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."
