The New Web Television is a Break-through Opportunity for Not-for-Profits and New World Communications is again a front-runner in delivering it. So what's all the excitement about and why do we call it a "break-through" opportunity? Here's why:

1) The Power of Television: Television is indisputably in a class all by itself as one of the most powerful communications mediums in the world. The problem in the past, however, it that television has been incredibly expensive, technically problematic, and historically controlled by "gatekeepers" - e.g. a handful of broadcast television stations, a monolithically-controlled cable industry, and the nationa televisionl networks.

Advertising on television is also incredibly expensive, and the advertising space is so valuable, that now even infomercials have kicked most sunday morning community services programming off the air. Getting a free public service announcement (PSA) aired is now an impossiblity.

FCC deregulation after the 1996 Telecommunicatons Act and resultant media consolidation has also not helped local programming. Much of it has not gone away. Public access cable has taken up some of the slack, but access to public access channel production facilities has been challenging and few people watch when shows air.

2) The Power the Internet/Web: With broad-based access, the new Web 2.0, and much more accessible and low cost web television technology, however, the entire television "game" has now changed. Now people can community groups can produce their own "television" on the Web... "Web Television" if you please, and the business reach is potentially much bigger than national and regional broadcast television, and even "inter-operable" regional and national cable television. Now also with new compression and broadband satellite technologies, even web television can now go almost anywhere.

2) Compare the cost only a few months ago ... In recent month's, many things have radically changed in the way that television can now be produced and distributed. Only a few months ago, one needed to own or rent a 3-chip professional camera in the $4500 range to produce decent looking web television, and the cost didn't just stop there.

You also had to sink considerable dollars into an expensive Mac or PC workstation with dual monitors and expensive editing software. You also had to have special encoding software and spend time getting your codecs right, encoding content first with special, costly encoding software before you could upload your content.

Then you also had to pay extra to host the content on a special streaming media server. Television done this way took a whole lot of money, and a whole lot of time.

3) Now Compare that with phenomenal drop in the cost of television done on the web now - The web television content you see above was produced on an elegantly consumer digital camcorder that costs under $100 and it doesn't even use video tape, and doesn't use a hard drive. It also fits on the palm of one's hand and is a little smaller than a "Classic" iPod. Some people are even producing and posting web television on the video blogging sites using their cellphones.

4) The "Posting" and the "Sharing" is also "virally" Powerful - What's also new and phenomenally powerful is the way that web television can be posted on your own website or shared in an e-mail. By "Posting", we mean that the web television looks like it streams from your own website...but it really doesn't.

This means that you don't have to use up your own web server space, or "hose" your network, or ask your IP department to do anything....because your web television isn't even hosted on your organization's web servers. You will want to have more bandwidth, however, if you already have a lot of traffic going over your network, but the price of upgrading to a faster account is well worth it. Talk to us about that as well. - (425) 844-8908