Community Media Review: DigitalBicycle and the Distribution Dilemma

This is an article written for the latest issue of Community Media Review, the trade journal of the Alliance for Community Media. The opening paragraph was written with assistance from Dirk Koning and the closing paragraph with assistance from Peter Bull. Illustrations created for this article can be found here and here.



Stop Dubbing and Start Downloading: Take a Ride on the DigitalBicycle

It's midnight in Massachusetts, 11:00 p.m. in Wisconsin, 10:00 in Colorado, and 9:00 in California. Computers across the country are waiting on a signal. Suddenly it comes, and these unmanned computers get to work. They 'automagically' connect to one another and begin receiving a one-hour program sent from your center, a program that hours before existed only on a timeline. Each computer simultaneously uploads and downloads, sharing the bits they have for the bits they don't, until each center has a complete copy; a copy they can import into a NLE, export to tape, burn to DVD, or cablecast directly. None of the centers involved have racks full of servers or connections faster than a T-1, just late-model computers with dedicated bandwidth running free software, but they are moving high-quality video files at amazing speeds. By the time the staff break for dinner the next day, last night's timeline is ready for tonight's playback. And the best part is, this isn't just the future of program bicycling; it's the near future.

Community media centers serve a number of roles. They act as educational institutions, as a community commons, as public spaces, as media creation points, and as distributors of content. Though these roles are manifested in numerous ways, the role of distribution is often tied directly to the asset and infrastructure that defines a PEG access center; the 6Mhz slices of cable bandwidth that connects centers to communities. This article will explore another form of distribution, one that uses peer-to-peer networking technology to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of our primary role of cablecasting locally relevant content. We will examine the way these technologies have transformed a similar community of media distributors, and how this can enable growth in both local involvement and better collaboration in our own centers.

Keep in mind that it is not unusual to feel uneasy with new technologies and distribution methods. For many, most of our funding comes from distributing local content over local cable. We may be afraid that incorporating other forms of distribution might undermine our most valuable resource and endanger our funding. Nothing proposed in this article will be a replacement for cablecasting, but eventually it will strengthen access centers, both individually and nationally, by enabling collaborations, increasing participation, and spurring production.
While our work must be always be rooted within our local communities, our success and future funding requires us to organize, collaborate, and dialogue with each other regularly. Our individual work is strengthened and supported through our membership in the Alliance and other regional and national partnerships. We share curriculum, policy, and experience, but although we are networked we are not a "television network". Yet, many centers have now incorporated satellite receivers to give them access to particular streams of programming. Moreover, most centers allow members to sponsor programs that have been "bicycled" in from other cities, and some centers are participating in distributed media collaborations.

One such collaboration, the National Youth Media Access Project's Youth Channel confederation, serves as an example of the type of project that will greatly benefit from a peer-to-peer based distribution system. Centers who participate in the collaboration train young adults to be peer-trainers and form youth-run advisory boards. They also create a programming block showing media created by youth in the local community and the communities of partner centers. Through shared content, the participating centers are able to create dialog between youth that are interested in expanding their personal circles, and provide a forum for applied media literacy experience.

Despite the rewards of this and similar partnerships, participation is dependent of the amount of resources a center is able to expend. Dubbing tapes and stuffing envelopes takes time and costs money. When tapes arrive in the mail they need to be digitized, organized, curated, and edited into a program block before they can be cablecast. The number of tapes that each partner can dub and mail on a regular basis directly limits the size and scope of the collaboration.

Similar challenges face community media producers distributing their show to sponsors in multiple communities. The cost of dubbing and mailing can quickly exceed the total cost of production. Many producers who start with high hopes of having their show seen across the region, state, or nation, end up burned out, not always from the work of production, but from the high fiscal and time costs of distribution.

The distribution dilemma can be broken into two parts. First, though most productions are now created digitally they are still being distributed in physical, linear, formats. VHS, miniDV, and DVD, all take time to make and cost money to move. Second, the burden of distribution is placed upon the sender (the producer) instead of the receiver (the sponsor/collaborative partner). When the scope of distribution moves from five centers to twenty centers, the producer's cost (energy and resources) quadruple if they are shouldering the entire burden. However, if each center were able to make their own copy this would reduce the producer's time involvement and cost.

Examining the world of live music fans known as "Tape Traders" can show us a more effective distribution model. During the last few years, this group has primarily shifted from mailing recordings in padded envelopes in exchange for "Blanks and Postage", to distributing digital files online at no cost to sender or receiver. Having embraced the internet early on as a tool for finding one another and sharing information about shows, many now use the internet in place of the postal system for the actual trading.

The primary cost of sharing things over the internet is bandwidth. As websites offering large file downloads often find out the hard way, this cost can skyrocket if the file becomes very popular, very quickly. For this reason the backbone of the tape trader's systems is no longer FTP, but a new, peer-to-peer protocol called BitTorrent that combines the advantages of a centralized server (reliability, organization, and quality control) with the advantages of a decentralized network (the collective storage and bandwidth of thousands of users). When downloading a file using BitTorrent you become part of a swarm, simultaneously uploading the bits you have in exchange for the parts you don't. By using the otherwise unused bandwidth of the people who want the file to help spread the file around, the burden of bandwidth is also removed from the individual user.

All of the software used to run the web community, compress and decompress the live shows, and download the files is free and open source. Active members of the community provide the major resources of storage space and bandwidth automatically, at no additional cost to themselves. The cost of running the centralized servers that power the web community and direct the file transfers is small and usually covered by donations. The burden of making the first copy of the file available is still on the owner of the master tape, but after that the burden falls upon the other fans.

Due to the open-source nature of the software and number of programmers working to improve it, new ways of using it are consistently being implemented. Downhill Battle, a digital advocacy group in Worcester, Massachusetts, has been working to simplify the multi-step process of making the initial file available through a project called "BlogTorrent". Other projects focus on realizing the concept of "broadcatching" as proposed by Andrew Grumet, where combining BitTorrent with RSS will allow for the automated downloading of files that meet specified criteria. Adam Curry’s "iPodder" project takes the idea one step further and after automatically downloading MP3's from trusted sources, loads them onto an iPod. The collective knowledge and idea base, expressed as blog entries and software, is benefiting everyone.

Since we're talking bits and bytes, the leap from audio to video is miniscule. Many tape traders are now exchanging video of live shows and hundreds of parallel communities exist using similar systems to trade everything from grassroots activist video to entire series of commercial television programs, all in near-DVD quality. The Commonwealth Broadband Collaborative (CBC), a collaboration of community media and technology centers in Massachusetts, used such a system to distribute episodes of its program, "First Tuesday."

While the combination of peer-to-peer networking and web communities has changed the dynamics of "tape trading," the impact it could have upon Community Media would be even greater. It promises more extensive collaboration between centers and individuals and increased local involvement. Such a system will not only enable current collaborations to communicate and share more effectively, but will spur the creation of new collaborations. Increased involvement can take place in numerous forms including members interested in curating their own programs and new producers spurred by the promise of a simpler syndication.

Implementing such a system is the initial focus of DigitalBicycle, a collaborative project started in January 2004 by LTC. It plans to integrate existing, proven, open-source technologies to produce a sustainable web community that can grow over time to meet the needs of community media and technology centers. Combined with user-friendly software on the desktop, it will facilitate participation by users with varying levels of technical expertise, allowing everyone to contribute to the system. Video will be compressed in a way that allows it to be easily imported into a NLE, burned to DVD, or processed for use with a media server. Plans are in place to launch a web community in the coming months and centers and individuals interested in getting involved should check out the project blog at http://10speed.ltc.org.

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.

Another great article from this issue can be found on Kenyatta Cheese's website halfway down this page.