They lived in public

We Live In Public, the documentary about online video martyr Josh Harris has its Canadian premiere next week at the Hot Docs festival. The mystique surrounding his late-'90s loft-based internet television venture, Pseudo.com, was largely due to the fact that relatively few people had a pipe fast enough to properly watch. But that only emboldened entrepreneurs north of the border trying to cash in, too.

Harris — whose pronouncement to 60 Minutes that webcasting would put network television out of business came a decade too early — was a 1980s New York City inter-nerd whose ability to glimpse the future of connectivity through market research and analysis bulked up his bank account. Then he got the idea to do something potentially creative with it, if first through salacious chatrooms billed hourly on the Prodigy internet service before figuring out how to fill web browsers. Pseudo was producing a steady stream of original arts-oriented television by 1997 — their most famous on-camera visitor grew up to be Eminem. Then Harris had the idea to confine 100 delirious bohemians to a bunker for the month leading up to the new millennium, but the experiment was shut down by the cops on January 1, 2000, who figured it for a suicide cult.

Pseudo recorded every move the inhabitants made, forming the vital background footage for We Live in Public, directed by Ondi Timoner (previously responsible for the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown Massacre rock doc Dig!). The company continued to float in the dot-com bubble — at least for long enough to pioneer web-based coverage of the 2000 Republican National Convention. And, when that money ran out, Harris opted to turn the surveillance cameras on himself, shacking up with his girlfriend — a former Pseudo show host — and putting themselves under the microscope until the inevitable breakdown and break-up. Harris subsequently spent five years running an apple farm.



Just as it started going wobbly for Pseudo, though, Toronto had its own answer to We Live In Public — backed by a major media player, Alliance Atlantis. U8TV was ambitiously announced in August 2000 just as Survivor-mania was taking hold, and the concept of recruiting twentysomethings to move into a loft equipped with 21 cameras was becoming familiar from global editions of Big Brother. The difference with U8TV was that it wasn’t a contest: rather, each resident would be paid $30,000, and duties included hosting no-budget interactive online programs with names like Spin the Bottle, Love Shack and Male Box.

A nightly dose of U8TV's so-called reality, The Lofters, was concurrently produced for the Life Network, based around the “off-camera” lives of those hosts. “If there’s more than smooching, that’s OK,” tittered Alliance Atlantis president Phyllis Yaffe, although the concept also necessitated one of the recruits constantly yammering about how she was still a virgin. The others seemed ready for anything: “His penis was touching the counter,” a female lofter remarked at the January 2001 press conference in regard to a question about their collective bathroom habits. “So we don’t know, as roommates, how we feel about that.”

Who cares about feelings when you’ve got footage? Zev Shalev, the CEO of the partnership venture, did his most to fashion himself into a Toronto new media mogul — today, he’s the executive producer of CBS’s The Early Show — even if all that early blather about e-commerce opportunities related to products the U8TV hosts were plugging, and even wearing, never panned out. A license was also procured for a digital cable station that never launched — confining the original slate of talking-head shows to mostly dial-up access.

Yet somehow, even after losing a couple cast members along the way, The Lofters survived 9/11 to complete a full year — with three of the inhabitants getting broadcast careers out of the exposure — and a sequel was ordered up for 2002. A voter-based eviction element was added to the mix because how else to know anyone was watching? But that drama didn’t help: The Lofters stopped being aired by the Life Network by March 2002, and all of the second-season cast members were homeless just in time for summer.



Alliance Atlantis was no longer in the economic mood to shoulder the cost of live web streaming, and no one else wanted to pay for it. When a $20 annual subscription fee was floated in 2002 by another struggling startup, Trailervision, no one wanted to bite, leading its CEO Albert Nerenberg to proclaim the model “an unmitigated disaster.” Typically for the time — and still to this day with money-leaking YouTube — the paradox was that the more folks tuning in meant expenses kept getting higher and higher.

Was anyone actually watching Trailervision.com? Nerenberg at least had the PR savvy required to get every conceivable media outlet to assert as much — the content-starved National Post ran pretty much the same fawning article about him three times in 1999. The hook was that people in just about every country in the world were busting their guts at fake trailers for fake flicks like The Jar Jar Binks Project and The Man With No Head.

Trailervision originally took the form of a special commissioned for the Space channel, along with an early-morning December 25 airing on Citytv, but the fact that an internet play was a billion times more likely to get written about — especially in all those glossy advertising-packed interweb industry magazines — led to deals with international companies with a few bucks to burn.

And then, of course, they all started going out of business. “There is less cash flying around,” said Trailervision vice-president Nick Sutcliffe in a last-ditch May 2001 press release, “but the flying money seems to be landing smarter these days.” A spin-off site earned a $500,000 investment for something called Zapavision, a site focused on fake ads for fake products, but it would have been better off shilling for genuine ones.

Nerenberg didn’t lack for Josh Harris-style soundbites about traditional media, though. “These people are tremendously fickle and backward and moronic and gutless,” he told Canadian Business. “The character of the average TV executive is very close to that of a bum who drinks Thunderbird wine. A very desperate, conniving monster.” (Nerenberg then went on to learn the ropes of less profit-driven funding channels for feature-length Canadian documentaries — the latest one, Laughology, is also part of the lineup at Hot Docs.)

Yet, winning over those fickle and backward and moronic and spineless TV executives was basically the business model of ExtendMedia. Coverage of their Toronto-based effort to integrate traditional programming with the internet was a more measured attempt to ride that same late-‘90s wave. Problem was, you could only sound so cutting-edge when your first big deal involved integrating a website into a Christine Cushing-hosted cooking show, no matter how innovative that seemed.

Later in 2000, a deal was signed to apply a web presence to the CBC series about hip-hop hosts at a campus radio station, Drop the Beat, and a similar effort allegedly plotted for CBC teen angst program Our Hero. At its pre-crash peak, ExtendMedia employed 160 people, with offices in New York and Los Angeles. Not long thereafter, its CEO Keith Kocho was publicly griping about how Toronto was inherently inhospitable to his vision of product plugs would be plugged into every level of entertainment. Now based in Boston, the most recent ExtendMedia deal concerns “next generation content management platform for in-flight entertainment” where, presumably, there is no escape from a sponsor’s message.

Traditional advertising was part of the gamble in July 2000 by another Toronto venture, BlackholeTV.com, which had the backing to splurge on transit posters and alt-weekly print pages. The operation claimed film crews in 17 countries, producing programs for multiple choppy RealPlayer channels, initially funded by two young guys with $50,000 to sorta spare. “I’ve got bank loans and I’ve cashed in all my retirement savings,” said the 26-year-old CEO Jay Litkey. “What do we have to lose? All of our money.” And so they did.

“Thus far, BlackholeTV.com’s video archive is dominated by footage of parties, pub crawls, interviews with folks on the street, concert footage and the hosts skydiving,” reported Matt Galloway in NOW. “Surely with time things will become more compelling but, given what’s up there now, you have to wonder whether viewers will stick around that long.” Within months, BlackholeTV.com was directing stragglers to its outsourced animation channel — short Flash-based cartoons being viewed as the last hope for the battered medium. Litkey has gone on to found something called Embotics: The Virtualization Lifecycle Management Company.

But there was one Canadian who most genuinely aspired to emulate the story told in We Live In Public, vowing to create a 24-hour broadcast day — except this one was based out of a pub, in Calgary. Intertooob.com formally launched in August 2000, with its 30-year-old founder Christopher Dores managing a staff of 12 minimum-wagers while volunteers hosted interactive shows with names like Bored Meeting, It’s All Crap and Two Old Farts. The trade-off was the hypothetical viewers would type hypothetical reactions back at them. Well, at least he got Wired to write about it.

“I didn’t do this to make money,” Dores told Canadian Press. “I did this to be the first.” And, of course, a few months later he wasn’t doing it at all — unceremoniously evicted from his base of operations at the Ship and Anchor by the end of winter. “I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do next,” he said at the end. “Things aren’t looking good.”

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