being tethered to a web cam connected to a PC doesn’t make the best television, so the pursuit to go mobile often relies on generous donations from avid viewers.
Going mobile creates a number of problems for the lifecaster, beyond the need for constant power, a net connection and lugging around a laptop or similar web connected device to stream the live content. One example being a trip to the cinema, where one particular lifecaster was told that he wasn’t permitted to record the movie on his trip to the cinema. Obviously, that would’ve breached copyright, so is somewhat unsurprising, what is surprising is how Ronald Lewis felt that he was being treated like a “pirate” and how passionately he felt about lifecasting every moment of his life.
Perhaps more addictive than Big Brother, and definitely has made me question how sad I am for (occasionally) watching, Justin.TV probably isn’t the future of television, but certainly puts a new spin on reality television.
