Image: Wikipedia
Just behind the wall of flame, a teenager raised a smartphone to the air. Beside him, a man hurled a leg of a chair into the blaze. Hundreds of people ducked in and around, covering their heads, yelling, feeding the fire. Somebody went under. From above, the conflagration flowed like a toxic river. On the other side, a wall of police shields stood raised.
The only way I know that these alternately tragic, inspiring, and unsettling events unfolded exactly as they did is because I spent a good chunk of the day glued to Espreso TV’s impressive livestream of Ukraine’s uprising. The revolution is finally and literally being televised, just on the internet. But it’s not being livestreamed, exactly, in the tradition of the guerilla journalism of, say, Tim Pool. This is ad-based television, with edited, curated programming—even if it doesn’t much resemble any newscast Gil Scott-Heron would’ve watched in his day.
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Espreso’s show, which is run through YouTube, offers a harrowing window into the carnage in Kiev. But it’s a bit more complicated, thoughtful, and canny than meets the eye. First, the monetization: Up to three and a half minutes of ads precede any bout of revolution-viewing on the Espreso channel, but you’re only required to sit through a few seconds’ worth. I watched an ad for an ‘Aquatimer’ luxury watch and a spot promoting travel in Galapagos before clicking through. (Current rates for YouTube pre-roll ads amounts to $6-9 per thousand viewers, and hundreds of thousands dropped by the stream today alone.)
After the gold band close-ups and high-res nature cinematography, I was live. I joined 180,000 other viewers in watching Ukraine burn. If you were on Twitter yesterday, you saw the link go round. It was profoundly disturbing; a swirl of violent orange and black, Molotov cocktails and lapping flames. And this, the world’s best look at the events in Kiev, was being beamed in by a media company that’s not even five months old.
According to TVB Europe, which filed a report on the station back in December, Espreso TV is a brand new venture in Ukraine. It opened its doors in November, just as the protests were taking shape. It was ostensibly originally intended to cover “news, business, sports and culture to viewers across the Ukraine region.” It was launched with the intent to livestream from the get-go, employing a suite of Mac-based software, ToolsOnAir’s Broadcast Suite, which offers “broadcast video professionals a customisable TV station in a Mac.”
“Using ToolsOnAir’s just:in, we are able to gather footage from multiple camera sources at once, editing and creating an EDL in realtime,” Espreso TV’s technical director Alexander Korostyshevsky told TVB. The outlet explained: “The system allows the user to create and disseminate news as it happens. Production and playout are equally streamlined, and chief editors Vadim Denisenko and Vitaly Pyrovych assemble and edit multiple playlists via ToolsOnAir’s just:live and just:play.”
The ToolsOnAir system allows Espreso to handle eight HD streams at once, and the team reportedly uses the program CompositionBuilder to make custom graphics on the fly. To wield the tech, there’s a staff of reporters, cameramen, editors, and producers behind the firestorm, even if the shot often appears to go static. Editors cut to different parts of the action, and do their best to convey the greatest sense of what’s going on. When the police advance, they switch to that angle. When the fires are burning far and wide, we zoom out.
Some of those cameras are handheld ones, wielded by reporters. And they’re all in considerable danger, too. According to the Kyiv Post, “Berkut riot police beat and kidnapped Dmytro Dvoychenkov, a journalist of Espreso online TV on Hrushevskoho Street before later releasing him.” At least one other Espreso journalist has been beaten by the authorities, too.
The station assiduously updates its homepage, and registers more breaking updates about the protest than any other outlet this side of Twitter.
Espreso stayed live, even after the lights in the highly contested Maidan square were snuffed, even as the gunshots rang out, even as the police rolled in with armored vehicles. Its livestream is perhaps the most reliable way to get an accurate sense of what’s happening on the ground—the terrifying chaos that has so far left an estimated 20 people dead. It’s hard, but important, to watch. It’s a direct portal to one violent alternative to a functioning, responsive democracy.
So yes, the revolution is being televised, and in a fairly traditional, if ambitious and courageous manner. It is being brought to us by corporate sponsors, and if that helps subsidize the costs of Espreso’s field reporters, even Scott-Heron would probably be okay with that. Ukraine’s revolution is being televised on the internet, and we should be thankful.
