NerdTV

When I praised Robert X. Cringely as a longtailer a few months ago, I didn't know the half of it. This week he and PBS launched NerdTV, "a whole new kind of TV for niche audiences", which will launch on the web on Sept 6th.

    It's going to start with 13 weekly one-hour freely downloadable shows, featuring such guests as original Macintosh programmer Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Joy, the Sun Microsystems co-founder and the father of Berkeley UNIX. "NerdTV viewers are actually encouraged to download and copy the shows, share them with friends and even post them on their own Web sites - all legally."

    Cringely is the author of Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date, which was based on his rightly famous PBS documentary Triumph of the Nerds.   

   Here, he describes the genesis of the project and why it makes more sense now than it did three years ago, when he first came up with the idea:

What's changed since 2002 is a dramatic expansion of broadband Internet access and a dramatic lowering of both bandwidth and distribution costs.  I make a distinction between bandwidth and distribution expenses because there are technologies like Bit Torrent that can take much of the expense out of video distribution by removing some of the bandwidth demand. I say SOME of the bandwidth demand because Bit Torrent is a fickle lover and if I throw a couple hundred episodes of NerdTV up there, only the most recent are likely to be broadly seeded, meaning the archive distribution costs fall back on me.

Yes, me.

Even with 355 megabits-per-second of Internet bandwidth, PBS can't take a risk of derailing the NewsHour or crippling PBSKids if NerdTV happens to be a surprise hit, so the real heavy lifting for NerdTV will be done through a network of distributed servers I've created as a kind of "poor man's Akamai."  My distribution cost using this system, by the way, works out to be approximately ONE PERCENT of Akamai's retail price, which shows how much profit there is in that business, or should be.

Outstanding.

Comments

[Justin Long]

I have been reading your comments and have found them very useful.
It's interesting to me how some folks don't go after niches that are
so obvious. One is Christian music.

Although I listen to "secular", there's quite a bit of Christian-
oriented religious music that I enjoy. In fact, many hearken back to
the late 70s and early 80s. Now, given that there is a HUGE Bible Belt
in the USA, and an even bigger belt OUTSIDE the USA - remember that
today, the majority of Christians are actually OUTSIDE America, but
love American tastes - it seems to me that there would be a huge
demand for music. But you can't find much outside of the current "pop
hits" within some of these niches.

For example, a quick scan of Microsoft's MSN Music within the
religious scene shows authors like Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Jars
of Clay, etc. But try to find an early Petra album - as I have been
trying to find one in particular - and its hard going. None of the
normal outlets have them.

I imagine this might be true of most niches. For some reason people
aren't putting them up. I don't know if this is on the artist's side,
the artist's agent side, or what. But there's folks out here (like
me) who would love to buy some, even if only for sentimentality's sake.

Also, there was an interesting comment about Bittorrent. The caveat
with bittorrent is that finding anything other than what is presently
"hot" is impossible. That is the problem with peer-to-peer - you have
to find someone who is interested in what you are interested in.
So if you THINK you want something, you have to get it while it is
"hot." Otherwise, you may not find anyone who is uploading it.

That's one of the reasons I think the major networks are missing the
boat here. I don't presently live in the USA and I would pay to
download certain shows - maybe not big bucks, but, say, $4 or $5.
If they were DRM'ed that would be fine with me. They don't show
them here, and I want to keep up with them.