Web TV boasts diverse content and strong moral purpose: giving a platform to those who often aren't heard, writes Haydn Shaughnessy.

I'm a fan of Take 3. Not every day, but at least once a month. Take 3 is an online multimedia magazine. I'm a growing fan of Mixcast, a melange of urban culture from across the world. And finally I think MediaStorm, a producer and aggregator of films on the web, is doing a great job.

The world of online entertainment suffers from the poverty of overload. Our eyeballs often can't bypass the candy of services such as ilfim, YouTube and daily motion. It's easier to be a YouTube user or a Bebo addict than it is even to find quality content.

The success of free upload/download sites is in part built on the back of biography services such as MySpace and Bebo. For those still unaware of MySpace, it allows users to create online autobiographies and to populate these with content from the web. The choice of video shorts are typically a way of indicating style and personal preferences.

With MySpace and Bebo running at billions of hits a month, it has become clear what the populist mindset is now chasing. Want to see Anna Kournikova on one of her early photoshoots? Go to ifilm. She looks mighty uncomfortable in a bikini with the sea lapping around her midriff. Paris Hilton on a lazy Susan? You get the drift.

Not to decry clip TV - there are some great comic moments out there - but after you've bellowed a couple of times at The Short Lebowski, a re-cut of The Big Lebowski that eliminates every piece of dialogue except the swear words, or puzzled over the Orbit chewing gum ad, then what? The average person wanting to spend time watching content of value would feel justified in turning off web television.

Web TV, though, is a medium with a growing fan base and diverse content, and strong moral purpose. Web TV does not mean your favourite TV programme on a PC. Nor does it mean movie trailers, though both, like Kournikova, are big on popular kudos. Web TV often stands for an original, liberated, content form, driven by the necessity of low-cost recording. The imagination at play here is often marked by a directness missing from broadcast TV.

TAKE MIXCAST. Mixcast is a network of channels owned and run by underground producers from major urban centres such as Washington DC, Seattle, London, Tokyo and, if proprietor and network owner Gary Murray gets his way, Dublin, Galway, Limerick and Cork.

Mixcast channels are the work of a new generation of audio-visual entrepreneurs, producers and artists.

Royce Dixon is a former restaurant, bar and Jamaican carry-out owner from Washington DC. Royce runs Streetz iz Talking, a reality documentary company that produces films about what he regards as America's other mainstream - the down-and-out, drug-addicted and apparently marginal that inhabit the Abandominiums of DC, New York and . . . the list is long.

Soul Gorilla reaches across the urban communities of America, Asia and Europe from Seattle. "We're working with amateurs and pros alike, explains channel organiser Josh Berman. "Some of the guys are film-school graduates, trying to tell the world what Seattle is about and create an entertaining concept and a brand."

In the case of urban Seattle, that brand focuses on the achievements of the black American population. Brand urban Seattle talks to the world without seeking a permit from a network broadcaster or an international sales and distribution deal. The internet is the only way for brand urban Seattle to grow.

Two members of Soul Gorilla are also dancers with the Massive Monkeys, world break-dance champions. The Gorilla's site features videos of the Monkeys dancing around the world, bringing Seattle's underground culture to appreciative audiences in Europe (they recently won the British break-dancing Open championship) and Asia. "They're treated like gods in Korea and Japan," says Berman, who adds they are relative unknowns at home.

When pieced together, the marginalised cultures of all urban centres add up to a huge cultural movement.

"Our channels bring their own audience to Mixcast," says Mixcast boss Gary Murray. "These guys are already established in their own urban culture and they bring that audience to us, and then there's cross-over between them and other urban audiences."

In the first two months of its existence, Mixcast served a million videos of urban culture made by people who have no access to television but who nonetheless aspire to a story-telling role.

"There are no outlets except Gary and Mixcast," says Dixon, who recently shot a couple of movies on crime and homelessness in Washington DC. "The networks were not an option for us. But I knew I had a voice and wanted to reach people. If you don't know anybody in the media you don't have that voice."

Dixon makes his films by living with down-and-outs and mixing with the bystanders of American crime. In one he's talking with a drug addict who the night before witnessed a vicious murder, in others he's talking with the homeless about why they want to be on the outside of society. "I follow them when they steal and do drugs," says Dixon. "It's raw footage of what's going down on the streets. I mean I edit, but I don't censor."

The reporter with a sympathetic ear for the underdog is nothing new, but it has more or less disappeared from broadcast screens. In the pursuit of reality TV, terrestrial channels have, Dixon argues, lost sight of reality.

A JOURNEY THROUGH the post-modern consciousness is available too at MediaStorm.org. "Our goal is to publish timeless stories for a worldwide audience," says Brian Storm, who was formerly a director of multimedia at Microsoft-NBC joint venture MSNBC.

MediaStorm's project has already attracted sponsorship from the Washington Post, giving it the imprimatur of big media. MediaStorm is creating an important venue for multimedia storytellers to connect with an audience eager to be both educated and entertained.

Among the films on offer: Ray Farkas, Emmy award-winning TV producer, gives a live account of his own brain surgery; Chernobyl Legacy, a photo essay by Paul Fusco; and a video journey through the ghettos of Cuba that introduces a new colour palette to film-making, courtesy of Cuba's rarely seen landscape.

Some of the films are short - that set in Cuba is only two and a half minutes but the production values are arresting - some longer: Farkas takes 20 minutes to have his own brain operated on while he talks with the surgeons.

Unlike MediaStorm and Mixcast, Take 3 is the product of the mainstream. It's an MSNBC product that looks at issues facing older people.

"It is not a TV programme," explains editor James Eng. "It experiments with new ways of storytelling over the web. You'll find a mix of high-end video shot exclusively for the web, audio, photos and text." In fact, MediaStorm acts as outsource producer for some of the Take 3 segments, and its storytelling model runs through Take 3's monthly channels.

There's nothing radical about Take 3. This is not the street-level media-entry anger of film-makers such as Royce Dixon. However, its concern with how we age commends it to a wider audience. The issues that confront those of us who will soon be looking back on four generations of living relatives mean Take 3 engages with a subject that the mainstream is struggling to address, largely because the current media obsession is with a youthful audience.

To the creative youth of Seattle, mainstream America's ignorance of regional and urban aspirations, particularly black aspirations, is the pain that fuels their desire to populate Mixcast with characters from the Seattle and DC storylines.

The drive behind Mixcast comes from their alienation, but it's a creative force and also an entrepreneurial one. The unheard but creative youth of America's big cities see an opportunity to make their futures financially and artistically by networking the urban underground across the globe.

These are the dispossessed only in the sense that they did not, until now, possess a medium for communicating outside their immediate environment. Many are already successful creatives and their means of communication is now at their door.

Gradually, as such marginalised voices aggregate into forceful cultural movements with a means of expression at their disposal, it will become necessary to re-evaluate our own cultural habits. It may be the lasting impact of the web's singular capacity to give expression to different value systems, that those of us who wish to can escape our attention-deficit present, but for those whose culture has been confined to clubs, bars and Indie records, the present really is about now.

See http://msnbc.com/modules/take3/aug/default.htm; www.mediastorm.org; www.mixcast.tv