Old News: Internet Multicast Channels

In 2009, at the prompting of some IT folks at Gustavus Adolphus College, I became interested in Internet2, in internet multicast channels, in the possibility of using the web to provide cable programming to minimally served communities. I was remembering the early days of Minnesota television, when the university was delivering content on Channel 2 because there would otherwise have been dead air. The idea never went anyplace; my supporters moved on to other projects before we could give this a try. I think it is still an idea that, in some new incarnation, has potential.

This is a talk I gave at the Spark Festival at the University of Minnesota.

For about 13 years, I have produced and directed The Bat of Minerva, a idea-based interview show, running Saturday night on Regional Channel 6 in the Twin Cities, reaching an audience of over 600,000 households. My guests have been thoughtful people at many different levels of education and scholarly accomplishment; a substantial majority are scholars and teachers at academic institutions.

The Bat comes out of some scary thinking. I am convinced that ideas are broadly interesting, that scholarship and creative work matter, and that the predators and thugs who dominate the broadcast media threaten the very idea of generosity and benevolence in our public culture.  I have worked very hard to hold up what I take to be important and to throw a counterweight to the forces that seem to me to be pushing us toward cultural disaster.

I have found some great allies and supporters: the Minnesota Humanities Commission, independent booksellers, liberal arts colleges, private foundations, and entities within the University of Minnesota, most recently the Institute for Advanced Study and, by their introduction, Doug Gears and the organizers of the Spark festival. Last year, I did two days of taping at the Festival, producing a significant interview archive to complement the performance tapings during the festival. I will be doing taping here again this year, both for cablecast and as part of an ongoing record of the festival.

So, I am here as a generalist, not as a new music enthusiast. I love talking to composers and performers. I want their energy, their ideas, their lives and their work to be available to a broad audience, as part of a project to make the riches of scholarly and creative activity broadly available.

I asked Doug for a place on the program today because I have encountered a new tool for spreading the good news  -- high quality multicast channels on Internet 2. Internet2 is an internet connection for exchanging information among colleges and universities (large and sometimes very small) throughout the world. There seems to be no good map of either the universities connected, or, more important, which of the universities connected are actively exploring the uses of this information pipeline. Internet2 can carry very large amounts of information, enabling the transmission of channels of video at broadcast quality or better to wired connections on institutional campuses. Any wired computer on campus becomes a display for high quality video.

I have encountered some fine experiments in my brief time exploring this medium. GRnet has two channels up, running very high quality movies from all over the world, documentaries, news, and children’s programming – all subtitled in Greek – a richer mix than our public broadcasting can manage – commercial-free. The University of California carries a schedule of major lectures under the title UCTV. Connecticut College runs non-stop dance performances. And then there’s the silly stuff: the seals in Monterrey Bay have a channel to themselves, as does a particular traffic camera situated next to a palm tree somewhere. There is surely much more there, but one has the sense of a medium still in its infancy.

When the excellent tech support people at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter suggested at a faculty training meeting that it would be possible for faculty to contribute content to the internet2 multicast schedule, I almost rushed the podium. I fought hard to get a single show established, to represent, amidst the fundamentalist preachers and the chiropractors and people selling duck paintings, an outpost for the best thinking I could find in the scholarly community and in the wider community of reflective people. I always knew we were too few:  a little sense drowning in noise. But to have a channel, 24 hours times 365 days every year, to make the case for good talk and creative engagement with the world – that was what I had always wanted. So, they gave it to me. I sent them old interviews, of which I have a basement full, and they massaged them appropriately and put them up on a channel, available to them, me, my students, and – if they knew where to look – the academic world at large. I now have about a 10 hour cycle looping, under the provisional name, “The Idea Channel,” and I hope to expand to 84 hours, a broadcast daytime week, by the time the demo project is finished. So far, I know of one regular viewer of the channel: me. I am very soon going to coerce my students into watching it. But Bell’s first call was just to Watson. Every new medium starts small.

I am here today to suggest that people interested in new music begin fooling around with internet2 multicasting. I think this technology has potential to complement gatherings like the Spark Festival, by extending the festival’s reach, by keeping widely scattered composers, performers, and scholars up to date, by enticing new people into the area as practitioners and as audience members, and by contributing a solid representation of new music to a resource that, collectively, brings the full riches of the academy to a broad audience – in the spirit of generosity and celebration. I am here to suggest that a coalition of folks with Doug Gears’ vision and ambition might quite easily craft a superb communications and recruiting tool which would also do cheaply and effectively some of the basic work for which the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was founded.

Here’s one way I can imagine this working. I am crafting a channel, as a demo, the Idea Channel. It – or some other channel constructed elsewhere -- could easily devote two hours a day to interviews and performances featuring new music. The material generated at this festival is a plausible beginning. If festival participants at the various institutions represented here were to explore the prospect of gaining access to Internet2 multicasts at their institutions, they could watch these shows, or record the ones that interested them. They might also find that the channel’s material on the Global Middle Ages is interesting to them, or the material put up by the U of M Center for Human Rights.  They might come up with their own programming to add to the mix. Over time, the channel could become a reliable communications link for those interested in new music all over the world.

One might object at this point: why not just post everything to Youtube and send people a list?  Why not have “new music on demand?” I want to respond, “Why not?” I think lots of the material from this festival should be out there competing with the spanking videos and the instructional tapes on how to hook up your rv – and it is pretty easy to put stuff up. However, the quality – especially for long pieces – is pretty bad; one isn’t going to junk one’s television and rely on Youtube for entertainment. Internet2 multicast is astonishingly good quality video, and that matters. Also, and I think more important, it is not “on demand.” A channel is a place where one can be surprised, where one can find things one didn’t know about, where one can make unexpected connections. That has always been the magic of broadcasting in the public interest – it’s a place where educated and alert people find new things to think about. That was the great generosity of this idea, from the era of “university of the airwaves.” It is an idea worth reviving, not as an alternative to on-demand resources, but as a complement to those resources.

University of California Television provides an interesting model. They have a website listing their multicast schedule. This website is open to anyone with an internet connection. Access to the multicast programs requires a more specialized connection, but under many of the program notes are links to Youtube versions of the program or to opportunities to buy the program. Someone who happens to catch an interesting show on the multicast channel can sometimes review it on Youtube.

Let me sketch some possible benefits of having rich academic multicast channels available at colleges and universities:

1.   It provides an audience, and thus a rationale, for documentary production, for conferences, for performances.  One isn’t limited in one’s imagination to the audience one can assemble at one’s home institution. Folks at small institutions have new reason to enter public space, have new hope that people will appreciate their work for the right reasons. (I had never heard of Connecticut College. But their modern dance videos are wonderful. I’m hooked. I associate “interesting modern dance” with Connecticut College.)

2.   Academic administrators talk a lot about encouraging multi-disciplinary work. Surely, one early step in that process is just to make cutting edge work in a variety of disciplines accessible to students and faculty without the investment of taking courses, subscribing to journals, going to a public lecture. A broad cross disciplinary mix will not appeal to every student, but it will appeal to the best students, to those who will become cyborgs with the internet, developing as multi-dimensional scholars and artists in ways we can only dimly imagine. A new kind of self-educated person has become possible in the contemporary environment, and universities have a responsibility to make that possibility of broad synthesis available to their students.

3.   Universities spend fortunes promoting scholarly events – with tuition money – that have really negligible effect on student life. It is an elementary requirement of fairness, I think, that means be found to make the major campus events more widely available to interested students and also to faculty as supplementary material in classes. An academic channel could go a long way toward justifying scholarly conferences by spreading the benefits of those conferences beyond the immediate participants.

Up to this point, I have discussed the prospects for academic multi-cast channels  -- assuming that Internet2 is an academic resource – an information channel linking institutions of higher education. But I see no good reason why it would need to remain thus limited. Surely, all one needs to do to share the wealth is to run appropriate fiber optic cables from a local college or university to the wellhead of the local community cable operation and invite the community to take what it wants. If a community is using its community access channels to run print announcements of AA meetings and school lunch menus, why can’t those items be transformed into a “crawl” under dance performances and archeology lectures. Leaking one or more academic channels to local cable would provide a lifeline for intelligent people in small communities – and there are a great many intelligent people in small communities. Further, if this kind of use became widespread, channels might evolve that were plausible compromises between academic self-expression and “what local communities needed and wanted.” This resource could give new life to university extension divisions.

I am sure that you, hearing this, have one or both of these thoughts:

1.   There must be technical or economic or political icebergs that will sink this sort of project before it goes very far.

2.   I can imagine a version of this kind of channel that would be just hell – boring people droning on about stuff of limited interest, interspersed with badly videotaped dance recitals.

With respect to the first point: maybe so. All I am saying is: “I think it is worth finding out where the dragons actually lurk, rather than just assuming that there must be dragons somewhere.”  In my initial experiments, to set up the demo, I kept expecting some problem to kill the project – permission refusals, technical glitches, too little staff time to take on something this ambitious. At each such point, the problems pretty much evaporated. I think it’s worth taking this a little further.

With respect to the second point, “It’ll be soo boring,” I think I have some relevant experience. Academic television can be boring; some papers and lectures are really meant only for a small and prepared audience. But it is my experience, over 13 years of interviews, that people who explain the context of their work, its place in their lives, its origins in their experience, produce compelling television – not for everybody, but surely for that large segment of the population that appreciates good talk. Also, we need to remember how fast affordable video technology is improving. I just yesterday bought my first high definition camera, in a pro-sumer version. The price was daunting, but not beyond the range of  a serious amateur, surely within the budget of an academic department or center. There is no reason why we can’t get good production values very cheaply, at least with modest projects.

I put this paper out as an invitation to people at Spark to contact me about exploring the potential of internet2 multicasting as a new music communication vehicle. I am offering the same invitation, this afternoon, to people doing a multidisciplinary project on the global middle ages. There is a lot of room on a multicast channel for communication within disciplines and across disciplines. Please come join me in exploring this resource.