Francis Ford Coppola once predicted that the next Mozart would be "a little fat girl in Ohio... with her father's camcorder." On Thursday, the Free Speech TV Web Project launched an ambitious service called DIY-TV (Do It Yourself Television) to ensure that if the next Noam Chomsky or Emma Goldman turns out to be a 19-year-old geekgrrl with a QuickCam, she'll have access to a world-wide audience.
The brainchild of Free Speech TV webmaster Joey Manley, DIY-TV will furnish free disk space and use of a RealVideo server to any netsurfer with a progressive vision and the basic image-making tools - available as shareware linked on the site - to deliver that vision on the Web. "I see DIY-TV potentially becoming like Usenet, where people use video to express themselves and their first thoughts," Manley told Wired News.
Don't expect America's Funniest Home Web Videos, however - or home-rolled testimonials for the National Rifle Association. The posting of contributions to the server will be moderated by Manley, who is up front about his own biases and those of his employers, the Free Speech TV cable network, which has attracted 7 million viewers for such programming as Dyke TV, Streetwise: Youth Activists Speak Out, America's Defense Monitor, and Viva Zapata! Viva La Raza!
"Programs with a progressive, activist, and/or multicultural stance will be given priority above all others," the site advises. "We won't post commercial garbage, right-wing spew, or anything boring."
To keep the range of voices as inclusive as possible, Manley encourages potential contributors to shed notions that video - even on the Web - has to be slick to be engaging and powerful. "There's this feeling of 'Oh, I've got to have Macromedia Director, and it costs thousands of dollars, and my computer can't handle it, so I can't make the video,'" Manley observes, calling high-end programs like Adobe Premiere "overpriced bloatware."
With freeware like DD Clip Free, Manley declares, "You can sit down at your computer and make something in 10 minutes." Offline activists with access to a video camera are invited to send in videotape for digitization and posting to the site.
Manley compares DIY-TV to the explosion of print zines during the punk era. "The zines invited participation," says Manley. "I want this to speak to people in the same way."
Free Speech TV has been making daily netcasts of audio and video programming since November, covering such topics as police brutality, AIDS, the incarceration of Mumia Abu-Jamal, phone phreaking, and the politics of cocaine trafficking. The site encourages the streaming of its programming through other Web sites, citing the distributed nature of Web content as one of the medium's most potent virtues. When the site offered Deep Dish TV's coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions during the last election season, over 100 other sites linked to the programs, Manley says.
Manley says the cable wing of Free Speech TV has to struggle for access to broadcast channels, which is obviously not a problem for the Web Project.
"Our problem - in a cacophony of other Web sites - is getting people to notice that we're here."
