Artwork for this article by Daniel Laurin

José van Dijck is a Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam's Media Studies department. She has written five books and numerous articles on media and science and on digital media technologies. Her latest book Mediated Memories in the Digital Age is being published by Stanford University Press this summer. In "Homecasting", van Dijck takes a close look at video-sharing sites and argues that they offer a new and self-contained form of cultural practice that is anything but a replacement of television.

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.f.t.m.vandijck/
van Dijck's site

Established broadcast organizations are currently renegotiating their relationship with the new kids on the block: internet giant Google recently bought up YouTube for the hefty sum of 1.6 billion dollars after Murdoch Inc acquired MySpace about a year ago. Ever since the popularization of the internet in the mid-1990s, technology gurus have prophesied the decline and eventual demise of broadcasting. The trendy expression "postbroadcasting" has come to signify the idea that television, after its convergence with the internet and other digital technologies, will gradually disappear as a distinct institutional practice. Projections of a postbroadcasting age are generally warranted by a deterministic logic: they tend to reduce broadcasting to a technological system that is bound to affect social use. However, the internet never replaced television, and the distribution of user-generated content via sites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo, in my view, will not further expedite television's obsolescence. On the contrary, they will introduce a new cultural practice that will both expand and alter our rapport with the medium of television - a practice I refer to as "homecasting".

Homecasting is the use of special video-sharing websites to download and upload prerecorded, rerecorded, tinkered, and self-produced audiovisual content via personal computers from the home and to anybody's home (that is, homes with networked PCs). The term "homecasting" betrays its kinship to broadcasting on the one hand and "home video" on the other. Couched in the rhetoric of technology, homecasting means two-way communication via the internet - a form of transmission in which both parties involved transmit information - as opposed to the one-way distribution of audiovisual content involved in broadcasting. Beyond the need for this term to indicate the technological convergence of TV and PC, homecasting also braids old and new operating logics. The old media moguls may not particularly like this development, but it is crystal clear that user-generated content is bound to change the nature of the advertising game. Rather than fashioning channels to attract specific audiences, homecasters enable groups of voluntary, active users to form their own target groups - users with like-minded tastes and lifestyles - a commercial asset whose value has not escaped the attention of advertising agencies. If NBC, ABC, CBS and PBS can be considered the construction companies of the media world, YouTube and GoogleVideo are likely to become the Home Depots of the television industry. They cater to the do-it-yourself segment of the content industry, offering raw feedstock of video and delivering the software tools for home assembly, the way Home Depot sells lumber and hardware, paint and jackhammers. In recent years, there has been a sharp rise in the sales of digital video cameras, camera phones with video capabilities and Photoshop software. Rather than delivering end-products to consumers' homes, the new intermediaries offer semi-manufactured goods and tools to be appropriated by individual users.

Homecasting also denotes a hybrid institutional practice that is bound to further entwine the private and public spheres. GoogleVideo and YouTube propose a novel relationship between users and their television sets that, at first sight, seems to bear more resemblance to (making and) watching home videos than to watching TV programs. For decades, people spent their leisure time filming family life and showing the results to neighbors or relatives. Distribution via video websites reaches circles far beyond those of families and friends: most uploading activity either caters to specific audience groups of anonymous individuals who have expressed common interests (equalling the intentions of "narrow-casting") or is geared toward the widest possible audience (equalling the intentions of "broadcasting"). Many interfaces' default modes betray users' inclination to open up their personal lives to the virtual universe, and to commit individual expressions to anonymous audiences. Not coincidentally, YouTube's website logo, "Broadcast Yourself", connotes the close interconnection between the platforms of private and public expression, between self and world. Broadcasting conventionally signifies the central institution located within the public sphere, whose task is to make essential information, knowledge and cultural experiences available to all members of society. Homecasting accommodates the individual in the private sphere who feels the urge to make his or her opinions, insights and experiences available to everyone out there. To bend a familiar clichÈ: if broadcasting opens a window onto the world, homecasting deploys a looking-glass to have the world stare right back into the living room.

From programs to snippets

We can see a similar intertwining of broadcasting and homecasting at the level of cultural form. Broadcasting's unique institutional product - the fruit of the audiovisual culture industry - is programs. Television programs have always been tradable and consumable goods that were produced for specific markets and were preferably also sold to other (national, regional) markets. Cultural forms, including TV programs, are considered end-products and hence protected by laws regulating ownership and copyrights. The new types of content produced and distributed by homecasters will inevitably be defined in terms of (or in contrast to) programs. At first sight, video-sharing sites harbour three general categories of content: original creations, transformative derivatives, and copied or "ripped" content. From the articulation of these terms it is clear that one form of content is preying on another while obeying a succinct hierarchy: users can only "rip" and "derive" from television programs, but television programs can never be derivatives of "original content" created by individual users. And yet, in the past, television programs have also been "derivatives" of users' creations - think, for instance, of programs like the hugely successful America's Funniest Home Videos which is entirely made of self-produced content.

It is important to name and specify the type of content produced by homecasters, as a means to carefully catalogue the cultural dynamics by which user agency is encouraged or inhibited. So what would be an appropriate label for the preferred cultural form of homecasting? "Fragment" and "clip" are inadequate words to describe the kind of content contributed to YouTube or GoogleVideo. Evidently, we can find many examples of clips and fragments posted on these websites, but "videoclips" refers to ready-made cultural forms (usually music videos) and "fragments" fallaciously suggests that all uploads are cut from pre-existing content. I therefore propose the word "snippet" to characterize the new cultural form promoted by homecasting channels. In contrast to traditional TV programs, snippets are of limited length, ranging from several seconds to potentially several hours, but the bulk of postings average between three and six minutes. "Snippet" covers the limited length of most uploads, even if they imitate the begin-middle-end form of a polished audiovisual production. Although most snippets are one-time contributions, they may be accessed serially, for instance when the same uploader posts a line of thematically connected videos. But arguably the most crucial feature of snippets is their status as resources rather than as products; they are meant for recycling in addition to storing, collecting, and sharing. Snippets, by common agreement, are posted by homecasters to be reused, reproduced, commented upon, or tinkered with. Recyclability is an inherent characteristic of snippets.

Obviously, the problem is that "programs" and "snippets" represent two seemingly incommensurate legal schemes. Whereas programs are copyrighted and owned by corporations, no one can claim ownership of snippets posted on video-sharing sites which issue their use under a creative common license, such as the original YouTube site did. Indeed, YouTube's terms of use contain explicit warnings against the illegal copying of broadcast content, but the same terms explicitly encourage homecasters to regard all feeds as potential input - recyclable resources in the life cycles of creative culture.

See YouTube's terms of use:

The site's self-description says it "hosts user-generated videos [and] includes network and professional content". However, paradoxically, YouTube sets the standards for a new type of cultural form - the snippet - while also inevitably inducing the appropriation of content produced under an adverse regulatory regime. The right to "own" seems squarely at odds with the "right to appropriate" audiovisual content. The stakes in this debate are high: the broadcast industry is waging a battle to protect its "legal property" as the only possible type of property in the audiovisual content market, by articulating the stakes of this debate in industrial-legal terms.

Why is it important to define "homecasting" and "snippets"? Naming and defining distinctive cultural practices and forms is a deliberate strategy to assign user agency, as opposed to consumer agency. Extending the comparison between YouTube and Home Depot, it may be unthinkable for an organization of broadcasters to legally frustrate or thwart the activities of homecasters, just as it is unimaginable to conceive of a lobby of construction companies trying to prohibit home owners from remodelling, renovating or even completely demolishing and rebuilding the house they once bought from these companies. And yet, consumers who take a short clip from recorded television content or from the DVD they already paid for, and use it as a resource in their own creative product, are liable to be prosecuted as a result of copyright laws that increasingly deny users the right to cite or rephrase parts of intellectual end-products such as programs, clips, or films. YouTube and GoogleVideo, who are currently defending their legal and economic position as homecasting institutions, may want to take the cultural position of users more seriously; they have to strike a delicate balance between the claims of users as rightful creators and tinkerers of content, and the proprietary claims of broadcasters as legal owners of some of the content that is tinkered with. Therefore, it is crucial not to define the current debate on video-sharing sites exclusively in terms of market economics or legal ownership, but to phrase the discussion in culturally relevant terms that emphasize the co-evolution of technological systems and marketing systems with social institutions and cultural forms.

Television 2.0: The Next Generation

Ever since Google took over YouTube in October 2006, we have been witnessing a growing stand-off between the old media moguls and the new media giants. Legislative and judicial forces have formed a so-called enclosure movement to advance proprietary models of information production at the expense of burdening non-proprietary, creative commons production.

See Yochai Benkler on non-market creative commons versus proprietary models:

Urgent issues to be settled over the next few years are both open ended and predictable. Will broadcast producers leave enough space for the emergence of new practices like user-generated content and video-sharing? How will conventional broadcast companies adjust to the inevitable growth of the do-it-yourself branch of the television industry? Will the various cultural forms (programs, formats, snippets) peacefully coexist once a consensus is reached over traffic regulation? It is too early to tell which direction this transformation will take us, but this does not discharge academics from the responsibility to sketch the stakes involved in this (ideological) struggle.

At this moment, Hollywood producers hesitate whether to regard YouTube-Google as friend or foe: either they go after it and use their historic prowess in electronic media distribution to impose their rules on this newcomer, or they side with it in creating new business and marketing models that help homecasting channels to create buzz for conventional television products. Whichever turn the face-off will take, it should be clear that both broadcast moguls and new media giants such as Google are after the same bounty: attention from advertisers and users. And where elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers. One way or another, future users of YouTube will be confronted with innovative advertising strategies infiltrating "their" homecast environment. For original YouTube adepts, the purchase of their homecast channel by Google may turn out to be a choice between Scylla and Charybdis. Google's strategies may be manifestly different from those of the media moguls dominating the television branch, its preferred model of homecasting also distinctly diverges from a creative commons agreement formerly promoted by YouTube. Since its takeover by Google, YouTube's terms of use are increasingly incorporating more advertiser-friendly and owner-friendly conditions. A clear sign towards the accommodation of advertisers' interests and intellectual property rights came in January 2007, when YouTube's Chad Hurley announced the introduction of short commercial clips and advertisements on the site, as well as the introduction of a "paid revenue" system for popular uploads. It is clear that Google needs time to figure out its preferred strategy, a strategy that involves the risk of losing its largest asset: some of the most prolific voluntary user communities in the new branch of homecasting.

My deliberate introduction of concepts like "homecasting" and "snippets" is not a gratuitous attempt to coin a few neologisms that render emergent phenomena intelligible to non-academics. An important task of media scholars is to cast the debate over user-generated audiovisual content in terms of culture. Viewers, consumers, and users are distinct cultural categories with different types of agency. Broadcasting and homecasting embody dissimilar institutional practices that engender complementing social and cultural roles in the continuum of media space. And programs, formats, and snippets deserve to be inspected as cultural forms, each signifying a succinct product of creativity. Broadcasting and television programs will never disappear, quite the contrary, homecasting and snippets will gradually be intertwined in the texture of our mediascape. But at this current stage of redesigning the landscape, we need to define cultural products and agents before these new phenomena are entirely incorporated by dominant forces that define creativity and user-generated content exclusively in legal and economic terms.