It's in the home that consensus grows up: family and television are the basic tools to create consensus and social control. If we want to traverse the trajectories of television consumption we have to become the media in the space of communication flux. In the last ten years we have witnessed a process of diffusion regarding communication technology, wider accessibility to media tools, and an increased awareness of one's expressive possibilities. This situation favours the mutation of the consumer into the producer. The consumer, following her own natural instinct towards consuming, develops the expertise that allow her to find online the shows of her favourite soap opera or the lastest Hollywood movie, and download them easily at home. This increasing experience in Internet Computer Technology and sharing introduces the consumer to networks where not only pirate materials circulate, but also independent productions. These independent productions belong to a realm which is an alternative to the market in commodities.

Examples of these alternative networks are New Global Vision (www.ngvision.org) and V2V (www.v2v..cc). The aim is to collect and distribute videos on the Internet using peer-to-peer networks. Both the projects suggest the Creative Commons license as a way to protect the productions and the authors.

V2V has the following aims:

1. To use an audio-video compression algorytm (codec) within a format (.avi, .mov, etc) which may be used on every OS (linux, windows, mac, ...) and which is free software. The developers of V2V are waiting for the release of the OGG THEORA codec, currently the suggestion is VP3.

2. To share not only final video productions but also raw footage to allow collective editing.

3. To decentralize access to the archives through the use of RSS feeds.

4. To use peer-to-peer networks such as edonkey or bittorrent to disseminate videos.

These mechanisms facilitate the circulation of content between independent producers and are a opportunity for the sustainability of innitiatives such as the Street Televisions in Italy. To fill up and create a daily palimpsest is in fact the most expensive need for independent TV. Several experiences in this field show us the simple possibility of building an antenna, transmitter and amplifier from which to start broadcasting. To broadcast not only to obtain a corner in the mediascape but to change the nature of the mediascape itself. This vision is not feasable if it is not supported by a network, as there soon becomes a need for content. This can be provided by a local space of production or by collective pool from the net. To integrate and to cross several media (TV, radio, Internet) is to create paths and time-space tunnels in a flux which attempts to drown us.

The motivations behind independent media projects are highly differentiated: desire to reconstruct the public sphere; interest in experimentation and the development of media production skills; longing to tell new stories in different ways; will to develop a mass medium to counterpose a critical political message to that emanating from the commercial broadcast networks. Obviously Italy's curious blend of political and media power is even somewhat particular.

Beyond Mere Access

V2V functions as a storage and distribution mechanism within a broader schema of an autonomous communications infrastructure. When combined with wireless mesh networks and low power transmission (a la Telestreet) such a system is capable of providing a basic outlet for communication to all. The irony is that this potential has emerged in spite rather than because of the legal and media policies underpinned by the state. Instead it has been the commodification of personal computers and later bandwidth which have provided the rudimentary basis for such a system.

This possibility should give us pause to evaluate the typical proposals made to rectify or alleviate conditions of media concentration, and specifically on the current legal proposals to legalize pirate television and normalise it in the framework of community access television. Such a system has existed in the United States for twenty years - known as PEG (Public, Educational and Governmental) channels - and provides access for non-commercial broadcasters to cable and satellite systems. Thousands of these channels exist but they have scarcely attracted any audience attention at all. Why?

(1) lack of funds to pay people to work full-time on the production of programs, particularly those which do not follow common-garden political genre formats which are a likely by-product of other activities.

(2) The imbalance in user motivation stemming from lack of visibility in comparison to media outlets investing huge amounts of money in promotion, environment -saturation etc. which they can do because of their advertising budgets (and sales and licensing revenue of course).

Sustainability Thus, autonomous media projects remain stuck in a quagmire of chronic financial insustainability - they can thrive for some years before the lack of resources takes its toll. At this point one of three things happen. Either they professionalise and accept standard market practices [Liberation, Tageszeitung, the Village Voice], become dependent on institutional support [via arts councils or EU funded programs] which have consequences for the political content, or simply disappear. The modern cultural worker in many ways reflects the typical casualized figure: multi-skilled, mobile, short-term or freelance contracts. Likewise independent media projects themselves are precarious, ephemeral, dependent on the contribution of voluntary labour (self-exploitation or necessary virtuosity?) and small amounts of borrowed or collective fixed capital. Thus media and communication workers are confronted with two unyielding material challenges: the need to finance their own personal self-reproduction and the cash needed to ensure their projects survival. Where can it come from?

The TV License/Arts Council At its inception the television license was defended as the only means of financing audiovisual production without the constant intrusion of advertising. This was the Reithian model championed by those who envisioned tv as an instrument for education, opposed to that in evidence in the US where stations advertising revenues determined what programs could or could not be produced. In Italy the license fee has existed since 1954 and is currently set at almost 100 euros for each of the estimated 20 million households - a notional total of 2 billion euros. The inaptly named subscription - which is in fact involuntary and is legally required without consumption of RAI's products - provides no safety from advertising however. Thus users get the worst of all worlds: they are taxed for owning the means of reception, and then their attention is given to the manufacturers of consumer desire to be saturated. That fund has been used to maintain a 'public' media under the model of clientelism and rival political party mouthpieces. That system has now been put in crisis by the extension of Berlusconi's control over the CDA and the eviction of presenters like Santoro.

By way of comparison, in the Netherlands, a country of 16 million people, there are 330 community radio stations and 100 community television stations, most of which also have an Internet presence. They operate year round with a public service remit on a non-profit-distributing basis and are locally controlled and accountable. The Dutch licence fee service agency distributes £5M per annum in structural support to the community broadcasting sector. The total turnover of the sector is near to £25M per annum with the remainder coming from local grants, sponsorship and advertising. The average community radio station has a turnover of £60,000. Community television services in the Netherlands operate at a similar economic level by mixing text, still images and teletext with a limited amount of moving image production. The Dutch community broadcasting sector sustains some 500 jobs but involves more than 25,000 active volunteers.

http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2004/01/469551.php

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