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Rocketboom, produced and directed by Andrew Baron, is a three-minute daily vlog (videoblog) which is often presented in the format of a newscast, usually with a comedic slant. It is hosted by former MTV Europe VJ Joanne Colan, who made a brief appearance on July 11, 2006, and then began as the show's anchor the following day•. The series' original anchor••, actress Amanda Congdon, also co-scripted and co-produced with Baron. The two launched Rocketboom on October 26, 2004. Her last Rocketboom episode was on June 23, 2006. Rocketboom was directed by Baron from 2004 to 2006, with some 2005 and 2006 episodes directed by Mario Librandi•.
Format Each weekday morning, Rocketboom offers oddities and assorted animations, reports on robotics, unveils digital delights, samples vlog excerpts and explores emerging social movements, such as freeganism and parkour, while sometimes presenting political commentary, satiric or serious. Apart from an occasional use of old newsreel footage or vintage commercials, the much-touted products of traditional mainstream media seldom get a mention. Instead, the thrust of Rocketboom is very much allied with Internet culture and personalities, such as Ze Frank, who has been parodied on Rocketboom. Baron's survey of Internet amusements is ongoing and vast in scope, as indicated by the many links he has posted at Rocketboom's associated sites, the Rocketboom weblog and Apollo Pony, repositories of material that does or does not make it onto Rocketboom's daily webcasts. On some shows, Rocketboom reports directly from Internet seminars and conferences, such as the Apple Campus in Austin (2006-03-16)•, the Syndicate Conference 2006 (2006-05-18)• and the Webby Awards (2006-06-13)•. It also offers field reports from such events as Times 100 Most Influential People red carpet gala (2006-05-09)•, the Union Square pillow fight (2006-02-21)• and locations such as the Brooklyn Brewery (2005-10-07)• and the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York (2006-05-11)•. People Rocketboom and Rocketboom Human Wire's World Video Report both present webcasts packaged by its correspondents in the United States, Europe and Kenya: Annie (Los Angeles), Andy Carvin (Washington DC), Zadi Diaz (Los Angeles), Ruud Elmendorp (Nairobi), Steve Garfield (Boston), Milt Lee (South Dakota), Chuck Olsen (Minneapolis), Bre Pettis (Seattle), Tyson Root (Houston), Stefan M. Seydel (Switzerland/Germany/Austria) and Graham Walker (Prague). Other members on the Rocketboom team have included Andrew Congdon (production assistant), Kevin Chapados (video editor) and Sherng-Lee Huang (video editor and field reporter), plus Joshua Kinberg and Kenyatta Cheese. Popularity When Rocketboom debuted in 2004, it went from an initial 700 viewers to 70,000 viewers in its first ten months. The vlog's success was noted in the summer of 2005 by CBS Evening News•, Wired News• and other publications. BusinessWeek labeled it "the most popular site of its kind on the Net."• The January 9, 2006, issue of Newsweek stated that Rocketboom had "130,000 daily viewers." On February 2, 2006 Rocketboom was incorporated into an episode of the TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation in a fictional scene of a murderer watching a Rocketboom commentary on the crime.• In the month following the CSI episode, the number of Rocketboom viewers jumped to 200,000. As noted by Dan Mitchell in the New York Times (2006-03-11), this is similar to the size of a small cable show audience. In "A Blog Writes the Obituary of TV,"• Mitchell wrote: One recent week, the video blog Rocketboom drew an average of 200,000 people a day to watch its short daily news reports on technology, the arts and other topics. The Abrams Report on MSNBC, meanwhile, drew 215,000 viewers to its weekday hourlong show about legal issues. Does this anecdote -- that an unpopular cable news show and a wildly popular Web site draw similarly sized audiences -- prove that the Internet is upending the economics of the television business? It does for Prince Campbell, a former media executive who runs the Chartreuse (BETA) blog. Mr. Campbell wields superlatives in a particularly bloggish manner at chartreuse.wordpress.com. "Broadcast television is dead," he declares. "Just like the Internet killed the music industry, it's about to do the same thing to broadcast TV." By the spring of 2006, Rocketboom was receiving a minimum of 250,000 complete downloads per day. Over the course of several days, each day's video receives over 300,000 complete downloads. Rocketboom states, "Some episodes are more popular and receive well over a million complete downloads."• In April and May 2006, Rocketboom introduced its first commercials. The first commercial sponsors were TRM and Earthlink.• Each of which was a series of 5 commercials shown, one per day, over the week that they were featured. In Fall of 2006, Rocketboom's self-published statistics came into question. An Excel spreadsheet published by BusinessWeek determined that 2,982,612 files were downloaded from Rocketboom's servers between October 1 and October 26.• This equals 114,715 viewers per day or 156,980 viewers per show, with the most popular show downloaded 165,822 times. Congdons departure On July 5, 2006, Amanda Congdon released a video saying she had been "un-boomed" and forced out as host of Rocketboom. The Rocketboom website claims that she quit in order to move to Los Angeles. The day following her exit, she was offered a position to join Netscape, among other online outlets. After host Joanne Colan began as the new host, comments indicated that many viewers felt Congdon had been a key element of the show. However, Colan soon found an appreciative audience for her mix of humor with informative interviews and field reports. Katrina controversy On September 1, 2005, Rocketboom departed from their typical light news reporting by presenting host Congdon, also an aspiring actress, performing a lengthy monologue in the character of a Hurricane Katrina survivor. Many viewers became upset and objected to her dramatic interpretation, finding it to be in poor taste as the tragedy was still taking place. Rocketboom responded by moving the episode from their archive to another location, which is linked from the Rocketboom archive.• Production Rocketboom is available on the website, Akimbo, Democracy, and via an RSS 2.0 feed. Viewers may subscribe to feeds using a podcast aggregator such as Juice or iTunes, which periodically checks for and downloads new content automatically. In addition to TiVo, it is also available on Windows Media Center with a third party plug-in from mcesoft•. Music Rocketboom's opening theme music is "Zoom a Little Zoom", from the 1959 album Space Songs (written by Hy Zaret and Lou Singer), a public domain recording because of a lapsed copyright. The theme is sung by folk musician Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans with music by Tony Mottola. | ||||||||
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