Thursday, October 11, 2007

Green Media and CNN

If you caught JMS on AC360 last night, you may, if you are the hardcore media junkie I am, have wondered how much energy was consumed to get that two-way shot with Stipe in Athens up to AC in NYC. A lot, I can assure you, given the price of gasoline used to transport a full MSM crew around Georgia.

Let's assume that a CNN crew based out of Atlanta was sent for the day to Athens, GA to set-up the shot. That's using XXX gallons of fossil fuel, right? In the kind of oversized vehicle needed to schlep all their gear back and forth. (Let's also assume no plane fuel was involved in the making of those TV minutes though, as that would be just thousands of gallons of fossil fuel burned, as opposed to mere hundreds.) And costs involved for that Athens-to-NYC air time were at least in the medium thousands. At least.

Meanwhile, CNN could have leveraged a terrific Green Media Moment (you read it here first; so yeah, you use it, I'll sue the pants off you) to do that live shot, which BTW was not live, but merely live-to-tape as we say in the biz. Notice the nice natural light on Stipe's shot, who was in the same time zone as a 10pm EDT Cooper; that was cool though because doing the shot outdoors saved plenty by not utilizing those energy-guzzling indoor lights.

Instead of incurring the costs for the (fossil) fuel, the superfluous personnel, and the ludicrously expensive satellite feed/uplinking capability needed to get Stipe onto AC360 last night, whereby he could then assist in the pimping of the upcoming green special, Planet In Peril, CNN could have had Stipe fire-up his laptop, plug a DV camera into it, get a wi-fi signal, jump on some live streaming platform like Ustream.tv, and voila -- live GREEN TV! Albeit via the Internets of course, but live or live-to-tape, and totally cool and totally pimp-able for being greener than the rest. A win-win for all. Even the marketeers!

Now of course there would be some energy resources expended to power the Internets-related tools that Stipe and CNN needed to employ to get the great, now-green media to everyone who was seeking such last night, but energy costs would have been drastically lower overall. And think if that laptop could have been... say... solar powered! Now we're talking Green Media, folks.

All the above said though, R.E.M.'s song put the soul into the CNN pictures we were seeing last night. There's energy and power in that kinda human resource that's immeasurable. Let's hope those kinds of energies are renewable, 'cause that's what we'll be left with when the other kinds are gone.

2 comments:

newmediajim said...

As you know Grayson, all of that stuff is producer/show driven. They want a look AND they want control. Ustream, Operator11 and all of those platforms are IMMENSELY cool and promising. Technologically they're ALMOST there and the better the broadband, quality scales higher.

Coms, IFB and such would be tricky as you'd be relying on his folks to accompish that. There'd be no one to yell at (like a NABET)if the whole thing went pear-shaped!! LOL

Grayson: Atlanta, GA said...

That's where the hyper-local social media thing kicks in... just where you left off! You get someone, on-site with some techy knowledge, just enough to really screw things up, and let them assist. Pay them a fair wage for the day, and be done with it. Much cheaper. Heck, give me 10 minutes, I could social-network you up several decent candidates.

And Stipe could just use a phone instead of IFB, right? It might look a little geeked-out, but looking geeked out with various personal media devices is cool too. Some really mo-clever geek could likely even rig up some IFB-ish item too.