The Grammy Awards on the Net
- Brad Waddell
The Information Superhighway still has some potholes, but the events that are happening sure show exciting promise. On March 1, the Grammy Awards telecast was carried live on the Internet, and it used nearly all of the capabilities of this new medium, and was quite an event.
The company who set it up was Metaverse, the company formerly known as mtv.com until MTV sued Adam Curry, former MTV VJ for use of the name for his Internet server. Adam then quit MTV and went on-line full-time, creating music newsletters and World Wide Web sites for corporations and events such as Woodstock 94.
During the Grammys, a booth was set up backstage which had two cameras pointed at the grammy feed and the backstage press room From this, live video was fed directly to the Internet. However, to call this video is a loose use of the term, as it is a window about the size of 4 icons (1 inch by 1 inch) in black and white. The speed of the video was based on the speed of a user's network connection, which for me was 14.4bps, so on average I got 1-2 frames per second, and no sound.
Also on line was the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system where Adam, the people watching, and stars who came by the booth could all chat on-line in real time. I saw posts from David Crosby (while he was captured by the video camera) and Garth Brooks. Unfortunately, the chat system was plagued by people connecting up wrong, and typing one character per line, scrolling the text off the screen too fast. Those with the best video reception were those at work or school with ethernet or direct connections, while those of use in the on-line cheap seats had intermittent video feeds where cameras would drop out entirely, come back later, and sometimes not update for minutes at a time.
A web page was set up for the show, with an easy link to download the video program, and with pictures of the nominees (and sound samples of the major awards) easily displayed. It also had a direct link to the telnet chat window which changed as the show progressed. A winners page was added, although this was not continually updated during the presentation.
I was frustrated that they did not do more updates, since I was hoping to hear if Nesmith's "The Garden" had won best New Age album, and Nesmith's Pacific Arts employees were calling me to see if I heard! Eventually I begged someone on the chat line, and they told me who won.
They also had a bulletin board of sorts, where you would enter a message via the web page, and it would be posted to an on-line page of viewer comments. Interspersed in the web page were photos taken moments earlier, probably with a digital camera. Photos of various celebrities were included, as well as a diary of the adventures of setting up the entire process. Backstage interviews, in a complete live form, allowed the viewer to witness more than the 2-3 seconds which appears on Entertainment Tonight.
As a whole, the experience was fun, even with all the problems, as it took another step towards showing how the Internet can be the people's medium. It showed that we are on the cusp of a social change which will eclipse the introduction of the telephone, where digital communication will become as common as the VCR, and everyone can operate the Internet equivalent of pirate radio/tv and underground newsletters which reach millions of potential readers with almost no fees.
