BRADY Gilchrist has gone to extremes to make a point. The former Marshall Fenn Communications executive is spending the summer sailing the Great Lakes in his high-tech-equipped boat, reporting on his thoughts about the information age and providing a visual record of his travels for his website, adigitallife.net.

Gilchrist has forsaken traditional technology such as broadcast television in favor of wireless digital forms, illustrating how new technology impacts our lives and demonstrating the viability of convergent media programming.

‘The mission of Digital Life is to use cool technology to enable this promise of a ‘mobile lifestyle’ and being able to contribute [to media] and being connected wherever you are,’ he says.

This is Gilchrist’s second Digital Life embarkation. Between journeys, he spent five months on board the Starship, a purpose-built 22.5-metre ocean-going yacht. The Starship carried a group of photographers and scientists on a three-year expedition around the world to produce a multimedia record of the planet and present it via the Internet. Gilchrist joined the team for the leg of the journey sailing up Africa’s West Coast to Majorca. Despite feeling some unease about passing villages that don’t even have electricity in a vessel that epitomizes high-tech, Gilchrist found the project inspiring.

‘On board it has tech you wouldn’t believe,’ Gilchrist says. ‘It was impossible to open a cupboard without finding a neat new toy. They have a full-blown non-linear editing suite that can edit in any format. All the video and pictures that were taken were digital. We had over one-and-a half Terabytes of storage.’

Due to the currently exorbitant cost of satellite bandwidth, video on the Starship website was limited, and the daily journal was built mostly with text and pictures. To Gilchrist, what the endeavor most brought to light was the growing role of interactivity in media. He estimates that Starship’s adventures attracted 500,000 to 600,000 daily Web visitors, and a fair number of those would e-mail the Starship crew.

‘People from different parts of the world would give us suggestions and advice on things that were cool to see,’ Gilchrist says. ‘In every little region we went to, we had people with amazing insights and expertise. In many ways the audience shaped the show in real-time. That interaction made the experience much richer.’

The Starship Millennium Voyage was sponsored by Microsoft, Sony, Olympus and Deutsche Telekom, and also proved the case that if you can provide a compelling enough online product, you can bring major financial partners on board.

Gilchrist sees interactive media as superior in terms of keeping content fresh and spontaneous.

‘In traditional media, you do the research, you shoot the television story, you edit it together and you produce a show that will air at some future time,’ he says. ‘[But on the Starship project] our lead time really was just a day for talking to specific points and issues. Things could really change on a dime [based on viewer input]. It’s the ultimate in responsive media.’

Reality-based TV

The reality-based programming ideally suited to the Internet has also been embraced by traditional broadcast. Networks like it because it is cheap to produce, and it has caught on with audiences in a big way. However, excessive production ‘finessing’ often compromises the true degree of realism. For example, producers of CBS’s Survivor 2 admitted that stand-ins were used to achieve an overhead shot of the show’s characters in a race. Storylines can seem created in the editing room, and many wonder if certain sequences are scripted outright.

That is why the Internet is presently a better outlet for true reality-based shows such as the Starship Millennium Voyage or Digital Life. Web programs do not have to adhere to the well-entrenched stylistic and structural audience expectations for TV shows, nor their scheduling and lengths (although if they incorporate streaming video they can be limited by technology and cost). Web shows are currently primitive compared to their traditional broadcast counterparts, but with the forthcoming massive rollout of greater bandwidth, the playing field will start leveling.

Alliance Atlantis Communications’ U8TV co-exists in both worlds. Web surfers can take a gander at what the site’s eight lofter-hosts are up to at any given time through three ‘snoop cam’ feeds, and they can also watch three hours of live online programming daily, interacting with the lofters in real-time via e-mail. Viewers can then turn on their TVs to AAC’s Life Network throughout the week for a half-hour compressed version edited into a form more conducive to TV.

With the growth of iTV services such as TiVo and ReplayTV, which adopt the ‘lean forward’ features of the Internet, including the notion of video-on-demand, it’s inevitable that just as Web programming will start to look more like TV with improved streaming, broadcast programming will increasingly resemble its online brethren in terms of content.

Digital technology frees content providers and audiences not only in terms of form, but also, significantly, in terms of space. Whether you are a terrestrial broadcaster or someone like Gilchrist – who does not want to give up any of his favorite content, only its traditional delivery devices – storage is a major issue. His studio, after all, is an 8.1-metre Catalina.

‘Everything has to be digital,’ he says. ‘All the music is digital with Windows Media. I do a lot of downloading of stuff from the Internet, such as e-books and Internet video, for later consumption. Depending on the connection I’ve got access to, either it’s wireless via cellular modem or satellite, or I’m lucky enough to plug into some place where there’s a telephone line close by.’

So far Gilchrist is financing Digital Life himself, but he has a revenue philosophy he believes is ahead of the curve. He writes features on his site about wireless equipment, such as the Rogers Blackberry, explaining how he employs them on his travels. So far he has not found sponsors willing to pay for this kind of exposure, but he anticipates it’s only a matter of time. Meanwhile, he says the media attention Digital Life has received has helped him establish a recognizable brand, which he plans to translate into interactive consulting work.

-www.adigitallife.net

-www.ms-starship.com

-www.u8tv.com