I have been a TV journalist for a decade. But a fortnight ago, I produced my first interview (with Member of Parliament Jay Panda) that was filmed and streamed live by a mobile phone. In television terms, the smartphone doubled up as the camera and the OB van. In effect, the cost of producing a live interview such as this had been reduced to about 0.0001 per cent — or some such ridiculous fraction — of a conventional production. So had the size of the equipment we needed to carry, not to mention the absence of government licences or prohibitive transmission fees which TV channels must pay.

What’s more, viewers could not only watch the interview live on their mobile phones, they could also ask questions and interact with the guest. While there has been much noise — globally and in India — about how the digital shift is killing print publications, few realise that digital video may be the TV-killer.

Reed Hastings, CEO of the wildly popular movie-streaming site Netflix, believes that broadcast TV in the US will die by 2030, with online and mobile videos taking over. Hastings told The Hollywood Reporter , “It’s kind of like the horse, you know, the horse was good until we had the car.” This tectonic shift has already begun in India too: two of my friends from journalism school, both with a decade of TV experience, have quit to join start-up mobile apps.

The current global market leaders in this disruptive mobile video streaming technology are Periscope and Meerkat, both available on Android and iOS. In March this year Twitter bought Periscope for close to $100 million, according to The Wall Street Journal . That is a pretty mind-boggling price for a platform that was still at a beta stage then. But if you look at the incredible growth in this space, the price appears justified.

According to Cisco, global mobile data traffic grew 69 per cent in 2014, with almost half a billion new devices added in the year, taking the total number of devices and connections to 7.4 billion. And of the mobile data traffic, 55 per cent was mobile video traffic. To put this in perspective, last year’s mobile video traffic was nearly 20 times the size of the entire global internet in 2000.

In India, mobile video growth is even faster, spurred by cheap smartphones and ever improving data connectivity. Mobile video data consumption is growing at a whopping 88 per cent annually and traffic is expected to grow 24 times in the next five years. And there is a generation growing up out there whose favourite ‘TV channel’ is YouTube on their mobiles.

But the crucial question is, will journalism actually improve with this digital and mobile shift? I believe it already is improving, and will continue to do so, though many of my colleagues lament the fall of original, shoe-leather reporting to aggregation and click-bait headlines. The reason for my optimism is two-fold, both on the production and consumption sides.

On the production side, digital technology opens up the doors for anyone to become a publisher or live video streamer. This will break down the brahminism associated with a few editors at elite newspapers and TV channels who were able to control the media narrative. Journalism — or storytelling — is not, and should not be rocket science. There is a storyteller in each one of us, and digital technology, coupled with the reach of social media, is finally democratising the space.

Yes, there will also be riff-raff — particularly in the initial stages — as digital media companies are still not well funded enough to do rigorous, original reportage. But if you look at the US, for example, Huffington Post picked up its first Pulitzer prize in 2012 for national reporting, while digital-first outlets like Vice, Politico and Vox are producing some of the most innovative storytelling formats.

On the consumption side, the mobile has given the viewer incredible choice, both in terms of variety of content and the time at which they want to consume it. Features like custom notifications and on-demand videos mean that the news consumer is engaged in real-time with the issues that she is passionate about. She no longer has to wait for the newspaper in the morning, and doesn’t have to sit in front of TV at 9pm to catch the headlines of the day. Nor does she have to depend on an editor to curate the news she wants: she is her own editor.

Most journalists and newsrooms will push back against this brave new world, of course, and lament the loss of their own exalted position in society as the curators of the media narrative. Just like brick-and-mortar retail pushes back against e-commerce or black-and-yellow cabs lobby against Uber. But if a technology is cheaper and more democratic for both the producer and the consumer, then that technology will eventually triumph. That is the story of human progress.

Revolution is no longer in the controlled airwaves or newsprint. Revolution has reached everyone’s hands.

Sambuddha Mitra Mustafi is the founder of The Political Indiant; @some_buddha

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