HuffPost Live, a real-time video internet news channel that launched last week, is indescribably moronic. Like fingernails on a blackboard, it is brutal in its insipid banality and obviousness. But whether this is good or bad for the enterprise, or whether quality is in any way a relevant point, is not at all clear.
In some sense, HuffPost Live just dramatically furthers a determined trend. It's another leap in turning media – that is, content – over to amateurs and know-nothings. Anybody who wants to be an expert can be. All blowhards are equal.
HuffPost Live adopts an old dog formula – talk radio, which Fox News imitated to great success on cable – into an internet video format. The variation in the HuffPost Live version is that the talent is replaced with young men and women of a particular milk toast, deer-in-headlights demeanor, who appear to have no more than a few hours of experience in television or news. This does not, least you wonder, lend the project some internet-style authenticity. Rather, the result is purely anodyne with these goobers, all would-be morning television types, making special efforts to be unctuous.
But again, I fear this critique is seriously missing the point. The goobers may not be old enough to remember the dawn of cable, but I am – and HuffPost Live is not worse than that. And, like early cable, its proposition is surely not about quality but about inevitability, territory and footprint.
Consider it a race: in addition to HuffPo Live, one can now watch is Sean Parker and Sean Fanning's Airtime, an attempt to match the video feeds of like-minded strangers while cleaning up the penis wavers who electrified the world on Chat Roulette. There is YouTube – already seeming like a hoary first generation effort, one stubbornly shunned by advertisers – and its efforts to create a more professional premium version that will be embraced by Madison Avenue. There's also Viddy, a sort of Instagram of video, Winkball, mostly a b-to-b platform, and Just Sayin', a Twitter-like mobile platform for video and audio.
It's a business in search of a product. Well, hardly a business – a business opportunity. So, really, no business and no product, just a yawning hole to fill. HuffPo Live's excruciating debut is merely part of a natural process. Video, because its form and cost basis can shift so dramatically, is a format that can only be perfected by doing it, and you are only really doing it if you are doing it in public. Humiliation, therefore, is basic practice.
In its early days and with its minimal budgets, CNN seemed preposterous against the production standards of network television news. Then Fox News came along and, at an even lower cost basis, seemed pathetically maladroit and screamingly funny. My favorite will always be MSNBC, which built itself a dweeby-cool studio in a bunker out in New Jersey and hired a cast of craven everyman yuppies to comment on the news (the predecessors of HuffPost Live's goobers). But video allows you to process out the embarrassments, like software makers process out the bugs.
It isn't really about the video, anyway; it's about the cost of the video. You are trying to match the resources you have with your audience's minimal expectations. The thing is, nobody really knows how low those expectations are (although it's a good guess that HuffPo Live falls below the threshold), or even what they are. Did viewers know they needed 24-hour news? Does anyone think they now need a real-time video back and forth with a new generation of questionable junior pundits?
That is the other thing with video – it may be unnecessary, but it is nevertheless habituating. It's a glorious trap. Like watching a train wreck, the eye can't look away. It doesn't need to be good, it just needs to find the level that bad is not laughed at.
The smart (or jaded) money on the internet sees video (remember, video has been the next big thing for the past five or six years now) as curiously retro. The internet overcomes the inefficiency of its vast blather because you can skim it and skip it – we are all negligent readers now – but video is clumsy because you actually have to watch it. While a quick glance at a first sentence can identify the worth of a commenter, with video, you're stuck.
The breakthrough feels close. If everybody carries a mobile recording and uploading device, doesn't that ability and behavior beg to be harnessed? What megalomaniac could resist that? As every internet citizen has become a self-confident writer and diarist, won't they also become dedicated broadcasters? As social platforms teeter, I suspect this will not so much cause the intrepid to pull back, but to see weakness as opportunity. Moving pictures will not be denied. He who controls video controls the media.
HuffPo Live really sucks, but the game is afoot.