Bill Cammack

@ the end of tonight’s show, Jonny announced that this was the final episode of Reinventing Television. I think the format, concept and hosting of the show was great, and actually a reinvention of television.

On television, you might get to see Britney Spears on a closed-set talk show, emoting to a hand-picked interviewer with carefully-chosen questions, and after MUCH, MUCH, MUCH editing done to make her look as good as possible, physically and intellectually. You don’t realize you’re being sold something that people are hoping that you’re going to buy.

On Jonny & Peter‘s show, “REINVENTING Television”, the guests responded directly to questions from Jonny or from the audience over the text chat or the phone lines. It wasn’t so much like television as it was like bringing people together that weren’t physically in the same location into a coffee-shop or lounge environment where we could discuss common interests. Same deal for Jason DaSilva‘s show “Zoom In”, which became “Celluloid Stories”. Jonny & Jason held weekly house parties that happened to have a technical focus.

I got a lot out of the show, because I’m relatively new to videoblogging. Actually, ReinventingTV / ZoomIn was my first extensive experience with webcams. I don’t even OWN a webcam! :D I found out that I could use my DV camera that I hook up through Firewire with iChat and the application that Phovi was using for ReinventingTV, which was flash-based.

I hadn’t seen webcams as useful for anything, so I never used them. ReinventingTV was really the perfect application for them. The only difference between phovi.com‘s format and actually BEING THERE is that you couldn’t reach across the table and shake someone’s hand. :D I had felt that way before, but the final episode really showed me how ‘intimate’ the setting was that Jonny, Jason & Peter created. I had met / hung out with Rudy & Casey from Galacticast a couple of weeks ago, and they were guests on last night’s show. They were sitting on their GalactiCouch & Casey was playing her guitar, and we had verbal connection through the phone lines as well as connection via the text chat, and this was what was happening NOW… right now. Real-Time. IRL.

This wasn’t taped, so you find out that the guest on tonight’s show is actually in Puerto Rico right now. :D They were in Canada, Jonny was in D.C., I was in NYC, other people were wherever they were, but we were all together, in our little, multi-connection coffee-shop, finding out about what’s going on with Galacticast and getting answers to OUR OWN QUESTIONS instead of the questions that the corporation told the network to tell the station to tell the show to tell the EP to tell the producer to tell the interviewer to ask! :D

fantastic!

Anyway… I’ll be keeping an eye out for Jonny Goldstein‘s next project as well as Peter Raulerson (phovi.com). I think they’re both ahead of the curve right now, and when the technology catches up to what ReinventingTV/ZoomIn did with the *current* technology, there’ll be a lot of emulators of their format & style.

… often imitated, but never duplicated! :D …

Thanks for the shows, fellas!