Prompt's TechBlog
Sumo TV launches 'world's first' user-generated TV channel. Not!
01 December 2006
Posted by Fiona Campbell-HowesIn the glitzy world of Web 2.0, attention spans are short and memories shorter. How else to explain the claim made this week by Cellcast that it has launched the 'world's first' user-generated television channel?
Cellcast's brainchild Sumo TV started broadcasting in the UK on Monday, on Sky channel 146. Its unique selling point is that it selects and broadcasts popular home-made videos uploaded to its www.sumo.tv site, and rewards the video creators financially for each video selected.
In doing so it is setting itself apart from rivals YouTube and MySpace, which have yet to start remunerating amateur videomakers for the traffic they bring to the sites. Setting quality issues aside - the most popular videos on the sumo.tv site at the time of writing include women stripping, punching each other and wrestling boys to the ground - Sumo.tv is taking an interesting approach by transferring 'new media' content to an 'old medium': the television screen.
But is it really the world's first user-generated TV channel? Fans of 1992 film Wayne's World will recall that it affectionately satirised American public-access television, popular in the 1980s. Like Sumo, public access allowed ordinary people to broadcast their own amateur television shows to cable viewers. User-generated content has been around a lot longer than some Web 2.0 proponents appear to think.
tags: cellcast | sumo.tv | wayne's world
Comments:
Public Access TV was generally whole shows made my film and TV amateurs. A step above generally the normal public. This new stream of UGC is far more accessible and people can just post a single segment captured on webcam or mobile.
: Friday, June 15, 2007 12:59:00 PM
Hello Anonymous, thanks for stopping by.
I've absolutely no doubt that things have moved on quite a bit since the days of Public Access TV, and that more people can now participate because the barriers to entry are significantly lower.
I just wanted to set sumo.tv in context of the history and evolution of user-generated content (and reminisce a bit about Wayne's World at the same time!), because I think there's an erroneous tendency to view things like Web 2.0 as being all shiny and new and without precedent. Sometimes looking at the history can be instructive - after all, everything comes from somewhere.
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