For those who read of the adventures during the ansathat.com experiment, you will not be too surprised to hear that as soon as it finished I had only one thing on my mind – ensuring that I got as much good space on the internet as I could. I had seen the future and, contrary to what Peter Kay might suggest, it was NOT garlic bread, it was actually internet TV.
The possibilities were endless and all I needed to start off with was a great web address or two. I figured that with great internet domains I would have a strong start and ‘instant brand’ with which to launch as many new commercial channels as possible. My first thoughts centred on internet TV channels being created to share news and ideas for towns and cities – the so-called ‘geo market’.
Even though I made my living as a professional journalist/features writer, I was still heavily influenced, and in favour, of the idea of citizen journalism. In many ways I felt that internet TV would be as revolutionary to free speech as the original printing press had been when first introduced by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440.
The internet had begun with the thoughts and ideas of people depicted simply in word and number form, and soon these words were backed up by pictures – but now we had the technology to show video of what was happening in our world – end everyone connected to the internet could see it exactly as it happened. If a picture paints a thousand words…. – then a moving picture would paint millions of them. Everyone had a video camera, be it a professional ‘Hollywood’ type through to a modest family handheld, or even a the camera on their mobile telephone.
We were all able to document our world. No longer would we have to wait for the BBC to show up to film events and give us their slant on what HAD happened. We could capture the train crash, the celebrity kiss, the Earthquake, the war scene, the off-the-cuff remarks of the politician AS THEY HAPPENED. In short, we would be there, on the ground, seeing news as it really unfolded, not as it had been packaged and made palatible. Truth was the only winner, and with truth comes real democracy.
Wow, this wasn’t just about simple internet TV, this was a way to change the whole world. And I loved it even more.
This period of time, February 2007, may not seem so far away, but it was a time when local newspapers didn’t seem to realise what was coming their way. I felt they didn’t understand that the old media model they were based on, with its high production costs being passed on to advertisers, was no longer going to be sustainable. Advertisers just wanted results, and if they could get them more effectively through the internet then that is the direction where they would head.
So, the Wild West of internet TV lay ahead and cheap land (the URLs) was available to anyone who would venture into an area which few understood, and precious few had ever been. In the past I had been lucky with the name AnsaThat, which turned out to be very catchy, and even more so, much earlier, with the name PetrolBusters, but the whole world of internet TV was a completely different thing.
On the evenings of the 23, 24, 25 and 26 of February 2007 I stayed up until the wee small hours registering every geographic domain name I could get my hands on – and all had the ending TV.com
I managed to get a great many names such as SurreyTV.com, OxfordTV.com, LancashireTV.com, etc. Big geographic areas that certainly warranted their own internet television channels. I’d also spent more money in a few evenings on purchasing ‘domains’ than most people would on buying a family car. Little did I realise this was just the start.
I was petrified of having wasted my cash and kept reassuring myself that as the person cutting the route ahead of everyone else I was bound to have more trepidation than those who would surely follow. Very quickly I found that many of the names I would have liked to register had already been taken. I was obviously not alone in seeing the future. And many people had some really good ‘digital real estate’.
Times would change in the following months as I decided to add .TV names into my internet land bank. In the next two years I managed to acquire some of the best digital real estate imaginable for internet TV purposes. Among my more ecstatic highs were the moments I purchased US.tv from a gentleman called Kam based in Hong Kong, acquired DIY.tv at a German internet auction, bought my home county Shropshire.tv from a fine old gentleman in Shrewsbury, took Tourist.TV in auction and sent poetry to the self-styled ‘Queen of the Domainers’ to eventually drive off with Motorist.tv.
Oh, and as a side note, I woke up one day and ‘just had to buy’ the name BING.tv because it sounded ‘just right’ for a little project I wanted to create for online television. Little did I know that some months later the head of one of the largest corporations in the world would also come to the similar conclusion that Bing was a great name – only for him it meant ‘search engine’.
Welcome to Teleblog.TV, the observations and experiences in internet television of an ex-Daily Mail journalist called James Black and a few of his, patently, more interesting friends.
But where to start?
In my case everything started when I accepted a friendly bet from Roger Greenhalgh, a computer genius who created the popular PetrolBusters website with me several years earlier. The bet was simple: I had suggested that anyone could find fame in North America and Europe through internet TV. All you needed was a cheap camera, a good microphone, interesting material, wonderful locations and amiable people – and you couldn’t fail.
It all sounded very plausible in my ‘I can do anything’ brain.
I’d figured that the internet video player technology combined with faster broadband speeds was just at the right point in time to make internet TV watchable to a large computer-smart audience, so I further upped the bet by boasting that even without YouTube it would be possible. In fact, in the face of what was happening for real at the time, even a person who represented the completely wrong demographic (ie. wasn’t female, bubbly, good-looking and twenty-one, which seemed to be the ONLY demographic working at that time) could do it!
The deal was done. I had fifty days to prove it was possible and at the end of my experiment EVERYONE important would come running to my door with offers of money, contracts, fame, maybe even my own terrestrial news show or seat on the BBC and CBS board of directors. They had to, I would have proved that internet TV was possible, and inexpensive. The old media types would be desperate to hang on to my new media success, while the new media types would be impressed with my old media emphasis on keeping things professional and accurate.
Win Win Win.
And so, with new laptop, new camera, new microphone, new mobile phone, and new suits (four – all the same) I set off around the world with various friends and acquaintances to go use up my contacts book, pulling interviews with fab people and getting into interesting places like the top of Big Ben or behind the scenes at the Hoover Dam. Oh, life, bring it on, this was going to be fun.
On New Years Eve 2006 we had recorded enough initial film to record and edit our first ‘episode’ and by the morning of New Years Day 2007 it had been uploaded onto DailyMotion and had been then embedded onto a very simple web page. The new daily internet television series had arrived. It’s name, AnsaThat.com and it was GREAT.
And so, with first episode out to a waiting world we sat and waited for the cheers and accolades – BUT nothing happened… nothing, nothing, nothing.
The episode was brilliant, well-scripted, fun, and full of everything the BBC could ever have wanted in a programme if they had been anywhere near as brave as we in this new media world… it educated, informed and entertained. The show was perfect, but as Oscar Wilde once nearly remarked: “the audience was a disaster”. Actually, in our case, the audience weren’t so much a disaster as not actually even aware we existed.
All these lessons, and so quick they came. We understood how to present, how to film, how to edit, how to upload onto our site – but now promotion was the new goal.
Actually, I must confess, I found the promotion the absolutely most relaxing and easy part of the whole process. I knew how to get a message across from my many years as a journalist at the Daily Mail observing how badly most organisations were at even sending a press release and now I had my chance to shine on the ‘dark side’. I became a momentary PR expert and social media guru, and the fact that we were mentioned everywhere throughout January and February 2007 ensured we found a very large, very appreciative, and highly enthusiastic, audience. Still the consumate professional, I was ‘technically’ still in the employ of the Daily Mail, so we were ‘down’ access to one of the country’s most infuential newspapers as I really couldn’t hassle them or send a press release.
The time during the fifty days was one great big whizz of travel, filming, script-writing, organising, telephoning, e-mailing, texting, interviewing (and being interviewed), editing, promoting, press-releasing, cajouling, arguing, laughing, laughing, crying and laughing.
I went from unfamous to web-famous in the blink of an eye. I was honoured to be the BBC Radio One ‘Web Celeb of the Week’ sharing a Sunday evening show with Russell Brand, mentioned in newspapers wherever I went and passing every ‘quiet’ moment I had having a chat with, what felt like, every radio presenter who ever existed. I was especially happy to discover that Ansathat’s library backdrop (real books by the way) had made me a librarian posterboy.
Yes, I had travelled the world, I was the man who discovered the timber from the original Mayflower ship was now a barn in England, stayed in every hotel room in Vegas, counted £1 million in coins with veteran comedian Frank Carson, found the two ends of the World War One trench system, sat alone in a deserted Trafalgar Square on my office swivel-chair, been attacked by a skunk in Florida, driven 100 times up and down San Francisco’s steepest hill, and had a million and one adventures…
..sadly, at no point in the proceedings did we ever consider whether this was mid-life fun or real business!
Towards the end of the fifty days, even when we got offers of advertising and a call from a telecoms executive wanting to discuss ’signing us up’ we treated it as though it wasn’t real. And actually, it wasn’t, it was an experiment, even though it felt better than any normal way of living.
At the end of fifty days, even though I was desperate for this fun to continue, I had to close the book on the Ansthat.com chapter. My report on internet TV, especially the part about professional journalists being pushed out by citizen journalists made the very highbrow business pages and even BrandRepublic took a look at what had happened.
Several people came forward wanting to be the ‘new’ presenter of Ansathat, but all quickly disappeared when they realised we didn’t have a budget – and certainly didn’t have a masterplan to make money.
Within a few weeks, and after realising that I could no longer just use anyone’s music as background to our films, we pulled all the film down and turned off the website. All that remains is a very lame film about D-Day and some footage of me singing the Japanese National Anthem put up on YouTube by one of the helpers, for his own amusement, a few days before the experiment began.
Ansathat was over, but I had been bitten by the internet TV bug. From now on I was committed to developing internet TV but I knew I had so much more to learn.
