We all should have seen the revolution in home-cooked video coming a long time ago.
The amateur movie-clip revolution has been coming at least since the 1970s when Super 8 home movie camera/projector kits became something every family worthy of its avocado-colored fonduemaker had to have.
The reason we didn’t see this sea change sooner is because it’s been a very slow revolution indeed, as amateur clips evolved from Super 8 to Betamax and VHS tapes to digital camcorders to Pandocasting.
I assume you noticed how I, a professional writer, skillfully laid the groundwork to coin a term–Pandocasting.
The Pando.com Web site arrived among the trendy set recently as a brilliant scheme that lets us treat those huge files required for home-made digital video with the same casual disregard for file size and bandwidth now given to attaching still photos to e-mail messages.
Pando Networks Inc. uses small bits of software that get loaded, for free, onto the PCs and Macs of both the senders and the recipients. The software lets users select files up to 1 gigabyte in length and upload them to servers maintained by Pando over cable or DSL high-speed Internet connections.
Then the Pando program sends e-mail messages to whomever the user wants to send the files, telling them they can download the video–or other huge file–by using another copy of the Pando software.
My tests of the system usually yielded delightful results, letting me share video files with running times as long as 2 hours with other folks. It was something I had never been able to do before using e-mail.
Until Pando, it was unthinkable for ordinary computer users to share their digital movies as e-mail attachments because they require files so huge they exceed size limits imposed by nearly every Internet service provider and nearly every free e-mail service.
Nearly every digital still camera now sold can capture video as well as snapshots, but the sheer size of movie files meant that there was little people could do to share the movies short of mailing a DVD.
The reason Pando intrigues technology buffs is that it arrives in the middle of a global fad for making quirky videos and sharing them with friends, acquaintances and strangers over new Web services like YouTube, Google Video and MySpace.
If you haven’t logged on to YouTube.com to watch this mind-boggling new way to drive you to distraction, I urge you to do so the next time you’re online.
You will find hundreds of thousands of people who have discovered that uploading their videos to these kinds of sites has been the only feasible way to share them with friends and family, even if it meant sharing them as well with the world in general.
Of course, posting videos with these public sites quickly became ultratrendy, the ultimate in reality TV in which not only have we done away with the professionally written scripts and actors but also with the television networks that once made it all possible.
However, there are many of us who would prefer to share clips of high school graduations, birthday parties and trips to Yellowstone with friends and family rather than getting naked and strumming an air guitar before strangers.
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For us, Pando arrives in the nick of time. I know you’ll love it once you try it.
But there is more here than first meets the eyes.
I can share my lengthy homemade videos with one person on my e-mail list or I can share them with many people on my e-mail list.
I can, in fact, use Pando.com to broadcast stuff just as I would do on YouTube. But with Pando I control who sees my work. My goodness, I could even charge people.
Or I could use it to share stuff that isn’t my own work at all–stuff by filmmakers like Spielberg, Lucas and Tarentino.
And it needn’t just be movie files. I could just as easily upload music CDs to the Pando servers and then send e-mail to folks telling them where to get them. And those folks could then reciprocate by sending me links to their own music files on Pando servers.
Or they could proffer their own copies of Hollywood movies, of their favorite software titles, games and/or copyrighted Audible format recorded books.
Log on to Pando.com and you’ll already find a busy online chat area where folks from around the world talk about what they can do with this new tool.
Maybe they should rename Pando Pandora, after the fabled Grecian lass who got more than she bargained for when she opened her e-mail box.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611.