TODAY: Voyeur TV ‘live’ on a computer near you

DIY real­ity videos made with free online tools the rage among netizens

HOSTING video files on the Inter­net is not a new con­cept, and you can find a vari­ety of ser­vices — both free and paid — to store and share your video clips. Two of the most pop­u­lar are YouTube (www.youtube.com) and Google Video (video.google.com).

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These two free ser­vices allow users to upload their own video clips in a vari­ety of for­mats, includ­ing those taken with mobile phones. And we’ve already seen the per­va­sive­ness of these new ser­vices dur­ing the Gen­eral Elec­tion, with neti­zens upload­ing and shar­ing video clips of ral­lies and elec­tion speeches.

I think the avail­abil­ity of such tools has embold­ened some neti­zens to skirt the edge of the legal­i­ties involved — such as copy­right and other laws (such as the Par­lia­men­tary Elec­tions Act) — and I’ve seen video clips made by peo­ple shoot­ing footage from tele­vi­sion screens.
For starters, both Google and YouTube make upload­ing and shar­ing video clips a cinch.

If you have an inter­est­ing clip that you want to share with your friends and the gen­eral pub­lic, all you need to do is cre­ate an account with either ser­vice and upload the clip to your allo­cated space.

Then, you can cut the lit­tle bit of pro­gram­ming code pro­vided for you and paste it into your blog entry and voila, you have a blog post with an embed­ded video clip, and it plays right off the page (as opposed to hav­ing to down­load the file first).

I played around with YouTube recently, by upload­ing a video clip of a noisy and annoy­ing water foun­tain which I shot with my phone cam­era, just so I could illus­trate how noisy and annoy­ing the water foun­tain was.

If a pic­ture speaks a thou­sand words, could these video-sharing ser­vices pos­si­bly bring about the demise of text-based blog­ging alto­gether? I’m not sure about that, but there are sev­eral things you could do with either service.

Think­ing of start­ing your own tele­vi­sion chan­nel? That sounds like what one blog seems to be doing. With a tagline that reads “fig­ur­ing out Sin­ga­pore in byte-sized chunks”, “Chan­nel X” (channel-x.blogspot.com) was launched on May 15 — inspired, it seems, by the recent Gen­eral Election.

So far, the site fea­tures a five-minute video clip that resem­bles a news or infor­ma­tion bul­letin, com­plete with footage shot off tele­vi­sion screens, and what looks like a Pow­er­Point slide presentation.

Don’t have that radio pre­sen­ter voice or afraid that you might be iden­ti­fied by your unique speech pat­terns? “Chan­nel X” skirts around that prob­lem with a computer-synthesised voice commentary.

The rate at which neti­zens are adopt­ing these tools means we’ll get to see more and more video footage of things that would pre­vi­ously have been the domain of hearsay and third-party reporting.

Last week, a sec­ondary school stu­dent uploaded onto YouTube a phone video clip of two school­mates fight­ing in a toi­let. By the time com­mon sense (and pos­si­bly the school’s admin­is­tra­tion) made him delete the file, it had already been seen, down­loaded, copied and dis­trib­uted among thou­sands, with com­ments made by view­ers which ranged from dis­gust at the notion of vio­lence in schools to dis­gust at the tame­ness of the “fight”.

“We are, after all, not talk­ing about two actors, but two real-life school chil­dren,” said com­menter “Nick Tay”. Com­plained “dh”: “Don’t they know how to fight in schools any­more? I would have thrown the first punch at that boy who was pos­ing, and he wouldn’t have been able to get up for a long time … ”

One thing’s for sure: You have content-hungry neti­zens scour­ing the Inter­net for action. For­get Real­ity TV, reality-video-clips-online are the rage.

Speak­ing of rage, some­one in Hong Kong posted a phone cam­era (aren’t they nifty lit­tle evil things?) video last week of a very heated ver­bal alter­ca­tion between two bus passengers.

Now, while the YouTube video itself was strangely enter­tain­ing enough, the past few days has seen deriv­a­tive works by view­ers — who cut and sam­pled the video and audio from the orig­i­nal, and re-uploaded their work back onto YouTube.

So far, I’ve seen two techno-rap ver­sions and a karaoke ver­sion of the video, com­plete with pro­fane “lyrics”.

How would you find these video clips with­out me putting the URL here? Well, both YouTube and Google Video allow you to “tag” clips which you’ve uploaded, just like you can “tag” your blog posts and photographs.

So, to share your clips with peo­ple inter­ested in the sub­ject mat­ter, tag it with an appro­pri­ate key­word or phrase, such as “Sin­ga­pore” or “school fight”.

And if you’re still han­ker­ing after the Hong Kong bus pas­sen­ger alter­ca­tion video clip, the tag phrase in Can­tonese is, trans­lated lit­er­ally, “bus uncle”. Enjoy!

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over two years, and has been reluc­tant to go on cam­era ever since he was passed over for a burger tele­vi­sion commercial.