Videostreaming – IT Week Opinion
Bare facts of the news are terribly dull

Videostreaming – IT Week Opinion

As undressed ladies tell mobile phone users what is going on in the world, Guy Kewney is overcome by the feeling of ennui.

It was a good few years ago that I came across the first streaming news services on the web, and shortly after that a friend sent me an email. In the sort of hushed giggle that I had thought only a 12-year-old schoolboy could achieve he pointed me at Naked News. If ever a product did what it said on the tin, that was it. It was a TV news channel. Only, the news presenters were all women. And, after the first few paragraphs of their bulletins, naked. Personally, I was absolutely not impressed.

I’ve seen people without their clothes before, and a good proportion of those have been young, nubile females. And a lot of those were putting a lot of effort into being erotic and failing. But this they weren’t even trying to be erotic. They stripped with the sort of academic detachment that any lecturer on (say) tyre compound analysis would be hard pushed to match. And once bare, they recited the bulletin in a way that could only be called cold.

These days, Naked News is a hot property. To my utter amazement, there are enough gawpers who simply want to see what breasts look like, that its a commercial hit. Not only a commercial hit: a resellable commodity. And guess what… you can now watch Naked News in glorious pinkicolour on your mobile phone. For £15 a month, says the SMS group 160characters.org, you can subscribe.To me, this is just baffling. I can understand a pimply-faced youth wanting to see nudity for the first time, but surely after a month no one would re-subscribe.

So I tried to find out whether viewers were really loyal to the show. I didn’t get a reply. On reflection, that was probably my fault.Maybe I shouldnt have used standard web jargon in my question, to ask how “sticky” the subscribers were…