Meet Hacking TV, My New Podcast

Watch and Listen at HackingTV.News

Update: After a good two-year run, Steve and I decided to move on from HackingTV. His new podcast is Future Forward. 



“Let’s do a podcast,” my friend Steve Rosenbaum blurted out a few months ago.
  

We were shooting the shit, as we so often do, about the erratic path that television—the biggest and most powerful communications medium—is taking as it meanders from a handful of linear channels programed in the towers of Sixth Avenue and the back lots of Hollywood to the diverse galaxy of Internet video that puts Kevin Spacey a click away from Pew Die Pie.

Instantly, it was clear that this was exactly what we should do.

It had the just-for-us-because-it’s-fun feel of “let’s put on a show”. And I’ve been thrilled to see podcasting emerging as the vanguard of journalistic creativity. Sure, we’re not going to do the sort of reported in the field, edited and scripted podcasts that are the hallmarks of Alex Blumberg, Sarah Koenig and the others building on the NPR traditions. But podcasting, like blogging, is a medium that can be engaging in lots of styles.

So we’ve started by taping a weekly conversation in which Steve and I talk about our favorite topic—the transformation of TV by digital video—based on the week’s news and our own adventures. Steve came up with the name Hacking TV that embodies our thesis that the centralized establishment of networks and cable systems is being upended by myriad creators and entrepreneurs.

Obviously, we had to make a version of our podcast on video instead only on audio. This has proven to be much more of a technical challenge than we expected. But Steve, who has decades of experience as a filmmaker, TV producer and digital video entrepreneur, has tamed our unruly menagerie of software and hardware so now you can see us, hear us clearly and even have the sound sync up with the movement of our lips.

So give HackingTV a watch or a listen.  The video is on YouTube and WayWire (Steve’s company). The audio is on  iTunes. Both forms plus show notes and other links are on our site HackingTV.News. Join the conversation and let us know what you think on the website or tweeting to @HackingTV @SHansell or @waaywire (Steve).