June 20th, 2009
How can archives become a key node in the consumption of media in the changing media landscape?
Audiovisual archives across the globe are engaged in large-scale migration programmes. An important driver behind the investments related to these programmes is the physical state of the analogue carriers; the films, the tapes, the optical discs and so on. Migration is a way to preserve the information on these physical carriers and securing access for future generations, a key mission of these institutions.
Migration also opens the door to the establishment of the networked archive; where material can be made available online to an infinitely large audience. Different services can be built with this ever-growing resource, such as specialized services for education, video on demand, and access through portals such as YouTube and Blip.tv. Also, as viewing has shifted away from television and onto the Internet, the public interest in access to archive resources online has exploded.
Some collection owners go a step further and allow their material to be downloaded so everyone can truly engage with the material and use it as building blocks for new productions. Back in 2003, the BBC coined the term “the creative archive” and entities across the globe are bringing this concept to life. Archive.org is another one of the leading examples. An ever-growing collection of over 250 thousand videos can be downloaded in multiple qualities (and formats) for free. The videos in the collection contributed by Prelinger Archives have been used by a lot of people. To give an idea of the impact: almost 800 videos on YouTube have been tagged with the words “Prelinger Archives”. This is just a tip of the iceberg. Dozens of initiatives and thousands of individuals are distributing content in the same spirit. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Johan Oomen in General |
Tags: openvideoconference mediaburn aljazeera creativecommons
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June 19th, 2009
The Open Video Conference starts today. Images for the Future will host the Audiovisual Archives session on the second day of the conference.
The event will be broadcasted live: “We’re teaming up with Livestream to bring you a live broadcast of the Open Video Conference. Tune in to http://openvideoconference.org/ on Friday, June 19th starting at 10:00 AM EDT for live coverage.”
Posted by Johan Oomen in Technology |
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May 16th, 2009
The Open Video Conference will be held on June 19 and 20 as NYU Law School. Eminent speakers will share their thoughts on the emerging open video movement. The impressive line-up includes: Matt Mason (author of The Pirate’s Dilemma), Yochai Benkler and Jonathan Zittrain (both Harvard Law School), Clay Shirky (Shirky.org), Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing), Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Mike Hudack (blip.tv) and Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla Corporation). Also, there is ample space in the schedule for demonstrations and round tables focusing on FLOSS software solutions.
From the conference announcement “When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right—but there’s more to Open Video than open codecs. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.”
Representatives of the Images for the Future project have initated ad Birds of a Feather session, focusing on audiovisual archives that are (planning to) offer parts of their collection online in order to encourage creative reuse of their content. It is scheduled for June 19, at 5:45 PM. The session will begin with elevator-pitches of initiatives from three continents: Open Images (Netherlands), Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository (Qatar) and Preserving Public Television – Channel 13 (US). The major part of the session will be reserved to exchange ideas between delegates. We would like to address issues such as:
- what are the incentives for broadcasters adopt Creative Commons licences? How can archives support such a transition?
- how can free access and revenue from footage sales be combined in a new economic eco-system for broadcasters? Which business models work?
- how can we provide unified access to available resources available on heterogeneous platforms?
This session is bound to capture valuable ideas for future distribution and use of our audiovisual heritage. Reports from this session will be placed on the Images for the Future Research Blog.
The programme features some initiatives that are closely linked to the central topic of the Birds of a Feather session. To name just a few:
- Archive.org: contains thousands of videos uploaded by Archive users ranging from classic films, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these are available for free download
- Uncensored Interview: an initiative making video interviews with musicians available for download under the Creative Commons attribution only license.
- Metavid: an archive of legislative video from the U.S. Congress, spanning from early 2006 to the present not subject to copyright protection.
- Pond5.com: an open marketplace for stock video footage allowing producers to find and buy instantly downloadable, broadcast quality royalty-free footage for use in their productions.
- Kaltura Network: a large network of content, users, and services focused on collaborative rich-media creation, remixing, and distribution. The network offers re-mixable content all available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license.
- NRKbeta: Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK set up its own BitTorrent tracker to seed its content. The tracker is based on the same Open Tracker software that the Pirate Bay is based on, but it only tracks content from NRK.
The Open Video Conference is organized by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Open Video Alliance. Organizers the Audiovisual Archives Birds of a Feather session are listed below:
Maarten Brinkerink – Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Paul Keller – Knowledgeland, Creative Commons Netherlands
Mohamed Nanabhay – Al Jazeera
Johan Oomen - Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
Nan Rubin – Channel 13
Jeff Ubois – www.ubois.com
Posted by Johan Oomen in Technology |
Tags: bittorrent, conference, creativecommons, ecommons10, openimages, openvideoalliance, openvideoconference
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April 17th, 2009
With a riveting performance by Dutch sample artist Eboman, Celluloid Remix kicked off on April 15th. Celluloid Remix is an online remix contest with films from the beginning of Dutch film history (1917-1932). Professionals and amateurs are asked to unique Dutch cinematographic material from the Filmmuseum collection, into new short films with their own soundtrack.
We chose to launch the contest during BeamLab, a bi-monthly night in Pakhuis de Zwijger, dedicated to the moving image in all shapes and forms. Each edition, a creative crowd of around one hundred artists, VJ’s and designers gathers to see new work by peers. Since these are the people we would like to get involved in Celluloid Remix, we opted for a launch at BeamLab, instead of hosting it at the Filmmuseum itself.
In a concise presentation, Thijs van Exel (Kennisland) and Jan Baeke (Filmmuseum) outlined the background Celluloid Remix, the unique quality of the film material and how to take part in the contest. Audience members reacted with questions and comments. Some people showed concern that a contest like this might not do justice to the original, source material, and that it might be better to just leave it at peace. Thijs and Jan countered this with explaining how the contest promotes these beautiful films to a new and wider audience; how working closely with the archival material promotes understanding of film history and how new, exciting works will come out of this. Besides, the original films are not being altered, they are still safely in storage.
We had invited world renowned sample artist Eboman to make the first remix with these beautiful images. He created a great promotional video and performed this composition live at BeamLab with his SenSorSuit. We hope that it will inspire lots of other artists and amateurs into creating their own remixes. To be continued!
Annelies Termeer - Filmmuseum
Posted by Annelies Termeer in General, Technology |
Tags: beamlab, celluloid remix, eboman, filmmuseum, kennisland
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