By Pat Ford
Pew Center
A young man, all in black, with hair moussed into a wild halo wants to talk about homelessness. Another, neatly dressed in suit and tie, wants to talk about parking meters and how “they wait there till the meter is just about to expire so they can write you a ticket.”
Next, a couple peers into your TV screen, arms around each other, smiling sweetly. “Hi, I’m Ken Moore,” says the man. “And I’m Moira Moore,” says the woman. They look at each other. Ken beams back into the camera, “And we really want to have a baby.”
These are some of the moments recorded by a videobox, the newest way to get the stories and opinions of ordinary people onto television.
Developed a decade ago at City TV in Toronto, the boxes are beginning to flourish in the United States since City TV began licensing the technology earlier this year. Stations in Oakland, Portland, Phoenix and some 20 other cities have recently licensed boxes to use as promotional or news gathering tools. City TV is also exporting the boxes to Africa, South America, the Middle East and Europe.
In a separate project, public television station KCTS in Seattle recently took its own version of a video box to nine U.S. cities to gather material that will be used both for a regular, half-hour, documentary-style show and for a series of short spots that will be distributed nationally by the Public Television Outreach Alliance. (Watch for a spotlight on the KCTS project in the coming weeks).
What all the stations using video boxes cite as most exciting is the sense of power these boxes give the people who speak into them and the level of honesty — even intimacy — the boxes elicit.
“What we’re selling is a cultural phenomenon,” says Ian Schamandy of YOUtv, Inc., City TV’s partner which is actually distributing video boxes. “We’re democratizing television. TV is essentially an elitist tool. Few people have access to the power of TV. (Video boxes) give ordinary people access to that tool.”
According to Schamandy, more than a thousand people a week visit City TV’s version of the video box, called “Speaker’s Corner,” which is built into a corner of its building in Toronto. Visitors talk about issues of the day but they are also free to talk about anything on their minds. The video is compiled into a half-hour weekly show and dropped into other City TV programming, such as the music video show “Much Music.”
Men have proposed marriage from the box, stand up comedians have pitched their acts inside, musical groups have been discovered. Schamandy says the novelty band “Bare Naked Ladies” got their break when they crammed into the “Speaker’s Corner” booth and performed a humorous send-up of the booth itself. On the serious side, he says, Canada’s Prime Minister went to “Speaker’s Corner” during the last election campaign and urged people to vote, regardless of who their candidate was.
“It’s a soapbox for the common person,” says Schamandy, “but a lot of people use it because they see it as a credible way to get out a message.”
Schamandy believes the power of the boxes is that the person who pushes the “record” button has complete control of the process. There is no interviewer or cameraman directing them. And that, he says, allows them to be unusually candid.
“People lose their inhibitions when they talk to a machine,” he says. “They say the most incredible things. And you see their body language and feel their emotions. It’s a more visceral process. And it’s amazing entertainment. It’s great television.”
That is precisely what appealed to Craig Miller, advertising and promotion manager for KPDX, a Fox television station in Portland, Oregon that plans to begin using video boxes this fall. Miller says he first saw “Speaker’s Corner” three years ago, during a visit to Canada, and thought it would be a wonderful tool for his station. So he jumped at the chance to license the boxes when City TV began exporting them through YOUtv.
“In order to be a good local station,” says Miller, “we need to reflect what the whole market is thinking and we’ll do that by getting local people to speak their minds and have opinions.”
Another Fox station, KTVU in Oakland, California, is among the first to use the boxes in the United States. Creative services director Steve Poitras says KTVU put up video boxes labeled “Fox Box” in four locations, last March.
Poitras says the box is feeding material for the station’s two-hour morning newscast but that KTVU also uses it as a promotion tool (posing questions such as “Tell us what you like best about our news shows”) and as a sales tool.
“Clients will pay a premium to have the box at a location that will drive traffic to their business,” says Poitras. In fact, he says, the busiest location is a Virgin Records megastore in downtown San Francisco.
The boxes are triangular shaped fiberglass structures, about six feet tall. People who approach find themselves looking at a TV monitor on which their image appears. Graphics on the screen give simple operating instructions. Questions appear on the screen; the speakers push a button to begin recording and have a brief time period to answer the questions or simply say what’s on their minds.
YOUtv’s Schamandy says some of the most interesting material he’s seen has come from video boxes in other countries. In Venezuela, for instance, he says a woman held up a picture of her baby and said, “My baby was sold to rich people. Can you help me?”
YOUtv gathers material from video boxes around the world, packages it and sends it back out to stations that use the boxes. That gives stations the chance not only to gather local perspectives on an issue but to compare them with the perspectives of people nationally and internationally.
“We really sees this as more than just a commercial venture,” says Schamandy. “It’s satisfying to give people the opportunity to be heard because when you do that, they grab it.”