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Photo from Redvers on Flickr

For most of my professional life, I’ve worked for very large television networks. The biggest of the big. In Canada, think Global and the CBC, in the US, think NBC. The operations that have many affiliates and thousands of people working for them. They are massive organizations that bring in billions of advertising dollars. These ad dollars came from the television network’s ability to gather millions of people in their living rooms to watch the same program at the same time. When these massive businesses were built, television became the primary conduit for information and entertainment for people around the world. Nothing like it had ever existed in the history of humanity.

When Neil Armstrong took the first steps on the moon in 1969, an estimated 600 million people watched on TV, a full 1/5th of the world’s population. Television was barely 20 years old, but it was, and still is, the dominant communications platform.

While television defined an age, it wasn’t the medium itself that built the massive businesses, there was something more at work. You’ll find it at the intersection of government and money.

Broadcast television was build on the scarcity of the transmitters

There is only so much radio spectrum to go around, so the government sold radio spectrum to the highest bidder. Generally the highest bidders were the people who could also afford the massive costs of putting up the transmitters. That double barrier to entry, the available spectrum and the money to run it all, created such scarcity in the marketplace that a TV transmitter became a license to print money.

But what happens when the transmitter is your webcam and a laptop?

The economics of the television business are changing rapidly because anyone can broadcast to anyone using a laptop and Youtube. Companies no longer need the time between the reruns of Gilligan’s Island, they can talk directly to their customers online.

Now television isn’t going away anytime soon, but what does this mean for your business? What does this mean for your cause? When the transmitter is in the hands of everyone, how can we change the world?

Canon 7D vs. Barbie Video Girl from Brandon Bloch on Vimeo.

OK, you’re thinking about getting a fancy camera to do some video blogging. But let’s face it, you don’t have a lot of money, and you have a whole lot of Barbie clothes lying around that aren’t being put to good use. Have we got a solution for you.

The surprising thing, for a camera that is essentially a creepy gaping hole in Barbie’s chest, the footage isn’t too bad. Just make sure to keep Barbie’s hands out of the shot when you’ve got something important to say.

Check out the original post at Buzzfeed

And so reads one of the famous early cartoons about the Internet, published in the New Yorker in 1993. Back then, in the Internet of text news groups and 14.4 baud modems, it was pretty easy to keep yourself hidden.

Now, 17 years later, the social media explosion has changed that somewhat. Funny aliases have been replaced by real names. Your real identity is necessary if you want to get the most out of Facebook, or else how will people find you? While we are actually showing our face online, to most people, we are still just a face on the screen, not a real flesh and blood person. Getting to know someone online is still pretty much through reading what people write. And if you have a hard time writing (like I do sometimes), it doesn’t really convey what it would be like to sit and have coffee with you.

So how can you give people the idea of what it would be like to be in that coffee shop? Fire up the webcam and record a quick hello. Immediately you’ve become that much more real in the minds of your online friends. And when you’re competing with dogs with keyboards, a little humanity displayed through online video goes a long way.

Holy crap it’s been a long time since I’ve posted something here! Just wanted to let you know that we’re revamping the upNext Media brand with some new product offerings and some tweaks to the website here.

While I’ve been absent from these pages, I’ve been busy on what is now our main outlet, theV3H.com, where you can experience the best of news and events about the Tricities.

You can see some of the quick videos we’ve been doing for theV3H at our Youtube channel, TheV3HTV. Suffice it to say that upNext Media has been busy building web properties, and soon we’re going to be launching new products and services to help you make awesome online video. Stay tuned!

Jacob, my youngest, has just turned 1 and has recently taken a few steps on his own. I wanted to get a little video camera that I could whip out and crack off some shots and share them online fairly easily. I ended up getting a Flip Mino HD. This tiny little camera shoots in high definition (very compressed, but still) and has a USB connector right on board to plug into the Macbook Pro and start editing. I got it airbrushed with the logo of our Tricities website, thev3h.com, and shipped out, all for around $300.

Here’s an example of what can be done with a $300 camera and a copy of iMovie ’09. Due to the lightness of the camera some of the shots are a little shaky, but overall it’s pretty neat.