BEAM 1.1/BE-IN |
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by Cyberguy |
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 Being out in front of the trends that society and technology throw at us is a big part of what the Be-In is about. That's been my playground for longer than I freely admit. In 1996, the Eighth Annual Be-In staged one of the first live Netcast events anywhere. Ever. And it was quite the challenge. All the more fun.
So what is a Netcast? One of its high-visibility aspects is streaming media. This is audio and/or video that is captured via digital cameras or converted to digital information while it is happening, then immediately uploaded to a server capable of "flowing" that information to browsers wherever they may be. The news was that anyone with connectivity could now make themselves a broadcaster (or more accurately, a "narrowcaster").
But jerky postage stamp-sized video is not a lot of people's cup o' tea, so back in '96, Be-In producer Michael Gosney and writer/editor Carla King invented a new kind of journalism, dubbed "on-the-fly-photojournalism" or live reportage. Carla managed a team of writers and photographers who scoured the event for happnins' worth trumpeting about. The writers, who had specific assignments, but were also free to respond as the spirit moved them, wrote their pieces in the heat of the moment, acquired appropriate digital photos, and delivered the finished goods to the Bridge (netcast central control) where "uploader" Eric Kalabacos, shared them with the world in close-to-realtime by uploading in tight intervals to the website. Be-Ins 9 and 10 both had even more elaborately produced netcasts, with Carla and John Graham still at their respective helms on the Bridge.
That well-proven technology included a Mac PowerBook and PhotoShop 4.0 for processing the images, which were then passed to a Pentium PC running MS Front Page (could have been any text editor) and an FTP (file transfer) program to upload the files we were making, as the event was happening. The skillful human beings included the Be-In's (and Radio-V's) Landon Elmore handling the image side of things, with yours truly (ably assisted by Sharlene Durfy) doing the HTML and uploading. The many photojournalists like dmarie, Jackie Dunne, Amy Carr and Kelly Durkin helped us to create the captions and descriptive copy at the very moment the pages were going up. Have you checked 'em out? Not bad, for the wild frontier! |
Fact is, the whole idea of
bringing satisfying multimedia to people over today's wimpy Net connections is more
trouble than it's worth. But the Be-In has always "pushed the envelope" anyway,
and actually helped pave the way for tomorrow's broadband distribution, which promises to
be way cool. In '96 you could barely get audio to stream, let alone video, which was
handled for us in '99 by Graham Technology Solutions (under the supervision of founder
John Graham). Mitchell Stein of Outpost Production Services brought multiple camera input
of the performances and environment areas to John's operation. Graham then took the raw
digital video, compressed it into a form that streams, and voila, "Net video"
right off the Be-In's website.
The trick to this treat is to
automate translation from straight text and graphics to well-designed, edited, and
produced pages in the web's language of HTML. In those prior years, this had been an area
where we were just too far ahead of available technology, and it never worked quite as
well as we'd hoped. So this year, I suggested we combine proven technology with some good
ol' dependable human skill to bring these photojournalistic pages of the Be-In online.
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