trashcanland – screen caps from your 80s childhood

Those of who enjoy the retro video curation of Network Awesome or the VHS mining of Everything Is Terrible, but don’t want to commit whole minutes to watching whole clips might like a tumblr I just stumbed on to, trashcanland, which strips minds the impacted VHS landscape to unearth the best 1/30 of the second.

The site is the work of DJ Daniel J. Cashman who seems to acquire a lot of VHS tapes. Then he takes screenshots and posts them to his tumblr. Sounds simple, but the secret is in the editing. Just you see, when you’re on page 48 and you’re still clicking to dig deeper, you’ll know you’re stuck.

Not everything is a still VHS screen cap. Some are also animated GIFs, and other found detritus.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Behind Network Awesome – An interview with Jason Forrest

As I mentioned the other day, Network Awesome creator Jason Forrest dropped me a nice “thank you” email after I wrote about finding and enjoying his video curation site and channel. I asked him for an interview to learn more about NA, and much to my luck, he agreed. So here is our email exchange where he tells me more about the creation and raison d’être of Network Awesome.

Mediageek: How did Network Awesome start and how long has it been online?

Jason Forrest: I had the basic idea for Network Awesome last year in the summer of 2010. After working out the idea for a few months I reached out to Greg Sadetsky to program it. After an intense few days we began work on the site and 6 weeks later it went live on Jan 1, 2011.

Mg: Why did you start it?

JF: I started N.A. because I realized that there was a hole in the programming provided by the TV networks. I dislike current TV trends and wanted to watch more interesting content – most if it vintage. I also became frustrated by the uneven quality of video on YouTube and realized that a curatorial voice was missing in the landscape.

Mg: How many people are contributing to or working on NA?

JF: That’s the crazy part- we have 91 volunteers involved from all over. Most of them are writers for our magazine (60+) but we also have 20 video curators and then video producers, PR people and a few more biz dev advisers, etc. One of our most recent gang members is Isaac who is running our Tumblr site and doing a phenomenal job at it! We get 2-5 more volunteers every day!

Mg: How did you recruit so many people to work on Network Awesome in such a short amount of time?

JF: Because we program content that’s both appealing and unique it has been met with excitement by a certain type of person who sees this as an opportunity to share something they are passionate about. We’ve been able to build a great team largely by answering our emails and actually giving a damn about people! haha! The writers we work with want to get involved because they like the idea of writing about such interesting content. The video curators get to share what they love and everyone else gets involved because they think it’s cool. Also it’s just fun!

Mg: The approach of NA reminds me of eclectic video programs from the 80s, like the much missed Night Flight on USA network or the Z Channel cable network in LA. Were these an inspiration?

JF: Massively so! In fact we actually began Network Awesome Magazine as a direct homage to the Z Channel Magazine!

I’d say that the birth of the cable networks was and is massively influential on how we program our content and branding. If anything I think the current era of broadcast companies have lost that spirit and could use a touch of finding it again. (Maybe it’s already happening with MTV and Nickelodeon bringing back shows from the 90s?)

Mg: Were you influenced by other retro video sites, such as Everything Is Terrible, even though your approach is different?

JF: Not really. To be honest much of what we designed N.A. in reaction too was YouTube itself. We never considered ourselves to be a blog or even “just a website” but always as a TV channel. We think the main concept of N.A. is in the curatorial vision of our programming, and that can scale to pretty much any format.

Mg: Network Awesome’s organizing principle seems a lot like a broadcast schedule, or a DJ set, especially since the videos play in sequence. Why did you choose this format?

JF: Well, it’s amazing that you say DJ set, as I’m a professional musician / DJ and have been for many years. I actually never had considered it that way before – but of course you’re right!

We try to look at our site from the users perspective first and foremost. We try to present the most basic and clear way to deliver our content to our viewers and we’re always trying to improve. There are MANY improvements coming soon!

But to answer your question, I think traditional broadcast got many things right in concern to who people want to watch video and that online video changed these habits. We consider Network Awesome to be between the two and the trends in our viewership point to its relative success!

Mg: Why do you think someone would come to a site like Network Awesome instead of just go browse YouTube?

JF: We get asked this often and we fully agree that anyone can find anything on YouTube just as we have. But the problem is the time to find it and also the process of discovery can be annoying. With our channel you get all the correct links in the correct order plus information on the show and possibly even a article explaining it.

Beyond that you also watch the combined curatorial power of 20 people. When we focus on a subject we’re able to find a staggering array of amazing material – most of which one might never even know they were looking for it. This is sort of a major point, because we realize every day that the content we’re broadcasting has been largely abandoned by broadcast TV but it remains powerful, relevant, and even popular!

Mg: Who creates your retro-tastic video bumpers and IDs? How are they created?

JF: Joey Mansfield and myself [create the bumpers and IDs]. I established the basic branding but Joey is reinventing it all. I’m actually excited to see his emails because it means he probably made something that’s gonna make me jump up and down! haha!

The bumpers are a crucial part of the concept of N.A. because while people dislike commercials, they don’t mind the interruption or pause in the programming.

Mg: Network Awesome seems to rely a lot on content that other folks have uploaded to YouTube. Do you worry that some of it might disappear, either because the person who uploaded it takes it down, or because the copyright owner issues a takedown notice?

No! We think that’s GREAT! It acts as a natural erosion for us to keep our archive as manageable as possible. A take-down also means that the rights holder doesn’t want it there and we only want to point to video that people want online. Our archive is constantly evolving and we like the life it gives the site.

Mg: What are the criteria for videos to be featured on NA?

JF: They have to be interesting.

Mg: Is there anything you’d like to feature, but can’t find?

JF: Tons of stuff, but at the same time YouTube is literally an ocean of content. We have over 17,000 videos curated in our system, but that’s absolutely nothing in comparison to what is uploaded every hour.

Mg: What’s your most favorite video that’s been featured on Network Awesome so far?

JF: Wow, there’s so many, but it the moment it’s these 3:

Mg: What’s your favorite TV show from when you were a kid?

JF: Ultraman! And amazingly enough – it’s not on YouTube… haha!

A big thanks go to Jason both for putting so much effort into starting Network Awesome, and for taking some time for this interview. I’m looking forward to seeing NA develop.

Network Awesome – Curating YouTube for the video geek

Man, I could lose days browsing this site, Network Awesome. The site editors pour through YouTube finding the best retro videos that bring me back to my prime video viewing years as a teenager and young adult in the 1980s and early 90s.

Home video and cable television were just becoming mainstream in those days. Cable-only channels were a relatively new phenomenon, as were premium channels like HBO and Showtime. Commercial basic cable channels were low-budget affairs, desperate to fill a 24-hour programming grid in the days before infomercials became the default late night program stream. The boom in home video also meant that video stores were similarly desperate to fill their shelves with content to supplement limited supplies of expensive Hollywood blockbusters.

What this all added up to was a goldmine of b-, c-, d- and f-movie grade schlock pushed onto our screens. The kind of stuff a teenager with a VCR and cable just eats up. But also amid all the low budget dreck was the truly experimental and weird. To programmers and buyers it kind of didn’t matter as long as it was cheap.

Thanks to the widespread bending of copyright laws and YouTube much of these riches have been mined and uploaded to the interwebs. The problems for middle-aged geeks like me is sorting through the videos of cats, backyard wrestling and other truly low-effort detritus to find the real gems. That’s where a good curator like Network Awesome comes in.

Copping an early 80s aesthetic for its bumpers, “station IDs” and title intros, Network Awesome feels like watching Night Flight or late night HBO in 1982. The short programs, culled from YouTube, feature everything from old Space Ghost Coast to Coast episodes to trailers for awesomely bad and weird movies.

Going to the site is truly like tuning in a fantastic underground cable channel, because the videos just start up in a program stream, just as if you’d tuned in a TV channel. Nothing is started in progress, and you can jump around. But it’s better to experience it as a video mix tape, enjoying the short Network Awesome teasers, promos and bumpers sprinkled interstitially.

Complementing the TV channel is a magazine that I’ve only started to check out, featuring essays considering the programs and themes found on the video stream. Network Awesome is definitely one of those sites that is so well conceived and executed that I really wished I’d thought of it first.

Interview: The End of Television

Although the delay of the DTV transition to June 12 has taken a little wind out of the sails for the potential of a massive rude awakening for an American public unprepared for the sudden obsolescence of their analog TVs, the transition is still going to happen. While more households will have obtained DTV converter boxes (and that’s a good thing), the transition nevertheless will leave a huge swath of temporarily vacant spectrum ripe for the exploiting.

Back in December I blogged about a Pittsburgh-based project called The End of Television which planned an unlicensed analog TV broadcast of submitted videos on the original transition day of Feb. 17. I contacted Ian F. Page for an interview on the radioshow. At that point the transition was still more than two months off, so he suggested we do something over email, saving a phone interview for closer to the transition. Then Congress delayed our fun, but Ian didn’t give up — he just delayed the End of Television until June 12, too.

Ian was kind enough to still agree to do the email interview to explain the motivation behind The End of Television, and its relationship to other unlicensed broadcasting.

mediageek (mg): Please tell me the inspiration for the End of Television project.

Ian F. Page (IFP): I first heard about the transition to digital television a year and a half ago. The idea actually came up because some one explained to me that the streets would be littered with TVs and that there were specific protocols for recycling TVs. I had been thinking about ways to watch videos alternative to screenings and I began making a video that I wanted to show on TV. I had a burgeoning interest in electronics and after a little collaboration discovered that I could accomplish building a transmitter.

mg: Why is the transition to digital television significant, and why did you choose to mark it in this way, with an unlicensed broadcast?

IFP: I have always enjoyed moments in my life where some mandate or alteration in the daily round comes down from the mountain and WE have to adjust. I remember one day in high school when I overheard a classmate talking about how his cable company had switched the numbers of such and such channels. He was riled up about it. It is a totally insignificant change that somehow agitates the self-programmed thoughtlessness. It gives us a glimpse of the human behind the machine, a glimpse at the power of a medium, whatever that machine or medium might be. Daylight savings is another example, or when the fare for the subway goes up, or New Year’s eve. I like these moments and June 12th is another one of them.

I find the June 12th switch amusing in that the switch cannot happen unless people get involved with their televisions, so a passive medium gets a little physical attention. It is also amusing because the whole ordeal shows our faith in everything digital, the event is a nice marker on the way to accepting anything and everything more efficient and newer. The political activity behind the switch is also a loud declaration that TV is a right, not a luxury. The delay was a very interesting revelation for me, to read speculations and think about what it would be like if people didn’t have TV anymore. It brought back a conversation that I hadn’t heard in a while and from, what I read, the debate was really polarized.

mg: Is the project a political statement?

IFP: I am not approaching it in a political way at all, but the project leads to an interesting idea – the privatization of the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea of owning or trespassing on a person’s radio waves is silly to me. I do not think that someone or some corporation should be able to own a frequency. At the same time I do understand the need for regulation and allocation, since so many lives rely on communications.

Companies own wavelengths, like colors for example. John Deere green is just a wavelength like 88.3FM and both are private. The problem is that the frequencies for the public are ever decreasing. There was never any massive preservation projects for the electromagnetic spectrum like there was for parks, so now experimenters are confined to small frequencies. So if you want to experiment with radio waves and not become a ham radio operator, it is inevitable that you trespass.

mg: What relationship, if any, does the project have to unlicensed or pirate radio?

IFP: It is similar, the difference is only that I am modulating a video signal and audio signal onto a radio wave, rather than just an audio signal. That, and it is at a different frequency, but otherwise they are the same.

mg: Are you willing to share the technical details of your broadcast set up?

IFP: The set up is mostly commercial equipment and some modified ham radio equipment, nothing out of reach.

mg: How many submissions have you received? Can you tell us about any of the more interesting ones?

IFP: To date there are over 30 hours of footage, with more submissions coming in hopefully. The submission deadline is May 25th. I was excited to receive a submission from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, a local filmmaker who is getting involved in the project. The video is something he has wanted to have on TV for a while now and we are glad to give his work the setting it needs.

mg: Finally, besides the obvious need to delay the debut of the project, is there any other affect the June delay of the digital TV transition has?

IFP: The delay revealed to me the elaborate process a bill has to go through to get passed. It also means not as many stations will be turning off at one moment, which potentially lessens the impact of the project on the viewing audience, since there are more people prepared to receive digital television and not analog. Other than that, it is pretty much the same.

Thanks for the interview, Ian!

The End of Television is accepting submissions on VHS or miniDV tape through May 25. Send to:
The End of Television
331 S. Aiken st
Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Obsoletion Watch: Portable TVs

Analog full-power TV got a bit of a stay of execution this month, with Congress voting to delay the digital TV transition until June 12. The passage of the stimulus bill should loosen up some more money to fund DTV converter boxes to help more households avoid the loss of TV service. However, Bohus of RetroThing points out that there’s a class of sets that probably still will be left behind: portable TVs.

As Bohus points out in the video below, converter boxes are often much larger than the portable TVs themselves, and aren’t battery powered. Those are just a couple of reasons why portable TV watchers will be left will little more than home shopping networks and evangelical Christian low-power TV stations come June 12. Watch Bohus give a fun overview of the soon-to-be-obsolete sets:

Inauguration Shows that the Internet Still Isn’t Broadcast

Last Tuesday’s presidential inauguration was one of those moments where I think all business except for vital functions like transit and public safety stopped all over the country as people tuned in to watch Obama’s swearing in. Another thing that stopped for a lot of people was the internet. Arguably this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest live streaming video events in the history of the event. It was also one of biggest tests for streaming video over the internet, and the results were decidedly mixed.

I was at work on Tuesday, where one of my responsibilities is providing instructional media support. As soon as I got in that morning I started getting requests from people all over our building to set them up to watch the inauguration. Now, the building I work in is poured concrete monstrosity that acts like a Faraday cage, successfully blocking reception of most broadcast signals. On top of that, there’s no cable TV in building. So I advised anyone who asked about getting a TV that they should consider viewing a live stream. Then I went to go set up a live stream in a large conference room with a video projector. At that moment I realized that maybe the live stream wasn’t going to work out so well, as it took many different attempts on several different sites before we could get anything to stream for more than a few seconds. That was around 30 minutes before the inauguration was set to begin.

When I returned to my office all attempts to get a stream there–whether from CNN, Ustream or even the CBC–resulted in failure. A few minutes after the ceremony began I received an email from our central IT network department, advising us that our multi-gigabit campus network had ground to a halt due to people watching the inauguration online. Looking at Twitter and the CNN live Facebook stream I saw that we were not alone, as folks all over the internet were finding it hard to get a reliable stream.

In the end it looks like about 7 million people were able to get live streams of the inauguration, according to Dan Rayburn whose estimates are based on talking to actual content distribution networks. By any standard that’s an impressive simultaneous viewership for the internet. But it’s less impressive compared to broadcast television, where 37.8 million people watched the inauguration.

More illustrative of the difference is the number of people who were denied the ability to watch the inauguration due to capacity limits. That is, another 37 million people could have tuned in to the inauguration on broadcast, cable or satellite TV while still leaving capacity for 37 million more. Whereas on the internet 7 million appears to be the upper limit — past that nobody else could watch.
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Is The End of Television The Beginning of a New Resistance?

I’ve discussed the idea of reclaiming the analog TV spectrum when the digital changeover happens in February, and talked to Free Radio Berkeley’s Stephen Dunifer about his unlicensed TV transmitter kits. Now it looks like someone is ready to put the idea into action with The End of Television project.

The project is accepting video submissions on miniDV and VHS of programs that will air on VHF channel 2 in Pittsburgh, PA on the day of analog TV turnoff, Feb. 17, 2009.

Of course there’s a small element of risk in pre-announcing the broadcast, but the flip-side is that it’s difficult to pull of a collaborative art project without some degree of publicity. I hope that the folks behind the project don’t intend to broadcast from the address they’ve listed for sending the videos. Yet, if it’s just a one-day broadcast the risks are pretty slim, especially since I’m guessing the FCC will have it’s hands pretty full that day depending on how smoothly the changeover goes. I wonder how many phone calls field offices will be taking from puzzled viewers whose analog sets all of a sudden quit working (except for channel 2).

It would be great if TV microbroadcasters across the country would take the abandoned analog airwaves on Feb. 17 as a coordinated act of resistance against planned obsolescence and the accompanying handover of free but enormously lucrative digital spectrum to the nation’s major broadcasters (who then tried to lobby to keep their analog channelspace, too).

I’ve already exchanged emails with Ian, one of the principals behind the project, and plan to do an email interview for the blog, followed up with a phone interview for the radioshow closer to Feb. 17.