Media Sphere

Al Gore has proven that there can be life after politics. He's written several best-selling books, received an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, helped develop Current TV, a cable television station focused on getting young people interested in the world around them. and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week. Seven years ago, he was running for president and since that time he's done all this.

Today Current launched a new website at Current.com that not only brings all the television content to the web, but also seeks to build a new social media platform. The site has a completely new look, a wealth of new features, and a few components seem to have been pushed out the door. When a visitor first stops by Current.com, they are greeted with a tutorial introducing the new site.

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Are you a videoblogger, a You Tuber, filmmaker, or a video journalist? If so, check out RUNtv, a new television show on peralta.TV that I have been developing for the past few months. The two-hour weekly show features short form videos from all genres and provide an opportunity for you to get paid for your work.

Viewers and visitors each week will be invited to vote on their favorites, and we will be giving out cash grants to the top three videos every episode. First place gets $250, second $100 and the third place film will receive $50. Our season finale will feature all of our winners and a few favorites and will offer $1000, $500, and $250 to the favorite videos.

Videos can be submitted electronically, or by mail. All electronic submissions need to be of a high enough compression rate for air on television. FTP available upon request. To submit your video send an e-mail with the link to josh(at)riseupnetwork.com, or simply leave a comment where we can find your video. If you'd prefer to mail us your submission, send to:

RUNtv
c/o peralta.TV
900 Fallon St.
Oakland, CA 94607

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.

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Before YouTube became ubiquitious, and long before they were snatched up by Google, Vice President Al Gore launched his own experiment to democratize television: Current TV. Initially introduced to the public with a series of gatherings at bars and colleges as INdTV, the moniker Current TV was announced with great fan-fare in April of 2005 prior to the station's premiere that August. Although initial reviews of the station were luke-warm at best, it was their initial submission terms that led many of us video creators to stick to other distribution avenues. The good news is that Current TV now has terms that are far more reasonable.

To understand the concept behind Current TV, simply imagine what'd happen if You Tube were to buy a cable television station and you're about 90% there. Add a studio space for the hosts to mingle with celebrities ala MTV and you've pretty much got Current TV. The content is all over the map, and a team of employees and contractors help supplement the material submitted to the site. Submissions are voted on, and the winning submission each week is automatically put into television rotation.

Originally, all content submitted to the station was provided under a six and then later a three month period of exclusivity. In other words, if I wanted to upload my documentary I had to choose between Current, my personal blog, and You Tube. This limitation discouraged those with their own audiences from posting to Current, and many of my fellow video makers expressed their dissatisfaction with these restrictions. Today, Current TV's terms allow you to post your video wherever you see fit provided that you don't use Current's music library. It's rare to be able to point to a company that finally listened to its well-reasoned critics and did something to remedy the situation, but from the rights perspective Current is one such company and deserves to be recognized for bucking with the lawyers and media 1.0 execs and finally doing what made the most sense.