Sunday’s New York Times Magazine carried an informative article about MTV America’s latest foray into television delivered via mobile phones.
For television veterans, the advance of cellphone television makes for competing anxieties. They’re worried that they may be moving far too slowly, but they’re anxious, too, that they could be moving in the wrong direction. It’s a feeling something like television’s pioneers must have had, trying to create visual shows for a nation still huddled around the radio. But another, perhaps more apt, comparison is to the early years of the Internet, when so-called content providers pumped prodigious amounts of material and ideas onto the Web and hoped that the demand for it would follow. More often than not, it didn’t.
Now, instead of simply repackaging content, MTV are producing Sway’s Hip-Hop Owner’s Manual, “a documentary-style show that deciphers the ever-changing lexicon of rap”. What’s notable is that they are going out of their way to work out what style of camera work best suits the medium.
To be intelligible on screens sometimes smaller than 2 inches by 2 inches, most shots must be close-ups. Producers also have to limit zooming, panning and quick movement, which can blur because of slow streaming rates and because cellphones often deliver only 15 frames of video per second, compared with 30 frames per second on regular television.
It’s ironic, in a way, that the channel that gave its name to the “MTV generation” — that nebulous concept of an audience that wouldn’t tolerate television unless it’s frenetically paced, always moving — should be pioneering a way of making that content more static and less animated, so that it looks better.
- The Shorter, Faster, Cruder, Tinier TV Show (NYTimes.com) [via PaidContent.org]
