Back during the first Reagan Administration, my first “real” production job was to shlep a videotape machine around on my back. In those days, if you shot professional video, it went to a 1″ reel-to-reel recorder roughly the size and shape of a large suitcase.

The machines were monsters, weighing about 50 pounds. For location use, it was attached to an aluminum frame similar to what a backpacker would wear. A video engineer needed to accompany the machine on all assignments as they frequently jammed. My sole task was to follow the camera guy around, connected by a 5 foot-long cable as thick as your thumb. The Ikegami-79 camera was the industry standard. It was gigantic and ran about $75,000 in 1980s currency. The lightest jolt required a time-consuming adjustment of it’s components, and being a tube camera, if you accidentally aimed it at the sun, it was ruined beyond use.

That first job was making the “Be All That You Can Be” spots for the Army. I spent 2 miserable weeks in the middle of July chasing through the woods and swamps of Fort Jackson, South Carolina lugging $150,000 worth of recording and camera gear. For what my salary was at the time, I’d need to work 15 years to pay for that stuff. In the heat, bugs, and humidity we were always one step away from production disaster. If you wrapped the job with equipment intact, off the tape went to a CMX editing suite with a million bucks worth of equipment needed to cut your spots. First you’d need to ‘offline’ the work, and finish with a costly ‘online’ session.

I thought about all of this last Saturday morning, when, on a whim, I decided to write, shoot, produce, and edit a ThreadBanger promo in my bedroom. Sanyo makes a video device, the C-40, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It will record up to 80 minutes of pretty OK-grade video to a 2 gig video card (tape, what tape?). The device weighs maybe half a pound and cost me $199 at RadioShack. When I was done shooting, I jacked the device into my $1,200 laptop and cut the spot on iMovie. I layed in music, titles, and effects, while sitting in my rocking chair. I was being all that I could be.

The tools of the web scale so easily to allow interaction and communication on a mass scale, and that’s why we love ‘em, but the flip side is always how these automated systems can be twisted to other ends. As soon as a system gets enough use to be important, someone’s trying to game it. We’ve seen this of course with the millions of robot blogs that are gaming Google AdSense and Technorati on a mass scale; with astroturf video postings on YouTube; and with the horrible plague of blog comment spam (as I logged in to post this, I did my daily scrubbing of the dozen or so soulless spam posts that had accumulated overnight, some caught by WordPress’ filters, others not).

Intrepid rabbit videbloggers buns and chou chou (check out their show, Rabbit Bites) recently blew the lid off a story about possible manipulation by YouTube users of viewing statistics, which I’m only getting to read up on now. The way it works is something like this: you repeatedly refresh your video’s page, either manually or with an automated script, enough to get it into the “most viewed today” section for a category, where it’s easier for a video to then take off, based on the tendency of the community to trust that the video got there on its own merits and is worth checking out. In a preliminary test they were able to somewhat duplicate the result, a feat that’s more remarkable considering their lack of opposable thumbs.

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A startlingly beautiful piece is up on You Tube right now. Given the space and what we are all making of it, I found it to be of multi-faceted relevance. On one hand it is the message itself, on another it is the fact that it is a response to another video - it goes beyond a message and exposes the depth of a dialog. Online. With video.

While the doomsday clock pushes two minutes closer to midnight, a passel of senators have made it their urgent duty to attempt to legislate not nuclear proliferation, nor environmental pollution, but instead what people can do with their personal recordings of internet broadcasts, in the old interest of “leveling the playing field.” Leveling for whom? The bill, proposed by Sens. Feinstein, Graham, Biden, and Lamar Alexander (average age: 64), could require webcasters who use music in their work (and pay royalties to do it) to wrap their files in DRM to prevent “music theft.” But in the past few years, streaming and downloadable open formats like m3u and mp3 have become an essential way for artists to reach the widest possible audiences, and have created, if anything, possibly too level a playing field for some people’s liking, where unsigned artists are starting to crack the sales charts more and more often by word of mouth alone. I’ll try not to be cynical about whom this bill is really meant to benefit, but practically, it’s hard to see how it would benefit anyone, but rather stifle the business it’s supposed to protect.

If the record labels want DRM so badly, they could reserve the right not to license their music to providers who don’t use it. But they wouldn’t do that, of course, because that’s where all the listeners are — people always choose convenience in the long run, and DRM will never match open formats there. And with most of broadcast radio broken — overformatted, focus-grouped, payola’d and overloaded with ads — webcasts and satellite radio are becoming some of the best ways artists and labels can still reach new people to sell records, promote shows, get licensing and endorsement deals and all the other ways they make money.

The rights holders have an opportunity right now to institute a new royalty system, and work with the explosion of online music programmers out there who will happily pay a fair royalty for the chance to build audiences and businesses of their own. We’d be among the first to sign up. But everyone whose business is creating content needs to recognize that there’s still plenty of value that can be created by those businesses willing to embrace technology, give up control, and give people what they want.