A TV revolution

Every night, after we finish our daily dose of soaps and serials on TV and after I finish my customary browsing of news channels, which mostly show high pitched political fights to score brownie points over other political parties, my wife and I, switch on these days, what is known as internet TV. I am so much impressed by this new channel of infotainment that I consider it nothing short of another TV revolution.

TV came to India in the seventies and colour TV in the eighties. Yet for next decade or so, all that we had was a single, Government controlled, channel known as Doordarshan. The channel showed, what mandarins sitting in their offices wanted us to see and were never really bothered about what watchers wanted to see on their screens. To start with, there were no microwave links to connect two TV stations located far apart, say Mumbai and Delhi, and each station had its own programming liberties. Sometime in late eighties, they managed to connect all TV stations by microwave links and things became even worst. Now, instead of local mandarins, it was the turn of the bureaucrats in Delhi to extend their control over programming nation wide. As a result of which TV programmes became even more dull and insipid.

Some time in early nineties, satellite TV came to India like a fresh breeze in otherwise stale environment of Government controlled media. The things changed rapidly, first came the entertainment channels followed by cinema, news, sports and documentaries. Finally with DTH, TV got liberated as territorial limitations also were gone and someone sitting in a far off village could see all the latest channels by just putting up a satellite dish.

What I have described above, is perhaps true for most of the countries of the world, to a greater or lesser extent, perhaps except in US, where free to air private channels with minimum Government control came into existence much earlier. Today, in most of the countries of the world, except for few exceptions, TV watchers can watch a wide bouquet of channels that are specialized to the core.

Even with all that choice, one basic lacuna remained. We could only watch, what channels want us to see, not what a watcher might be interested at that point of time. I would enumerate this with an example. Yesterday, I wrote a blogpost about the ruins of Moenjo-daro in Pakistan and my mind was occupied with that subject. I would have liked to see a short film perhaps on this subject, but I had no choice and could only watch what National Geographic or Discovery wanted me to see on that day.

More advanced countries now give you option of seeing TV on demand. Here also, firstly the selection is mostly restricted to films for obvious reasons and one needs to make a payment to see a film of his choice. We are all used to see free TV, except for paying monthly charges for the TV signals coming from cables or satellite dishes. The idea of making a payment again to get some programme of my choice, is not palatable to me at least.

Around five or six years ago, Japanese and Korean TV manufacturers introduced internet TV for the first time. These TV have their own internet servers and can be connected to internet directly with a LAN cable or through Wi-Fi, by using a small modem like device called a dongle. I did buy this kind of TV, few years back but my experience has not been a very happy one. The media servers built in these TV are not particularly good and are unreliable. Few applications work well and most of the time a watcher ends up seeing a geared wheel rotating around itself, till his patience is over and he switches it off. 

 

Around three or four years ago, Apple inc. brought into market a new device, what they named as Apple TV. It is really a small black box about 5 to 6 inches square in size. All one needs to do is to connect this box to your TV with a HDMI cable and power it up. Initial models of Apple TV were quite flexible and net savvy people immediately jail broke them so that other media servers like XBMC could be routed through them. Apple inc. were not very happy about this and brought in version 3, which is jail breaking proof and has to be used the way Apple wants us to use it. 

 

For people with more independent frames of mind, there are similar black boxes made by other companies like Western digital are available. These would work with any other media server. Readers might be puzzled about all these details of new hardware available and how it really relates to a new revolution for TV watchers, but that is where I am now coming to.

Let us take as an example, the black box that is simplest to use;Apple TV. There are three kinds of applications for which this little box can be used. First is of course the way, Apple wants us to use this. It (Apple) has built up an on line store, which it calls as App Store. Apple wants us to make purchases in this store (it even rents), for songs, videos and films that we want to watch; once we buy them, Apple TV would simply show them to us on the TV screens.

The other application for which Apple TV can be used is to run media like songs, videos and films that are stored in our computers, which can be linked by the local Wi-Fi network to the Apple TV. Here again the choice is limited and we can not possibly store every other film we want to see because of storage space limitations.

This finally leads us to the last application, which I just adore. It is totally free and the choice is almost unlimited. These are applications like You Tube and Vimeo, where people around the world, keep uploading songs and videos by thousands every day. Apple TV or other serial media controllers provide apps for these on the home screen. All you need to do is to select these and see a new world of infotainment opening up before your own eyes. I have mentioned about Moenjo-daro above. If you type these words in the search engine of You Tube, you could be awarded with many choices. I managed to see yesterday a film made by UNESCO on this subject.

For seniors like me and my wife, searching You Tube is like going on a treasure hunt. During last few nights, I have re-found hundreds of songs from 1930-40's to 1970's. Hundreds or thousands of music enthusiasts, who had kept the original records for all these years with them have converted these songs to electronic formats and have uploaded them for listening pleasures of people like me and you and that too at no cost. You Tube and similar Apps have programming that is really by the people and for the people.

I no longer feel bored and constrained by the routine advertisement filled fare offered by TV channels to us. At the end of the day and just before bed time, half an hour on You Tube works out to be a perfect prescription for a good night's sound sleep. This is nothing short of a revolution, a TV revolution.

4th February 2014

Internet, Rumours and the Government

Recent exodus of India's citizens from the northeast, settled in other parts of the country, back  to their home towns, has now definitely proved one thing; the tremendous mobilizing power of the new social media of the internet like Twitter, U-Tube and Face-book have on the minds of the people around the world. It is just beyond reach of my imagination, that somewhere, some criminally minded individuals, wanting to foment trouble, pick up some old pictures of people affected by natural disasters, morph them into some imaginary racial incidences and along with hate messages, release them on social media and ignorant ordinary people start believing them to be true and start running around. Unfortunately this is true and what happened exactly. Normally such messages should have been discarded by the netizens as crap and rejected. Instead of that happening, many netizens actually believed these incidences to be true and spread them around by using short message facility on their mobile phones. Subsequently, other people, who in the first place might never would have seen this hate stuff because they never had any access to internet, also became aware of the phony hate messages and a real panic began. The entire law and order machinery of the administration and the Government had no clue as they watched the exodus helplessly.

In a typical bureaucratic reaction, Government has now started banning some URL's or internet addresses, which they have found out to be the culprits. In the first place the usefulness of such measures, after the damage is already done, is very doubtful and secondly anyone familiar with internet can tell you that trying to ban sites in such a piecemeal way is like trying to harness wind and the efforts would be completely futile. The Government is now faced with a real dilemma about taking effective measures to prevent a repeat of this kind of mass frenzy.

It may be worth while to note, what happened in China in 2009. Xinjiang is the westernmost province of China. It has a majority of Uighur people, who are Muslims. Over the decades, Beijing Government has been supporting, settling of Han Chinese people in Xinjiang: a fact that is very much resented by the Uighurs, who are essentially of central Asian origin. This has led to much dormant unrest in the minds of local Uighur population of this province. In July 2009 some websites started circulating news that two Uighurs working in a factory in southern China had raped a Han Chinese co-worker. Because of this news, a brawl developed between Uighur and Han workers of the factory , which resulted in death of two Uighur workers. Images of the corpses of Uighurs, who died in the brawl began circulating widely in Urumqi (capital of Xinjiang) through websites and SMS like wildfire. Soon armed mobs of local Uighurs went on the rampage, attacking Han Chinese, who naturally responded with further violence. The ethnic riots in Urumqi, capital of the Muslim-majority Xinjiang region, finally left 197 people dead and more than a thousand injured.

Chinese Government shut down internet in Xinjiang after the incident for more than an year and tried to control social media with its own rules. When it was found out that this is unlikely to happen, the authorities blocked access to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the popular first-ever Chinese Twitter equivalent, Fanfou. After much thinking and putting in place an array of stringent regulations, Chinese Government showed green light to other Twitter equivalents, or weibos. Sina Weibo is the most popular service today with more than 300 Million Chinese registered with it. Despite censorship restrictions, messages on these Weibos are getting increasingly critical of the government’s stronghold on information.

I have mentioned this Chinese experience to highlight the fact that in spite of completely banning the popular social media from that country, Chinese are finding it difficult to control the information that is virally circulated on the social media, even with so many restrictions. Chinese Government is a communist controlled autocracy, where freedom of speech and thought is not guaranteed. In India our constitution guarantees this. If Chinese, with all of their totalitarian laws are finding it hard to control the internet social media, can Indian Government , with its feeble and patchy, half halfhearted attempts, can ever hope to eliminate, efforts of criminally minded individuals, wanting to foment trouble, from the social media. According to me they do not have even a slender chance of success. 

 

What is to be done then? Does the Indian Government allow things to just go on and hope for the best ? Or should it ban the social media altogether like China? I am afraid that both these measures are not practical in Indian context and also may not be acceptable to Indian people. It is clear that, we need to do some out of the box thinking. The simplest solution to the problem according to me, is that the Government and law enforcing agencies should join the rumour mongers. They should start using social media in a big way to show and tell the people the truth. In my home city of Pune, the local police department sometimes sends greetings and such other SMS on mobile. Why no SMS were circulated by police on continuing basis during this crisis that the rumours are false and Northeastern people are safe here in Pune and Police would offer full protection to any one who desires it. Similar messages should have gone on Face-book, Twitter and You Tube, on continuing basis. Police could also take help of forums and Blogs, which have good circulation and ask the administrators of such forums of blogs to put Police messages on their web sites at a prominent spot.

The matter, according to me, is serious and requires an all out but innovative effort to Blitzkrieg the social media to counter these criminals. It might be a good idea to set up voluntary and live watch dog bodies of netizens on the social media in all big cities and state capitals. If any such message with a malafide intention appears to be in circulation, instead of making futile efforts to ban it, it should be effectively countered with bombardment of messages telling the truth. Off course such countering messages must tell the truth and only the truth, otherwise they would loose credibility in no time and the whole purpose itself would be lost.

In short, I would not waste efforts in trying to harness wind, I would rather start blowing a far more strong and powerful wind in the other direction.

25 August 2012