The images from their webcasts were even smaller than ones on the dumpy television screens found in overstuffed Manhattan studio apartments. Interactivity and the ability to send e-mail to the talent couldn't overcome the fact that Web TV is just too cool for overblown shows. Compared to Pseudo, even basic cable is sizzling hot, and the average motion picture is an information supernova. There is a working model for Web-based television, one that Pseudo and DEN ignored. Webcams, which run the gamut from voyeur-cams tucked in college coeds' dorm rooms to cameras aimed at fish tanks and African watering holes, are the future of Web television.
Webcams are very cool, in a media sense.
While watching one of these guerrilla webcams, a viewer can open up other browser windows and shop, chat, or read something. The viewer can send and receive e-mail, type a term paper, or play a game. Applications like multiuser games, instant messaging, and Napster can run while one flips through images or watches a webcam picture refresh. The Internet offers so many forms of information that any attempt to stanch this flow by demanding total concentration, the way DEN and Pseudo did, just overheats the medium. The site is run by a trio of artists who toil outside the NYC gallery system.