“Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow”
write a history of multimedia interactivity, get a book deal,
get fired from the Internet start-up company and decline the book deal.
Life is weird!
PROLOGUE
Remember Y2K…? It was an interesting time to be sure, especially if you used a PC instead of a Mac – you never were quite sure whether the whole world was going to come to an end or not. It would be calamitous, some said – the sky would fall. Some pundits predicted the entire power grid would collapse and our bank machines would cease to spit out cash. So-called ‘experts’ said our credit repositories would cack and we’d all be left without a credit record… okay, so there were some good things about Y2K too!
Back in 1999 and into 2000 I worked as a film and video consultant for an online start-up company called Global Media.
Global Media started life as a strange amalgam of two separate companies: an Internet-integrated call centre based in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and a satellite television delivery service called Westcoast Wireless Cable based in the Fraser Valley area of B.C.
When a Canadian court announced that the distribution of American satellite signals to Canadian TV sets was illegal in the Fall of 1997, Global Media sought other means of making their fortune. By combining the two fields of their businesses, the Internet as a broadcast delivery service seemed like a prescient business idea, at the very least a good gamble. Globalmedia <dot> com was born.
But this isn’t a story about Globalmedia, or really even a story about the Internet. It’s a story about the Golden Age of television and how it reflects the tender beginnings of what became the World Wide Web. This story uses the history of television as a mirror of analogy, if you will, to compare how the two mediums grew into the communications behemoths that they are today. It also looks at the historical parallels and the cultural impact between the two, and the global influence they continue to wield. In the end, I show how and why the Internet has grown so much in such a short space of time and why it is no different from the way television, and before it, radio (and before it, the telegraph) developed over the last one hundred and fifty years. Make no mistake – there is less difference between television and the Internet than you think!
But for the moment, back to Globalmedia.
I had an interest in Globalmedia from the moment I first became aware of their existence. A professional interest as well as a financial one.
I had created and produced Canada’s first live television / Internet simulcast in the basement of CBC’s Vancouver studios in January 1997. I was also among the first few anywhere in the world to broadcast a network television program and stream it live on the Internet at the same time in December that year (Entrée To Asia: The Golden Thread – a sixty minute food and travel documentary for PBS).
So the fact that Globalmedia was now in the business of bringing streaming media to the masses was an area of the business that I was very keen on being a bigger part of. And so I joined their ranks in September 1999 – employee number twelve, I believe I was.
When I was let go nine months later (fired actually – a whole other sordid story!), there were over a hundred employees in the Vancouver office and three in New York City. I won’t go into all the tawdry political machinations and boardroom calisthenics that escalated during the preceding year, but suffice to say Globalmedia was headed for the dot.com dustbin and pretty much everyone inside knew it. It wasn’t a matter of ‘if’, only ‘when’.
A year after I was dumped the doors were locked for the last time and the company went from being a ‘global media’ darling to just another local business statistic. The stock price had gone from over $9.00 a share to mere pennies in a few short months, and the dream of providing a B2B and B2C streaming media-rich experience burst like so many other web start-up bubbles that year.
In January of that year I was asked to be part of a delegation that was to travel to a world television conference in New Orleans. Globalmedia was debuting its ‘total streaming media solution’ to the world of television buyers and sellers. They had a big booth on the floor of the New Orleans Convention Center and a handful of the company’s braintrust available to hawk, pitch and sell.
Michael Metcalfe, the company’s president and CEO at that time, and the company’s visionary, knew of my film and video background. Michael himself had dabbled in cinema as an actor and a producer and had the demeanor and attitude of a Hollywood high flyer. He asked me to go to the convention and write about my experiences for the company. He would publish my document on Globalmedia’s Intranet when I returned. He thought my experience and knowledge of television would assist the company in its creative planning, and make for interesting reading when compared with the rise of online entertainment.
And so that’s exactly what I did. I went to New Orleans and hobbed with the nobs, wandered the cluttered halls of kiosks selling every conceivable TV show imaginable and sat in on many of the seminars being held by ‘experts’ in television, Internet and the all-elusive (still elusive) concept of convergence. I came away with new eyes, but also with a familiarity that I’d somehow seen and heard it all before.
The research I did in New Orleans was deep, thick and varied – how to collate it all, and most importantly make it understandable to the staff of Globalmedia was the challenge. Most of the staff was under the age of 25 – I was not… not by a long shot! They had grown up with computers in the home as ubiquitous as toasters and steam irons. The debut of Apple’s iPod was still more than a year away, but Napster was for these ‘geeks’ akin to mainlining heroin. How could I make the subject of the Internet’s daring daylight raid on television’s territory interesting, compelling, and… well, real?
And then I remembered why the New Orleans experience had all seemed so familiar to me – the aging men in white buck shoes and pencil-thin moustaches, their gold chains glistening under the gazillion-watt fluorescent lights, selling television shows like so many fake watches out of the trunks of Dodge DeSotos and Ford Fairlanes. Everything old is new again.
Technology had nothing to do with it.
I wrote the document as a comparative study between television and the Internet. The technology and the attitude isn’t all that different and content is content regardless of how it’s delivered. Bandwidth was an issue – how fast, how clear, how big — but that was being dealt with. The early days of radio and television had its winners and losers, it’s mavens and crooks – the Internet as it was growing was no different. But both mediums relied on one thing to thrive and survive; both needed content. Without it, one was a box of jiggly lines with fancy dials, the other nothing more than a bulky e-mail aggregator.
I submitted the document to my publisher as a query just for the hell of it, hoping to find an editor who thought there might be some interest in expanding it into a ‘quickie’ book.
The response I received (within three weeks – highly unusual) was quite enthusiastic. They were willing to pay me a lot of money if I could deliver a complete manuscript within six months – they would publish four months after that, a quick turnaround.
I then did something fairly stupid – not the first time for me, not likely the last! I said to them, “I need another month to flesh-out the document. If you still like it, I’ll do it.”
Okay, they said. And then I dove into the deep end of the online pool and continued my research.
There’s more to this – there’s always more – but I’ll leave that till the end.
Over the next week or so, I will serialize the book outline here. It makes for interesting and enlightening reading, if I do say so myself.
Before I begin, I will offer the following caveats, notes and a disclaimer. First, the disclaimer.
Globalmedia (dot) com no longer exists, at least not as the company I originally worked for. That URL will take you to a completely different company that has nothing whatsoever to do with MY Globalmedia.
If you’re interested in reading more about Globalmedia and its demise, these URLs will tell you a lot (though not everything by a longshot!)
○ Globalmedia 1
○ Globalmedia 2
○ Globalmedia 3
○ Globalmedia 4
You will see references to the ‘Player’, and the ‘Globalmedia Player’ throughout the document. This was the company’s raison d’être – a RealMedia software-based media player that the company redesigned and branded with our clients’ logos and livery. Household names such as Playboy, NFL Films, Martha Stewart and World Wrestling Federation (pre-WWE) were some of the big-ticket clients we had.
The original document had footnotes and sidebars, which I’ve incorporated into the document here for ease of navigation.
Finally, keep in mind as you read the outline that this was researched and written throughout January, February and March of 2000 – seven years ago. A lot has changed since then – a lot – in both television and the Internet. So, the pop culture references are of the time, but the predictions, observances and thoughts, for the most part, have come to pass. There are a few holes and some chronological gaps, but I still think it’s entertaining.
Regardless, I think you’ll find that the basic premise still holds: television and the Internet are joined at the hip, one feeds the other — indeed RELIES on the other — and the day when one REPLACES the other is probably still a long way off.
And with that, I’ll have Professor Peabody crank up the ‘Wayback Machine’…
Or, as always, you can find this story and its episodes
in the upper NavBar under ‘Content’.
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