On a blistering cold day in January, three ad hoc scientists trudged through the snow to Bryant Park, New York's most prominent Wi-Fi hot spot, armed with an iBook and a digital camera: Drazen Pantic, co-director of techno-performance art gallery Location One, filmmaker/activist Martin Lucas and Kenyatta Cheese, the technology director for public access TV network MNN, assembled there to test whether Wi-Fi hot spots could support audio/video broadcasts using open-source, mass-market technology. Despite some variation, the team concluded that the image quality was “very good” — 320 × 240 pixels at eight frames per second — but on a warmer day, they achieved a more fluid 15 frames per second. Last month, MNN aired its first live broadcast over Wi-Fi: a one-hour, call-in talk show filmed on a rooftop across the street.

From here, the team wants to simplify the process with a user-friendly CD that could, among other things, make impromptu news anchors out of anyone on the street. “We want to get it down to three clicks,” Cheese said. “Load the CD in, boot your computer, and click the broadcast button and you're on the air.”

Pantic appreciates the technology's gestalt implications as well. He was running Belgrade's first ISP in December 1996 when Slobodan Milosevic shut down the country's largest independent radio station, B92, because it was broadcasting news of widespread protests. Pantic picked up the torch, broadcasting the B92 feed over the Internet, where it created a swell of global political pressure that eventually forced Milosevic to loosen his grip on B92. Pantic wants to put that power in the hands of ordinary people.

“We just have to make it pain-free,” he said.