A Truly Free Press
On January 7, 2007, Steve Jobs mounted the stage at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.
On January 7, 2007, Steve Jobs mounted the stage at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.
It was the site of the annual MacWorld Conference, a place where Jobs, the consummate salesman and CEO, loved to wow the crowd by introducing Apple’s latest piece of technological magic. On this day, Jobs had a very special new device to show the adoring crowd. There had been rumors about an Apple phone, but now it would become a reality. As Jobs walked forward into the spotlight, the crowd fell into eager anticipation. “This,” Jobs said, holding up the first iPhone the world had ever seen, “is the iPhone.” The crowd erupted into spontaneous applause. Jobs raised his hand to silence them. Holding the instrument, he explains, “it’s a phone, but it is more than that. It is really three devices in one. It’s a phone,” he said, “but it’s also an iPod and it’s a connection to the Internet.” It was all that, but it was something else, something that even Jobs did not realize at that moment. Along with the phone and the music device, the Apple engineers had also included a camera. The camera had been something of an after-thought. But it was that camera that would change the world of media forever. Video is the most powerful medium the world has ever known. More than 90% of all Internet traffic today is video. The average person spends an astonishing 8 hours a day watching television or movies or video; 19 minutes a day reading. What you see on TV or on Netflix or online as video influences everything we think, do, buy, believe or vote for. It is how we educate ourselves as a society.
Up until now, the content that we saw, the news, the information, was controlled by a tiny handful of major media companies, from Comcast to News Corp to Disney and so on. We may think we have had a free press up until now, but we have not. We have a very very unfree press.
There was a reason for that. Shooting, editing, and producing television or Netflix news and information was incredibly complicated and expensive. A broadcast-quality video camera cost as much as $70,000. A professional edit suite could cost as much as $1m. And that gear was complicated to operate. So the content that we all got to see was in the hands of only the very rich and the very powerful. They decided what we would see and what we would now see — what we would know and what we would never know.
In a moment, Jobs changed all of that.
The iPhone or smartphone that you already have shoots 4K video — that is four times the HiDef that is on TV. The phone also edits, adds graphics, adds music, and can broadcast live from anywhere in the world, all at no cost.
You have the same power to cover news stories, to report, and to share ideas and information that NBC or Fox or CBS, or CNN have. You have it right now. All you need to do is learn how to use this incredible firepower.
At UnPress, we are going to teach you how to do that. How to use your phone to take control of the media and to take control of your life. We’re also going to show you how to make a living — a real living — out of that incredible power that is already in your hands. The global TV market is a $1.73 Trillion a year business. You can get a piece of it. We are going to show you how.
Now, for the first time, we are going to have a truly free press.