Terry Heaton’s PoMo Blog

Reader Kevin Reynen points out that the Jon Stewart takedown of Crossfire’s Tucker Carlson is the the number one downloaded video over at iFilm (a video-entertainment destination on the Web, offering channels of movies, short films, TV clips, video-game trailers, music videos and its celebrated Viral Videos collection). As of this writing, 387,633 people had viewed the 13 minute clip, far more than viewed the clip in real time on CNN. He also notes that the subject is highly ranked on Blogdex and that it’s likely many thousands of others have viewed the BitTorrents version. It is a top Blogdex topic this morning, and many others are hosting the video.

“What is CNN thinking?” Kevin writes. “They could have doubled/tripled the ad revenue that this interview generated. You couldn’t ask for a better content to illustrate that alternative distribution methods exist. We need better news gathering and if the big broadcasters aren’t going to provide it, the audience will get it somewhere else.”

Kevin nails an important angle on this story, that the loss of a sense of community that many people lament due to a fragmenting media world is poppycock, that people will find what they’re looking for and get involved on their terms. This has to be the highest rated CNN broadcast in recent memory, but it occurred in a video-on-demand environment. Wonderful.

Thanks, Kevin.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2004 at 9:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.