I'm following Apple's World Wide Developer's Conference today at work and lamenting the fact the thing wasn't being broadcast live professionally. What frustration. There's obviously a market out there for airing this kind of thing. You'd think even a fraction of the 40,000,000 iPhone owners out there might not tune in to events like MacWorld and WWDC. Sports fans will sit for hours watching ESNP 2 on NFL draft day. Why not tech events?
So here I sit, thousands of kilometres away listening to streaming video on one site, flipping through Gizmodo and Engadget's live blogging and following hash tags on TweetDeck and I kept wondering why a wire service at least couldn't be delivering real-time information the same way these independent sites are.
According to the streaming video site ustream.tv, which "broadcast" WWDC, more than 23,000 other people were following along the same way. I put broadcast in quotes because the video was brutal and the audio was choppy and interrupted constantly with rapid bursts of typing and thunderous applause that forced me to remove my headphones, the difference in volume was so loud.
But ya know, it was the best thing out there and kept me thinking that next time, next time wouldn't it be great if...
The whole episode drove home the fact that MSM has to figure out a better way to deliver these one-off events. The most prophetic tweet came from a blogger and music industry watcher I've recently discovered -- Bob Lefsetz, who wrote: "Gizmodo and other tech blogs update automatically, NYTimes does not. Mainstream media is inept, destroying itself."
Too true. We're in the business of delivering information, information that an audience desperately wants, and we can't. Or we don't. We should.