Simon Anderson
A dickhead with a camera: the Establishment’s dissident.
After my weekly SimonTV LIVE show, a mate in Europe hit me up. He’s building a new radio station and asked me to perform the occasional live DJ set.
“No problem,” I said, “love to.”
It took us about 20 minutes to configure. His station uses the Icecast protocol common in internet radio and supported by my distribution software so I simply added his station as an additional channel and hey presto! a record playing on my turntables in Auckland is getting broadcast live by a radio station in Finland.
Great to have this new capability and it got me thinking about my evening.
A couple of thousand people tuned in to my show across nine different platforms and young David Baker joined me at the top of the broadcast. I don’t know David but I watched one of his popular RapidQS Tiktok videos a couple of days ago and asked if he’d like to come on. He’s travelling at the moment but that didn’t present a problem, he jumped on from his hotel room in central London utilising the simple WebRTC peer-to-peer protocol, which is the same mechanism Eeryk McRae and I use to host our weekly Wednesday night show.
It’s all easy.
Content creators utilise a variety of tools and possess a variety of different capabilities but integrating these is trivial, thanks largely to open standards and open protocols. So trivial in fact that it can even happen on the fly. The astounding aspect though, is what that enables: collaboration.
Traditional media struggles to operate at internet time. Generally as close to real-time collaboration traditional media achieves is delayed syndication. These constraints are absent in new media.
“Hey mate loved your video want to come on my show tomorrow?
Yep what time?
8pm.
Sweet see you then.”
…
“Hey geez the next time you’re spinning some records could you send me a feed?
Sure thing, what’s the URL?”
…
“Dude I’m livestreaming this demonstration to YouTube and shit is about to go down. Want to broadcast to your chans?
For sure! Here’s the link…”
This ability to mix any type of content from anyone and, crucially, distribute it to an audience on numerous platforms where it can then be broadly disseminated through social sharing is a killer feature.
And better yet, it’s a game everyone can play.
The Fourth Estate abrogated its societal responsibilities a long time ago. Alongside losing their monopolies on distribution channels, they no longer enjoy a technology advantage and, indeed, are struggling to keep up with these types of innovations. As their audiences abandon them for internet time coverage, their creaking business models merely produce content that increasingly looks like yesterday’s replays.
It seems to me that the vestigial media’s producer versus consumer business model has been superseded by a producer and consumer collaborative model fit for the internet age.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
