Public Access TV made way for YouTube.
Public Access TV was a stipulation in the contracts with cable TV companies when they were granted city-sanctioned utility monopolies in many US cities. The idea, briefly, was that TV is a powerful medium controlled exclusively by big corporations and that community members should also have access to that medium.
Cable companies were required to provide free equipment and resources for local producers. They could not exercise any editorial control – beyond those stipulated by the FCC, such as no pornography and rules against using free access for commercial purposes.
In a world where camera availability, quality, and affordability were rapidly improving; computers we making dedicated edit suites obsolete; and anyone could upload any video to YouTube for a worldwide audience, Public Access TV didn’t make much sense anymore.
Fusion Patrol, the TV Series, was ending at the beginning of the YouTube era. Over the course of several years, we had learned (some would argue that it was quite painfully learned) that you can’t just hand someone a camera and editing equipment and expect quality work. Enthusiasm can only carry you so far. There’s a reason the big boys spent a lot of money on their equipment and training.
With a conscientious approach, you can identify your shortcoming and, to some degree, improvise solutions to improve the quality of the final product. (Remember we are talking about the days of handheld camcorders and no smartphones.)
In those early YouTube days, we saw people making the same mistakes we made years earlier. We also saw that the books and online tutorials were still in the mindset of “buy the good equipment, and here’s how the pros do it.”
That left many people out who couldn’t afford to buy C-Stands, dolly track, a steady cam, or any other expensive specialist equipment. But you can improvise.
That is how the Ninja Team Video Project (NTVP) was born. One of my friends, who is quite conversant in photography and videography, and I decided to make a series of instructional videos on improving making videos. We made a few, but time slipped away from us, and the rapid acceleration of the quality of consumer equipment made it unnecessary.
The name Ninja Team was one of our very few first “pie in the sky” names. Even back then we were sure there was no way ninjateam.com would be available.
But it was. And I own it and have done so for decades now. It has also been in mothballs for many years after we stopped the NTVP.
I promise you, this is all relevant.
With Fusion Patrol the TV Series wrapped up, with NTVP shut down, and a couple of other projects under the Lone Locust umbrella (Spottings, The Pizza Locust) ended, I eventually ended the pretense that Lone Locust Productions wasn’t just me.
I am the Lone Locust, and lonelocust.com became the online place about me, and in 2005, I converted it to a personal blog.
Things are changing again, all because of that iOS Killer Sudoku Aide app back in part one of this epically long multi-part blog post.
In part 4, I’ll explain why my app is driving this change and how my hubris about the Ninja Team is causing the changes to happen here.