Before YouTube and Vimeo there was Plastic Forks: an online video repository for the worlds video off-cuts and half-arsed video projects. It was never intended to compete with the short-film sites such as iFilm or Atom Films. Instead, the idea was for the video stream to be rich with potential, random ideas, rough sketches and video experiments. The result would be streaming video wallpaper and a chaotic video noise wrapped up under a single brand.
“Plastic Forks: The crap amongst the pigeons”
Established in 2000, site visitors were able to upload video content to the plasticforks.com servers and have inserted into the video stream. The name of the channel was born from a quote by Stephen Fry that stated “Cable TV is a lot like a drawer full of plastic forks”*. The brand played to the renegade dogma embraced by VJ’s, video ninja’s and the performing video arts scene of the time. It was very much a pre-cursor to today’s Video Blog (vodcasting) but without the accessible systems for distribution we have today.
The delivery mechanic followed a more traditional TV broadcast approach with a constant video stream being distributed for playback in RealPlayer or would be activated as a screensaver.
As a concept it was ahead of its time. In fact, the idea fell short of it’s potential due to the lack of broadband penetration around the world, coupled with the exorbitant prices required to host a streaming video service such as this.
* It may not have been Stephen Fry, it may have been Hugh Laurie or even Eric Idle. I do distinctly remember it being extremely witty and insightful (not that you could tell from my rather uninspiring misquotation). What is the opposite of [sic] anyway?
October 15th, 2008 at 1:46 am
ironically there are now low cost to free (eg Silverlight Streaming) options available that would have made this a dream come true….
maybe it’s time to dust of the plan, go niche and host the next generation…