Posts filed under 'participatoryculture'
June 3rd, 2008
Steel this film I and II have helped shape the debate on copyright policy. The first film focused on the raid against the pirate bay and file sharing culture. Part II took on the broader copyright debate.
Now they are making their interview footage from Steel This Film II available for remixing. Their site features ogg video with time segment requests (similar to what we do here on metavid) and synced transcripts for search. Footage is made available in ogg theora & high quality HDV via bittorrent. They encurge people to download and reuse the footage.
This exiting new area of community based audio video production is nearing actualization. Early projects like the digital tipping point and the echo chamber project did early experimenters with the concept. Now many web video startups are enabling communities to “remix” eachothers videos right in the browser. Projects such as Steel this Footage are pushing forward in existing ways as well. In the not to distant future hopefully MetaVidWiki will be among the strong enablers of community video production. By tying together temporal semantic audio/video metadata authoring and searching with a full featured video editor it should connect the dots of peer production with audio/video media assets. More on that in the near future 
Also see coverage of steal this film from miro blog
dale
March 31st, 2007
From the DemocracyTV blog:
There’s a new version of XiphQT, which is the behind-the-scenes code that helps Democracy Player for OSX play Ogg files. We’ll be including this in an upcoming release of ours and it should make Ogg playback much more efficient. If you use the XiphQT plugin yourself, this version supports creation of Oggs, which is very handy.
This theora support means that the RSS feeds generated by MetaVid searches (those funny orange boxes: 
) are exportable as channels for your DTV player. You could use a channel for your own Congressman (here’s mine), an issue you care about (like peanut butter), or some combination of the two (Anna Eshoo saying Peanut Butter). The great thing about RSS and DTV is that as new matches to these searches occur, the clips will download automatically — giving you a new and efficient way to sousveil your representative and cause.
update: hmm, it looks like our feeds are broken in the latest democracyPlayer; we’re looking in to why.
aphid
February 19th, 2007
Metavid will be participating in the Beyond Broadcast conference of 2007. Like last years conference its shaping up to be a key exploration of participatory culture and its potential to enable powerful tools for citizen engagement. Henry Jenkins giving the Keynote and schedule is action packed with projects and speakers addressing the state of politics and participation on the internet. look interesting… see the schedule
Metavid will be co-running the beyond youtube working group where we will explore contemporary political participatory media, and give some usage demos of metavid.
Like last year it will be possible to “tune in” via the internet. So if your interested in seeing portions of the conference check out the beyond broadcast site at or around February 24th
dale
December 26th, 2006
A few days ago, the NY Times editorialized in favor of relaxing the rules regarding cameras on the floor of the US Congress. This comes on the heels of an open letter (PDF File) by C-SPAN president Brian Lamb calling for independent media cameras (particularly C-SPAN’s) on the floor of the House. In addition to editorials on his behalf, Lamb appeared on numerous media outlets including this interview on NPR’s Talk of The Nation to lobby for these changes.
Much of the discourse around these proposed changes is a critique of the cinematography of C-SPAN, particularly on the head-on closeups that the House Rules require. Furthermore, Lamb suggests that relaxing the rules would be more consistent with House Speaker Pelosi’s “most open, honest and ethical congress ever,” with an implication that the government may be covering something up through these tight controls.
On Friday, Pelosi rejected these proposed changes and will leave the House in charge of the cameras. There are a few issues at work here, I’ll address them briefly and what they mean for this project. More after the fold.
Metavid is able to re-use the video footage of the House and Senate floor that C-SPAN airs because it is a government work. When a government employee creates something as part of his or her job, the resulting content is public domain. As Lamb’s letter references, C-SPAN already has its own cameras in committee chambers. C-SPAN’s coverage of committee hearings, such as the Alito nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, is perhaps more nuanced than the head-on shots found in floor proceedings. During some of the tougher questions, cameras captured the reactions of his family — that would not be possible under the current house rules. I would love to link to a clip in our archives illustrating the difference, but the fact that the cameras are privately held has another effect; the footage is copyrighted.
Under current copyright law, C-SPAN’s recordings of the Alito hearings will not enter the public domain for 95 years, meaning January of the year 2101 assuming there are no further extensions of copyright term (an unsafe assumption in the current IP climate). Until that time, C-SPAN exerts their authority over this footage by applying these restrictions (from c-span’s archive):
A license is needed for: Public Performances (Showing in a group or unrelated individuals with or without a fee); Documentaries, films or television programs; Multimedia applications; Corporate video uses; Presentation at association or corporate meetings. C-SPAN does not permit the following uses: Duplication licenses (ask about bulk copies fees); Any posting or streaming from an Internet site; Airing on public access or local cable television channels; Fundraising Use; Commercial/Advertising.
In an age of YouTube and video blogging, it’s absurd to restrict access to video documents so central to public policy. Allowing a century of monopoly over congressional footage to media corporations goes against the very notions of public accountability and political sunshine that brought the cameras to the floor in the first place.
aphid
November 9th, 2006
I just ran into Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation article on the future of internet video and how we can aim to push it toward more openness.
It is well written and questions the single service provider model that internet video is currently operating under.
Will internet video be centralized in huge services like YouTube or Google Video, or will it be more broadly distributed? (with technologies like RSS)
Some more questions to consider in the interest of “open” video on the internet:
1. Does the codec matter?
Google has fully embraced the flash video the codec. The software architecture has laid the foundation for a walled garden distribution mechanism. Video unlike images and text could be blocked from competing video search engines disabled in external players, and mediated by annoying market conditions ie advertisements. Fortunately we can still extract the flvs but flash does support locking these files away. Ogg theora on the other hand, is never locked away in a proprietary playback system, and will always be open for reuse inside our own gardens or by secondary service providers opening up the mediations of these cultural assets to everyone.
2. Beyond RSS what about arbitrary segment reference and dynamic sequence building?
In the metavid project we make arbitrary segments of video clips dynamic available for reuse in sequences on our site or off it. The meta data is freely available in its entirety, opening it up for secondary service providers and video content aggregators. For example any search in metavid can be a channel in democracy player. In time this may enable the types of rich interoperability we see happening with text in the blogospher. An environment where participants mix, match, tag remix visual content from a variety of video from a variety of sources with or without intermediary service providers which bridge the technoliteracy divide. Open systems like RSS and open API for hosting service providers enable secondary service providers like search engines to create much richer audio/video applications.
3. What would “videoPedia” look like?
Transparent versioned video Sequences pulling form huge repositories like archive.org and up to the minute video contributed by participants… collaborative editing tagging and aggregation enabling real time channels on given subjects/themes/memes. ie ~Real Open Source Television~
anyhow…I think the future is bright, even if we end up in a mostly google mediated reality its still much more open than the existing broadcast model… if we can fully enable participatory culture in the visual medium even better!
dale
November 9th, 2006
I just ran into Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation article on the future of internet video and how we can aim to push it toward more openness.
It is well written and questions the single service provider model that internet video is currently operating under.
Will internet video be centralized in huge services like YouTube or Google Video, or will it be more broadly distributed? (with technologies like RSS)
Some more questions to consider in the interest of “open” video on the internet:
1. Does the codec matter?
Google has fully embraced the flash video the codec. The software architecture has laid the foundation for a walled garden distribution mechanism. Video unlike images and text could be blocked from competing video search engines disabled in external players, and mediated by annoying market conditions ie advertisements. Fortunately we can still extract the flvs but flash does support locking these files away. Ogg theora on the other hand, is never locked away in a proprietary playback system, and will always be open for reuse inside our own gardens or by secondary service providers opening up the mediations of these cultural assets to everyone.
2. Beyond RSS what about arbitrary segment reference and dynamic sequence building?
In the metavid project we make arbitrary segments of video clips dynamic available for reuse in sequences on our site or off it. The meta data is freely available in its entirety, opening it up for secondary service providers and video content aggregators. For example any search in metavid can be a channel in democracy player. In time this may enable the types of rich interoperability we see happening with text in the blogospher. An environment where participants mix, match, tag remix visual content from a variety of video from a variety of sources with or without intermediary service providers which bridge the technoliteracy divide. Open systems like RSS and open API for hosting service providers enable secondary service providers like search engines to create much richer audio/video applications.
3. What would “videoPedia” look like?
Transparent versioned video Sequences pulling form huge repositories like archive.org and up to the minute video contributed by participants… collaborative editing tagging and aggregation enabling real time channels on given subjects/themes/memes. ie ~Real Open Source Television~
anyhow…I think the future is bright, even if we end up in a mostly google mediated reality its still much more open than the existing broadcast model… if we can fully enable participatory culture in the visual medium even better!
aphid
