Pitchfork TV targets a niche left by cable

MTV, by now, has been lack-of-music television for much longer than it was ever, truly, Music Television.

Now a new website, Pitchfork TV (www.pitchfork.tv), has set itself up as an answer to cable television's musical abdication. This music-video venture capitalizes on the rapid decline in Web-video costs -- and on the potent brand of Pitchfork Media, the indie-music site founded in a suburban Twin Cities home by Ryan Schreiber in 1995.

In the early going -- it debuted Monday -- the site seems to be a small gem, expertly cut and showing only minor flaws. You don't have to like, or even have heard of, the Portland, Ore., band the Thermals to appreciate the immediacy of its New York City rooftop set, played for a Pitchfork TV feature called "Don't Look Down." You might well like them afterward, though.

You don't need to hate your job to spend a big chunk of a workday sneaking peeks at "Loud Quiet Loud," the documentary about the Pixies that Pitchfork TV featured last week on a "One Week Only" series spotlighting rock films.

And you don't need to work in a stereo store or Silicon Valley to appreciate the quality of the sound and video -- levels that make YouTube look like a worn-out VCR tape.

The site is part of a new wave of online video that, instead of the catchall model of YouTube, aims for a niche. Just as aspects of broadcast TV schedules once migrated to cable and were magnified into entire channels, now aspects of cable are showing up, in concentrated doses, on the Net.

Hulu.com offers up NBC and Fox network shows, mostly. FunnyOrDie and Superdeluxe serve up comedy. Videogum, a sibling to music site Stereogum, looks to be all about pop culture, sort of like former music channel VH1's "Best Week Ever." Collectively, they represent a step toward the inevitable melding of television and Internet as video-delivery systems.

"Pitchfork is turning into the ESPN of the independent music world," wrote a commenter on Stereogum.

But to Pitchfork founder Schreiber, the site is not only striving to do logical new things that derive from championing good music, but also is adapting to modern, multimedia realities.

"The old concepts of journalistic ethics are breaking down a little bit in this new blog world," he said in an interview from New York City, where he lives now. He stresses that he sees "no business that's going to get in the way of our critical distance. We still view that as the most important."

Schreiber says he suspects the Radiohead video -- a recording of "Bangers and Mash" in the basement studio of the band's producer -- happened because Pitchfork has loved Radiohead music, but that doesn't mean the band has earned a free pass.

Nobody can complain about how the site functions. Using a Flash-based player, the videos loaded quickly and played with minimal hiccuping on two high-speed connections. You can choose what you view, or sit back and passively watch, just like in music video's founding days.