TV Finds Its Niches on the Internet

As Hurricane Katrina approached New Orleans, two newsmen sat in a television studio, calmly talking to viewers about the storm. They were not the only broadcast journalists in the city -- networks and cable news outlets had sent reporters.

But these two men were not visitors. They were news anchors at WDSU-TV, a station based in New Orleans. And although they were professional, composed and even managed a bit of self-deprecating humor, the fact that this was happening to the city where they lived and worked heightened the emotion of the broadcast.

I know, because I was watching them live, via streaming Internet TV, on a home computer. So was Frank Huisman in Veldhoven, a small city in the Netherlands.

“It was much more intense, more frightening than watching CNN,” said Huisman, who created the World Wide Internet TV site (www.wwitv.com), a global directory of more than 1,000 broadcast, cable and Web-only channels that stream onto the Internet.

“To watch something happening local gives you a whole different sense of it,” Huisman said.

Television stations have been streaming their signals online since the late 1990s, but Internet TV has never become as prevalent or prominent as Internet radio.

One reason for this is technical: Because video signals are much denser than audio, they require a fairly high-level broadband connection to be viewed with decent fidelity. That’s being overcome as broadband Internet access continues to spread, but without at least a fast cable-modem line, it’s tough to get uninterrupted, smoothly flowing picture and sound.

The other reason is economic -- no one has come up with a reliable way to make money off the medium. In most situations, the best an Internet TV station can do is draw viewers to advertising on its home website.

But judging from the local coverage from WDSU (www.wdsu.com) -- along with another station in New Orleans, WWL-TV (www.wwltv.com), that continued streaming over the Internet in the aftermath of the hurricane -- it was impossible to dismiss Internet TV as a novelty.

WDSU coincidentally started its Internet service less than a month before the storm hit, joining a slow but growing trend.

“There were a lot of stations that went online before 2000, but then it nearly stopped during the economic downturn,” said Huisman. “Last year, it started to pick up again.”

On his site, he lists about 30 broadcast stations in the U.S. that stream live online at least part of the day. For a few, small stations, the Internet is a way to tremendously increase their reach.

KCTU-TV (www.kctu.com) in Wichita, Kan., is licensed to broadcast with only 3,000 watts of power (by comparison, KCBS-TV in Los Angeles broadcasts with 30,000 watts) and has had problems getting even local cable systems to carry its schedule of reruns, movies and high school sports. So in 1997, the station turned to the Internet.

KCTU President Ron Nutt said it was the first commercial station to go live, around the clock, online.

“We were looking for an alternative,” Nutt said. “Now we get e-mail from Japan and all over from people who can’t get programming like we have here.”

The streaming doesn’t generate much additional advertising revenue, although Nutt said the station has booked ads from soft drink and cellular phone companies seeking coverage outside of KCTU’s broadcast viewing area.

And being online has brought in viewers from some surprising and far-flung locations.

“One night on our call-in talk show, ‘River City Forum,’ the topic was abortion,” Nutt said. “The phone rang, and it was the Vatican.”

Numerous cable-only channels stream online, including some that are nationally known. C-SPAN (www.c-span.org), for example, produces three continuous streams consisting mostly of speeches, hearings and other matters concerning the federal government. You have to be a true politics junkie to tune in to these shows -- or the many city council meetings that are streamed online -- on a regular basis.

There are the Internet-only channels, a very few of which are commercial ventures such as ManiaTV (www.maniatv.com), a Denver-based music-video and humor stream that seems mostly aimed at young teenagers.

Many online-only stations exist to establish a worldwide forum for their messages. These include religious stations, the vast majority of which are evangelical Christian outlets originating in the United States, Huisman said. But there are also Islamic channels and one from Brooklyn consisting mostly of a feed from a single camera at the back of a Hasidic synagogue.

There are several noncommercial music-video channels worldwide. Among the more original are AfricaHit (www.africahit.com), a Miami-based station that mostly shows African groups performing in a variety of languages, and SRTV (tv.specialradio.ru/tv.shtml) from Russia, which shows hard-core rock groups performing in clubs and singers in a variety of other genres.

So there is something out there for everyone, not that you will be able to watch it seamlessly unless you have access to an extremely fast broadband line.

“Everyone in the United States has a PhD in TV watching,” said Harlan Wallach, who holds the post of Architect for Media Technologies at Northwestern University. “Everyone knows what quality video looks like. So, when they see picture in a small window or one that is not great quality on a computer screen, it’s not up to our expectations.

“Right now, Internet TV should be thought of something that satisfies an informational need.”

Which is exactly what Anzio Williams, news director at WDSU, had in mind. Although the station has been able to broadcast over the air with borrowed equipment, the lack of electricity means few locals can watch TV. So the Internet has allowed WDSU to at least reach an audience outside the region, including evacuees.

“I tell our people that it’s our job to be an information source for New Orleans, no matter what,” said Williams, speaking by cellphone from the city. “And if it has to be mostly on the Internet right now, that’s where we’re going.”

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David Colker can be reached via e-mail at technopolis@latimes.com. Previous columns can be found at latimes.com/technopolis.