CNN's hi-tech Obamania

Like a few other people I know, I spent Tuesday watching TV. I love the pomp and ceremony of grand occasions such as US presidential inaugurations, even if the beatification of Barack Obama has been somewhat nauseating for some months now.

Veteran commentators were overcome. They ran out of gushing superlatives. "In the next hour, history will change." You don't say? They lapsed into confused non-sequiturs. "We bring live coverage to viewers in the US, the rest of the world, and..." Well, go ahead, finish that sentence. Martians and the Scientologists on their spaceship were watching too, you know.

Despite the symbolism of the moment, I enjoyed the coverage not because of who was inaugurated. South Africans have been able to indulge symbolism and take pride that "we did overcome" since 1994. Sentimentality aside, all that's left is policy. And Obama appears to think that government is not the problem, it is the solution.

Despite the conceit among so-called progressives that their presidents "tend to get shot" (to quote one columnist), the most recent US president to get shot was one who expresses the opposite view, namely that government is not the solution, but the problem. He also made a great deal of progress: winning the Cold War, conquering inflation, slashing confiscatory tax rates, and laying the foundation for a quarter of a century of unparalleled economic expansion. It was telling, perhaps, that Ronald Reagan's widow didn't crack an invite in the line-up of former presidents and first ladies.

But let's leave political philosophy aside, if only because there was no way I was going to see a president being inaugurated who would stop subsidising everything that moves, or better yet, abolish central banking and government price controls on credit.

One reason I enjoyed the coverage was because CNN is always ready with some cool technology to show off. With last November's election, it used multiple cameras to put on-the-scene reporters back in the studio as holograms. It was a little freaky, but it was very cool.

This time, the network had two party tricks. One was a superfast turnaround on satellite imagery of the event. Three hours after the inauguration, they showed you the view from space. And what a view it was!

The second was more significant, and not only for its application to media coverage. It used technology Microsoft bought along with SeaDragon in 2006, named Photosynth. It amazed the audience when it was first demonstrated at the Technology, Education, Design (TED) Conference in 2007, by SeaDragon founder Blaise Aguera y Arcas. It was only launched publicly late last year, and most CNN viewers would have been equally wowed on Tuesday.

Microsoft could have paid millions in advertising, and still not have got this good a promo.

Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor

Photosynth stitches together a large number of photos, based on automatically detected points of common reference, into a panoramic, 3D view. It's 'virtual tour' technology on steroids, but CNN took it a step further still.

It called on viewers to send in their own photographs, taken at the moment of Obama's swearing in, and then linked them all together to create a synthesised image of "the moment". The resulting 3D panorama was demonstrated on a very fancy, very large touch-screen, powered by a very fast computer. But viewers could also go online, and provided they run Windows and install Microsoft Silverlight, pan around, zoom in and out, and explore the image themselves. A world of applications opens up for the technology, right there. Microsoft could have paid millions in advertising, and still not have got this good a promo.

Imagine how this might have changed the coverage of John F Kennedy's assassination. It took teams of experts to reconstruct the events from a few grainy photos and shaky films, and 45 years later, conspiracy theories still abound about whether there was a second shooter, who was on that grassy knoll, and how that magic bullet turned around in mid-air.

Instantly stitching together 'I was there' footage submitted by viewers can bring an exciting new dimension to coverage of major news events, and CNN is often at the forefront of such developments. It exploits the Internet and new technology, rather than trading on its old-media credentials and big-budget reporting and production capabilities.

It does this because it faces a great deal of competition in its domestic market. It does this because the people who want news are forcing old media to change, adapt to the Internet age, and stay a step ahead of rivals.

Sadly, even in the US, the belief that these market forces need to be curbed is rising. More sadly still, in South Africa, these market forces were stunted by regulation in the first place.

This is why MultiChoice can still get away with compressing its content to death. This is why we don't have the bandwidth to scare the SABC or eNews into real innovation. This is why they don't need to bother with clever social media integration, or fancy user-generated content manipulation: they don't need to fear the unexpected emergence of new, smart, tech-savvy competition that actually (shock! horror!) gives consumers what they want.

At least we're all regulatory-statists, nanny-statists, welfare-statists now. One can hope that this era of growing socialism, in South Africa as in the rest of the world, will eventually lead to a post-1970s-style backlash, and to the rise of radical reformers: leaders who recognise that the state is not the solution, but the problem, and have the courage to do something about it.