Report Open Video Conference 2010

Open Video Conference Fashion Institute of Technology, New York 1 - 3 october 2010

What?

Open Video Conference is a yearly conference organised by Open Video alliance. Michael and Peter gave a hyper short presentation of Active Archives on saturday 2, during the session Our audio-visual heritage; Archives show and tell Below are some notes taken during the conference, for future reference.

(Note PW: due to crazy multitrack program I couldn't be at all presentations + took notes only at a few to help remember links and projects )

General remarks:

Across all sessions there is a lot of enthusiasm for [http://www.drumbeat.org/ Mozilla drumbeat] project. Drumbeat comprises of several projects such as:

Popcorn.js

makes it possible to pull into your page next to a html5 video feeds from twitter, wikipedia and subtitles, geolocation etc.

Have a look at the demo videos: http://webmademovies.etherworks.ca/popcorndemo/

http://www.drumbeat.org/content/popcorn-js-semantic-video-demo

Universal subtitling

http://universalsubtitles.org Have everyone write subtitles everywhere on whatever film

try it here: http://universalsubtitles.org/demo/

Interactive html5 film hit of the day using Chrome is Arcade Fire clip 'The wilderness downtown' http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w44cdIOor7E using your zipcode to render a site specific image of a man running through your neighborhood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvNVpHktrQ0&feature=related Google employees explain new tech behind groundbreaking music video.

Friday 1

Introduction

Tim Wu is author of The master switch

He talks about the three most important types of screens you work with daily. Tv, Pc, Mobile: what does the battle between the three types mean for the future of open video?

His book addresses the original claims that originally underpinned the importance of the type.

• 1: Tv claimed it would bring more quality broadcasts i a time in which radio was already seen as being increasingly vulgar.

Political meaning turned out to be more important: the complete synchronisation of the nation into one uniform united scheme. (Remember it was war.)

• 2: Pc brought the notion of user as opposed to viewer. financial model: one time investmet in hardware, then buying software)

Over the years, selling advertisement became a money stream for web sites.

• 3: Mobile. USP is closeness of technology to the body. This now feeds back into PC.

Marketing model is subscription. Moral values are those of Bell company: Family and contact.

Challenge for open video is to introduce the values of openness that surrounded the initial computer introduction into the field of closed boxed mobile devices, leaning on subscriptions.

Session: Beyond the copyright wars

with: Pat Aufderheide, (Center for social media American University)

Michael Petricone (Consumer Electronics Association)

Anthony Falzone (Fair use project Stanford law school)

Fred von Lohmann (Google copyright attorney)

Pat Aufderheide

paufder@american.edu

http://centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse

• Pat moderates; She is a civil rights activist. Her point is that the vocabulary surrounding copyright / privacy issues is creating an incriminating atmosphere in which creative use / fair use is forced into a defensive position.

• The language of conflict is dis-empowering. Using terms such as battle, war, infringement, pirating, sets negative premises. The juxtaposition of copyrighters and copyleftists is a bad concept ; Result is that copyrighted material is not used for creating new works. That is the opposite of what the situation should be.

We should not undersign these suppositions but write better terms.

• The goal of copyright is the creation of culture, not the protection of property rights owners.

• She refers to book:

David Bollier Silent theft: The private plunder of our common wealth http://www.bollier.org/

• The road to take is to better deal with Fair Use. She promotes the use of Fair Use principle: The Center for Social Media at the School of Communication of the American University publishes a 'Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video.

[1]

• She is exited that not only her field (documentary film) but also in libraries, teachers actively inform customers of their rights. (affiches in libraries)

• Makes a Call to audience to join EFF.

• Quotes Peter Jaszi: "fair use is like a muscle, the more you use it, the stronger it gets".

http://www.wcl.american.edu/faculty/jaszi/

Michael Petricone

"The decisions taken by the consumer product industries are not self evident. Organise yoru communication and make suggestions. It is important and it works" Join EFF !

Anthony Falzone

The civil rights movements that are successful try changing stuff from the inside. Opposition is not functioning. Evolution not revolution.

Comment: Best practices is a good strategy because it challenges assumptions. It is 'not pretty', but important to stretch the system. Join EFF !

Fred von Lohmann

Worked as an attorney for the Join EFF !, he now works for Google :-(

He thinks Buffy remix by Jonathan Mackintosc is more powerful then discussion, talks, writings about problems of copyright on the web.

Remixing doesn't hurt anyone. Not always are copyright clearances necessary, just do it. Showing is better than Telling.

Q audience: Why does google remove video material based on just a notice of a copyright holder ?

A Lohmann: You should file a counter notice against the copyright holder if this is incorrect, so he needs a court order to have google take videos down.

Q: Lots of what we find 'normal use of the web' is illegal. Is this sustainable? What to do ? A Lohmann: We have no choice but to accept tolerance as a factor. When you try to make money with it the shit hits the fan, that proves that only amateurist re-use is accepted. Not economicaly viable.

Youtube has a Content id system (submit a reference file the enables the platform to tell the copyright holder that there is a match). Most often copyright holders don't follow up with a takedown, but with attempts to montetize that video: meaning they force adds on top and keep the profits.

session: We know what you watch

Jim Harper (Cato institute)

Bill Lederer (ceo Kantor Video)

Tani Yuki (director comScore)

Frank Pasquale (moderator)

Harper:

• privacy' means several things

• • 1 control of personal informatio
  • 2 fairness
  • 3 seclussion, the right to be left alone

(spam)µ

• • 4 personal security
  • 5 protection for violanec
  • 6 autonomy
  • 7 identity crisis: being treated as persons versus consumers
  • 8 identity confirmation: being locked up in your own interests

• Are people strong enough to act in consistence to their values:

Not everyone knows how cookies and ip adresses work.

• Our challenge is make clear how stuff works, and support development of apps that are self explicatory (and awesome)

Tania Yuki

• privacy layers:
  • secrecy
  • anonimity,
  • solitude

• In our private life we choose who to allow breaking through these three layers.

On the web it is not us making those choices. But it is not reasonable of us to expect from a (more or less) public space such as the web, the same as from our homes.

Note PW: Lame discussion that got stuck in definitions of 'privacy' by corporate guys stretching that this was such a cool conference and that they would definitely hang around later wearing pull-overs in stead off their suits and ties. I left early

Streaming HTML5 in Open formats

Presentation by Thomas Vanderstichelen (Fluendo)

Fluendo is the company behind Flowmotion streaming server. Thomas and the company let blgium and are now based in Barcelona.

• Back in 2004 (?) they have pushed the Cortado java applet release in 2005. And have developed GStreamer.

The Gstreamer work is know mostly done by Collaborado from Barcelona (note PW: can't find a link, I possibly misspell)

Thomas made a great presentation mainly focussed on the difference between streaming and VOD. He shows several streaming encoding archiving workflows. mainly geared towards optimisation of the use of bandwith in case of multiple streams.

Some points:

• dirac implementation in Flumotion
• Fluendo does webm streaming, example is the streaming of the conference (now over) http://www.flumotion.com/demosite/ (firefox 4 beta required)
• seekability in stream is worked on using mediafragments
• no html5 browser support for live stream, needs to be in a player.
• As a company Fluendo facilitates multiple output formats, client delivers 1 input signal, they transcode and deliver over platforms

more: http://www.flumotion.com/open_video_conference_live.php

• Flumotion uses multibitrate fragmented streaming (such as silver light Smooth streaming, or Adobe dynamic http)

Breaking up the stream in chunks in a playlist, preloading low bitrates makes a fast ands table stream

Saturday 2 october

Keynote Susan Crawford

Former advisor to Obama. It is a bit hard for me as Non-USA attender to relate to a full on 'OUR nation' speech :-/ Could show a bit more awareness of global nature and urgency of the topic.

She spoke about the threats the open internet and net neutrality are facing. I have made no notes, but here's an apt. interview:

http://transmission.cc/visionontv/video/open-internet-danger

Session: Data driven Storytelling

Lance Weiler (story architect , filmmaker )

Tommy Pallota (storyteller producer Scanner Darkly)

Lance Weiler

http://lanceweiler.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Weiler

Weiler talked about his interactive film experiences.

• In his new film HIM (hope is missing) he connects gps live events live performance and video

Datapoints drive the storytelling The 'film' will be also an android apt that uses google maps, gps 360° stitsching.

• previous work: Head trauma

He made after suffering memory loss due to sever car accident. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCPEq2_8Lxg

http://www.headtraumamovie.com/

Tommy Pallota

• Scanner Darkly began as a graphic novel with collaborative assets. (hmmm still wonder what exactly he means) People uploaded homedrawn parts of the story.

• American Prince

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1372718/ After being forgotten for 30 years, the filmmaker revisits Scorcese's lost documentary 'American Boy' and it's raconteur subject, Steven Prince. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1372718/news#ni0834505

The film is distributed on BitTorrent

Fostering Open Culture in Higher education

Tiscar Lara (Medialab Prado, eoi madrid)

• Tiscar works on a business school teaching students using Android platform, everything is open licensed and Open Technologies.

The students learn to use social media, web publishing, etc. they have 500 samsung galaxy androids for their students!

And they use a cms called moodle http://moodle.org/ for creating dynamic websites.

• She also works for Medialab Prado. She talked about her work there during the session in which we showed also Active Archives. She works on the brick remember, when we with Constant visited Prado, they showed us: a 'brick' of tied together analogue video devices that are connected to a transcoding box: a service for the public whi can come and digitise their old media.

Session Preserving our audiovisual heritage

Maarten Brinkerink (Open Images, Beeld en Geluid)

Kara van Malssen (American Archive Strategy Consultant)

Tiscar Lara (Medialab Prado)

Teague Schneiter (Isuma.tv)

Michael Murtaugh + Peter Westenberg (Active Archives)

Fabrico Zuardi (Public Videos)

Namita Malhotra (pad.ma)

Intro Brinkerink and van Malssen

• Explaining position taken by the projects on the panel: proposing alternative and advanced strategies that are hard to develop within big archive institutes. There's a culture of operation that results in safe structures.

• What is the state of open archives ? Are they embrasing universal open media formats ?

• Netherlands institute of Sound and vision releases thematic clusters of films of which they own copyright under a remix license. Strategy is to couple that with an external project such as the architecture festival in rotterdam.

Teague Schneiter

[http:/isuma.tv ISUMA.TV]

• Website with Inuit film material. Indigenous content. Access to content is often hypothetical because bandwith is terrible on the countryside: makes it necessary to think about local cache. Showing content to others than Inuit is good, to makers and subjects in films is difficult. Hence the availability of low bandwith versions of films.

• Digitizing the Inuit and Aboriginal Media Archive. DIAMA preserves irreplaceable Inuit and Aboriginal media archives at risk of being lost. IsumaTV cleans, reformats, digitizes and uploads priceless audio-visual materials collected since the 1970s.

Tiscar Lara

• We have a right to use av-archives because "We are shaped by our audio-visual heritage"

• shows "the brick" -> digitisation rack (described above)

challenge: Easy and automatic capture

Fabricio Zuardi

http://www.fabricio.org/

http://alpha.publicvideos.org/

Public Videos is an archive of 'found scenes' shot by the maker himself.

In his own words: A cute interface to his films hosted on archive.org

Namita Malhotra

• As all pad.ma's she's a very good speaker. Pad.ma means Public access Digital Media archives

• Their slogan don't wait for the Archive reminds us of the one we use for AA: Archiving starts now.

• Focuss on exploration of video material through text.

• The system offers ways to change your point of view on the material. It allows for alternative readings.

• Pad.ma general license ishere:[ http://pad.ma/license http://pad.ma/license]

• Project is about the unmaking of traditions. They don't want to become a BitTorrent of world cinema.

• Position of Pad.ma is caught between open + active. Openness can lead to generalisation, active seems more to point to change.

Session : DIY in India

Lawrence Liang (alternative law forum)

Ramesh Srinivasan (professor information studies UCLA)

Siddharth Chadha (alternative law forum)

Sanjay Bhangar + Namita Malhotra (camp pad.ma)

Sanjay

says DIY in India covers basically everything that happens in the country. :-)

A slight continuation of Namita's last talk: definition of 'open' is problematic.

• Having internet access is not enough

• • Stuff is uninteresting, paid for, propriatery, unsuitable etc.

• Context is important.

• • Seeing the awfull conditions for informatics in India explains a lot about the project.

• • Trying to reach out to non-internet using audience is important

• • Using annotations from the site on local videos

• • confrontation W3C standards and reality of low / no bandwith

• Important in funding: independence of creativity

• • grants for development exist, but resources that do not interfere with creativity of maker are hard to find. Pad.ma's funding comes for a part from the west.

• • role of the editor in film projects is sometimes overimportant, systel tries to compensate for that.

• Organisation of the production structure matters in community video

Ramesh Srinivasan

• How to tell your own story, narrate , share, shoot content emersively without following educative paths

• Democratisation of media: not only low prices, but low demand story formats.

• Media literacy: is a medicine against ritualised society. Media can tease people into reflection.

• In his research he has set up collaborations with local communities. Distributed camera's, shooting in sessions. Discuss the shot material every two months with makers.

• • focus groups

• • • cast

• • • gender

• • Video is a first step towards real re-imaginations of your world

• Refers to book: Seeing Like a State by James Scott

• • Solutions should be scalable to their communities.

Namita Malhotra

Problem of archiving is that it is often done by gouvernement. Who do you trust to represent you ?

Don't wait for someone else to archive you, do it yourself.

Classical dance as an archive of traditional human movements.

quote: don't hide your archives but "hold your traditions up to the sun to see them" (which dancer was that again ?) -> Transparancy of historic traditions

Lawrence Liang

• What to represent in video? Your self / or your community ?

• Questions of authenticity forget the pleasure of the inauthentic. He shows Indian DIY superman fragments.

Refers to Ranciere: Hommage by exclusion

• argument against self-documentaries: Maybe I don't want to represent my poverty

Sunday 3 oct.

Transmission session

See a report here

Andrew moderated: He is questioning the need of the further existence of Transmission

• What are problems that exist ?
• Are the original aims still valid ?
• What about the Old definition (cooked up during last meeting 2 years ago)

http://transmission.cc/about

• new website: http://transmission.cc/

• The blogs on the website are underused, is there a need?

• Lots of the projects that were set out to be done in the framework of Transmission, are externally realised (subtitling, metadata, etc.)

• Engage wants to migrate to webm codec

• Is meta level aggregation of videoprojects needed ?

• Jan: "syndication and search seem important. Building best practices is a good way."

• Why not collect some good exemple projects on a corner of the site.

• Why not also make a : common Problems and good solutions section.

• Suggestion: On the mailing list: organise Critical mass around an issue and then call for a meeting.

• get the list behind a concrete campaign.

• Engage is working on a 'burnstation' to dvd: from webfilm straight to disc.

http://plumi.org/wiki/BurnstationProductionSystem

Screening: Yes man fix the world

Screening of the great film, which can be downloaded through BitTorrent on http://vo.do/EY1t.

• Talk with the Yes men about their working strategy, very funny, can't go wrong.

Fix the world is distributed through vo.do The film has been downloaded more then 650.000 times

vo.do is an intiative of Steal this film director Jamie King Vo.do works with a so called 'distribution coalition' of trackers and p2p sites so you can download a VODO film right from your favourite co-operating p2p site. http://vo.do/disco

Yes man fix the world ranks high on the download charts: http://vo.do/toplists the film is cc share-alike

Corridor meetings

Web Made Movies hack day at Open Video Conference! =

Brian Chirls has worked with the Drumbeat group on overlaying a webpage with (live) video. The webpage remains active. It is impressive.(Something with projection to a canvas, Michael can explain)

http://vimeo.com/15507980

Chirls will blog on it here: www.chirls.com, or follow the blog of Brett Gaylor

Definitely a good publicity to join the upcoming Mozilla Drumbeat Conference in Barcelona, where they will explore how teaching video for the web can be imagined.

Walking the edit

After AA presentation, Ulrich Fischer came up to us, http://www.c-sideprod.ch He is working on a project called Walking the edit which is interesting to look at for Nantes.

http://www.walking-the-edit.net/

Michael interviewed him on camera, maybe that will be coming your way sometime ?