For the last 4 months we have been busy working with Dutch secondary schools in a pilot which experiments with giving online access to
audiovisual heritage. Recently we were welcomed at the DIVERSE 2008 conference to present some preliminary results, see also our short paper. DIVERSE is a community which shares experience about developing interactive visual educational resources for students all over the world.
One of the points which we stressed was that we found that although teachers and students liked the idea of working with audiovisual heritage, to use and reuse it into presentations and learning objects, it was hard for them to put this into actual practice.
In our discussion on the reasons why this is so hard, we found out that there are some commonalities with other projects and countries. This was also mentioned by someone as a “changing teaching paradigm”. We experienced that there’s not only lack of facilities and technical difficulties which made it hard for secondary schools to integrate our pilot in their curriculum. We also found a lack of ICT skills and imagination with teachers trying to take it into practice. Students weren’t much motivated because there was no full support from their teachers.
On behalf of the National Archives of the UK, Andrew Payne presented a similar project Focus on Film in wich students and teachers are able to use films from the archive. They can edit, show it to others and even download the original video. A lot of work was done on putting all material in an apprehensive context. Although he impressed us with the fact that in 1 year the project is running, 1000 people have already registred and there were 2,5 million visitors in one year, he agreed on the same difficulties.
How can we overcome this challenge? Today I attended a meeting at the Stranger festival where UK based think tank Demos spoke about their research on how youngh people are changing Europe. Celia and Tommy stressed that the ability to put information into representations (video etc.) is a skill like reading and writing which is likely to becoming more and more important to participate in civil society. This makes you think about whose responsibiliy it is to foster this. Will our educational system be able to take this responsibility? What is needed?
Nikki Timmermans | Knowledgeland
Tags: audiovisual heritage, education, europe, secondary schools
This entry was posted by Nikki Timmermans
on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Product development, User research.
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The first panel Audiovisual Archives of the ‘Economies of Commons’ conference concentrates on the accessibility by digital technology for the wide public and education purposes. The new online access and distribution possibilities are discussed on a technical level and also in the perspective of national and international rights issues.
In his presentation ‘Inside the Media’, Pelle Snickars from the SLBA (National Media Archive Sweden) compares the actual situation of audiovisual archives to the first translation of the bible by Henry VIII. The distribution of the duplication of the text was taking place all over the Britain. But the bible was fixed in the place of worship by a chain for security reasons. Many of the audiovisual and media archives are placed in a similar situation. They keep their material on the shelves instead of making it accessible by new technologies. Through an architecture of participation and Chris Anderson’s long tale, Snickars argues that the age of mass media is transformed to the age of masses of media by the huge amount of media producers on the web. Improved access needs to be a guiding principle.
The Creative Archive launched by the British Film Institut (BFI) in 2005 aims to develop a digital portfolio and give a public value to the institution. The user can access material for free and create new clips by playing around with the moving images in order to re-contextualize them. It is not an economic model but more an educational one. Poppy Simpson from the BFI stresses that the future of access to archival material is a hybrid model with tired access or electronic guides. Functionality has to be developed to re-use the material in a more intensive manner.
Tobias Golodnoff from the Danish radio and television archive (Dansk Culturav) argues that the value of the archive is generated by its use. Making the material on-line available means giving it back to the public. The case study of the Danish archive shows how the public can participate and interact with the archive. The project Bonanza invited the public to participate in the preservation project by voting which audiovisual material should be digitized in a first phase. The Web 2.0 application gives the opportunity to the user to be an innovator and to develop on projects that are officially over but still on the internet.
In France the INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) operates with a more commercial model that can be considered as a VOD platform. The archive proposes audiovisual material through the internet on a B2B or B2P model. The activity of on-line access is extremely costly and advertisement or sponsoring can help to develop the services. Once archives are online it’s not enough. There should be an added value to be found to maintain interest. We must adapt to how people use online video today. The challenge is to join with content the creation of new users experience. Roei Almit from INA thinks that there is not only one business model that will answer all our needs.
It is not enough to put the material on the web. The add of value and the contextualization of the user can help to keep the audiovisual data interesting.
This entry was posted by bildgen
on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 8:28 pm and is filed under Market models, Product development, Technology.
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With the introduction of internet the traditional business model for spreading information has been challenged. Whereas before the largest part of the efforts and the investments where spent on the distribution side (printing, storing, selling and fulfillment) the internet (aka The Large Copying Machine) has facilitated easy and cheap distribution. Scientific publishers, who traditionally operated in a closed environment where they sold packages of journals and books through an annual license to libraries, are now (often forced by the community) turning their business model upside down. In this model authors are paying for the publication service in exchange for posting in so-called ‘open access‘ journals, where access is free at the point of use (also read Jan Velterop’s blog The Parachute). In this particular case it looks like a suitable business model has been found, as this model takes advantage of the power of the internet and leads to a greater return on investment for authors (visibility) while securing revenues for the service providers (publishers).
The music and film industry are facing similar issues but have yet to find a grip on the situation; the content is more often than not available for free through peer to peer networks therefore a large part of the incentive to go to a shop and buy a cd or film has vanished. As we are digitizing vast amounts of audio-visual cultural heritage we are facing the same questions: what models can be developed that fulfill the need for broad accessibility for the public while securing a solid return on investment for owners of the material (authors, producers, directors, etc).
Some, like Chris Anderson in his soon to be released new book’ Free’ build an entire economic theory based on the notion that free’ will be the leading model for media due to the vanishing marginal costs of distribution via the internet. The new model that rises from the ashes will be a model where the content or service is free, at least for the user. Google of course is a great example of a company that has turned ‘free’ to it’s advantage; the service is free to users while advertisers are the paying customers. At the core a beautiful system as the more you use the service the more revenue it generates for the service provider. Keeping the attention of the viewer is key in the ‘economy of abundance’, so you better make sure the service you develop is so appealing that users get hooked on it. In fact, if this becomes the case, there may be an opportunity to upsell them from freeloaders to paying customers by adding a an additional layer of services or privileges. This freemium model (term coined by venture capitalist Fred Wilson) has quickly become the leading model for web 2.0 companies like Flicrk and Linkedin. Interesting fact is that the rule of thumb is that the 1% of paying users supports the rest.
The crux of developing business models in this economy of abundance, where content is free, seems to be to tap into values that people are willing to pay for. And those values may not be the same as in the old days where content was king. Kevin Kelly calls them ‘generatives’:
‘’A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.” Think ‘trust’ or ‘personalisation’. In his blog ‘Better than free’ Kevin distiguishes eight of them.
So how does this translate to our audiovisual digitization adventure? Will the specific characteristics of cultural heritage lend itself to open content models like advertisements (google just released a beta service of video advertisements: Adsense for Video ), Freemium services or even community supported businessmodels?
We are hosting a workshop on this topic during the Economies of the Commons conference on saturday April 12 2008 in Amsterdam to investigate the options.
Tags: anderson, audio visual, business models, cultural heritage, digitization, economies of the commons, free, generatives, innovation, kevin kelly, open content
This entry was posted by Harry Verwayen
on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Intellectual Property, Market models, Product development.
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Today the BBC and MySpace, the world’s largest social networking
platform, announced the launch of a partnership to globally bring new and archived short BBC video content to MySpaceTV. A new step in BBC’s strategy to broaden the reach of its content to new outlets and engage with audiences.
Thanks to the deal MySpace users now will be able to visit and subscribe in order to view, embed and virally share BBC content across the MySpace community. Small clips, about 2 minutes in length, are available of popular series like Top Gear and Spooks and oldies like Red Dwarf and Docter Who.
Auntie puts on new skin
When you wander around on the channel, in fact there’s not so much content to choose from. A lot of it has already been released on YouTube anyhow which makes it a bit of a disappointment. Promising, the BBC says they will be updating the channel with new clips every week. The rather few reactions of the community are positive, they welcome Auntie on their space: “great to see you here, Auntie!” Susaan comments.
In the past the BBC made more content deals. YouTube, recently Vuze and ofcourse they put a lot of money in the iPlayer which also wille be showing high quality content, and the to be launched on-demand service Kangaroo from BBC Worldwide. MySpace will be building up more market shares in the worldwide market of internetvideo. Second in America after YouTube.
At the heart of the audience
According to Simon Danker, Director, Digital Media, BBC Worldwide, the BBC finds itself with this project in the heart of the audience, he said:
“MySpace is recognised as the largest social networking site and this partnership continues our strategy of putting BBC content right at the heart of where audiences spend their time and watch video online”
I signed up for MySpace especially to check out the “beebs vids”. They have to make some more effort if they want me there a second time and I think I am not an exception. User demands are high and will only grow higher. But I am definitly willing to suck up some more clips of The Youngh Ones.
Tags: BBC, businessmodels, content, socialnetworking
This entry was posted by Nikki Timmermans
on Thursday, January 24th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Market models, Product development.
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The Library of Congress and Flickr together announced a pilot to put a selection of the photo collection of the LOC on Flickr. The community will tag. Will it also capture the imagination of other institutions?
Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3000 photos from two of the most popular collections are being made available on the new Flickr page. Including only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.
The Library of Congress is not the first putting their archive on Flickr to gain more visibility and accessibility. A lot of prominant museums already did, like the Brooklyn Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Powerhouse Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum & the Renwick Museum. They all put their collection in a place where people actually spend more time than on the website of the museum itself.
The Commons
So, would this grand announcement be just a clever marketing trick to get the attention of the internet savvy youth? Maybe. But The Library of Congres doesn’t want to be just another collection on Flickr. They officially partnered with Flickr to move the Flickr community to tag the photo’s and baptised the pilot “The Commons”.
Their goal is to increase exposure to the collections and to facilitate the collection of general knowledge with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search. With this pilot the Library of Congress embraces the “power of the web”, as we can read on their blog:
We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well. From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom.
I hope that this pilot will get the attention of other institutions and encourage them to explore the rules of the web more profoundly. If you take a look at the collection already tagged it is impressive to see that some objects already have 25 tags. Somebody got payed to do this?
For the press release of the Library of Congress pilot on Flickr click here.
Tags: access, con, flickr, libraryofcongress, photo, socialtagging
This entry was posted by Nikki Timmermans
on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Product development, User research.
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ArtShare is a good example of how institutions can effectively work together to make their collections online available to a broad public. Share your cultural taste, make new friends and help the Brooklyn Museum work out their beta version.
The Brooklyn Museum is very busy finding new ways to bring greater visibility to their collection. Recently they started ArtShare. With ArtShare you can select works from the Brooklyn Museum collection to display at random on your Facebook profile, so your friends will see what kind of art you like. And because Facebook is all about sharing, you can also add your own artwork: “because social networking is about connecting and seeing what others contribute to the social fabric, anyone can also use ArtShare to upload their own work and share it with others”, says Shelly Bernstein, who started the project.
This not only enables me and you to upload work for others to show. Other institutions can also join ArtShare. And this has already happened very quickly. V&A added up some objects, complimenting the Brooklyn staff: “The Brooklyn did a great job with the application and then took it a step further by opening it up for other museums to add some of their collections to it as well as individual artists. This very collegiate attitude is hopefully going to spread across the sector with more data and technology sharing efforts in the future”, says Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum.
In their enthousiasm, they almost forgot the copyright question. They stopped uploading the contemporary collection and gave everybody a phonecall. If you take a look at the artworks now available, they did a great job. I now have a nice photo of Snoop Dogg, art proved on my Facebook!
If you are on Facebook, you can add ArtShare here.
Tags: collections, content, museum, socialnetworking, tools
This entry was posted by Nikki Timmermans
on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 1:44 pm and is filed under Intellectual Property, Product development, Technology.
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Last week a report outlining the economic importance of the film industry in Holland was officially presented to government representative Boris van der Ham. The report, commissioned by Filmwereld , an association of filmmakers, theaters, rental stores and other distribution channels, shows a clear but grim picture: in 2005 the film industry lost over 10% (82 million Euro) in revenue through illegally downloaded films. With the report, the association asks for governmental support to help fight the infringement of copyrights. While downloading films is not a crime in Holland, uploading is. Most P2P networks work on the principle that you have to open up your computer for uploading if you want to download, effectively making you a willful accomplice. The Dutch government has alreeds indicated in November that it shares the indicated concerns and that it will investigate the matter (see article in NRC).
While the claims on copyright infringements are legitimate, the whole debate brings back memories of what happened in the music industry, no more than a couple of years ago. A similar sales pattern indicated a clear change in the habbits of consumers. But instead of taking this change for a fact and adapting to this new reality, captains of industry nervously checked their balance sheets and focussed all their attention on legal actions. What followed is history. Traditional powerhouses lost their dominant positions while new players came up with legal alternatives that worked. By july this year Apple announced it had sold more than 3 billion songs, or an average of 87 thousand an hour since it opened in 2003. Granted, this development has not been able to put a complete halt to declining sales in the music industry and illegal downloading and sharing of music still exists. but the point is, there is a legal alternative that allows more music to be available to more people than ever before.
Improved bandwidth is now opening up doors to a similar situation in the film industry. I can find practical any film I want for free on the internet and I can watch it the same evening, if I have the stamina to endure the lousy audio quality, Spanish subtitles and my guilty consciousness…
So instead of focusing our attention exclusively on the illegal side of downloading we should applaud the fact that there is so much demand for the material and provide this hungry audience with some decent legal alternatives. Of course Itunes will be a big player on the VOD scene and so will others that cater blockbusters to large audiences. It will be harder to find distributors of arthouse films that can only exist at the very end of the Long Tail. Nevertheless there are interesting experiments going on that we will watch closely like the Spanish endeavor Filmotech. This VOD site brings spanish film affectionados high quality film through a platform operated by the spanish filmproducers themselves. The Norwegian Film Institute already launched it’s VOD outlet www.filmakivet.no in the fall of 2004. It’s mission is to ‘preserve, make available, and promote Norwegian films’ through the creation of a high quality distribution channel.
So yes, as content providers we should protect the rights of the creator and enforce our copyright laws. But it is in their best interest as well that we should provide serious alternatives to illegal downloading. And the alternative is to provide the highest quality formats in an easy to use environment with lots of added value services such as recommenders and ratings. I for one would be very happy to pay say 4 euro to be able to watch Cidade de Deus in a decent 2k version with readable english subtitles.
Tags: , businessmodel, cultural heritage, digital heritage, film, Intellectual Property, ip, productdevelopment, video on demand, VOD
This entry was posted by Harry Verwayen
on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Intellectual Property, Market models, Product development.
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Images for the Future has a broader context – all over the world major digitisation projects are creating large-scale online heritage resources. The European Commission acknowledges the magnificent value these resources have if this wealth of material in Europe’s libraries, museums and (audiovisual) archives would be accessible to all.
Since a few years, the European Commission is supporting various initiatives that help realising this vision, dubbed ‘the European Digital Library’. These include research oriented projects such as MultiMatch, projects focussing on providing access such as Video Active and best practice networks on a specific topic, such as COMMUNIA. Knowledge exchange between projects is stimulated by coordination actions like CHORUS.
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/
Until now, these efforts did not result in one single access point to collections across different domains. The heterogeneous nature of heritage (covering different languages, held by different organisations with their own standards for digitisation and annotation etc.) is the major obstacle. To meet user demands and in order to provide the complete picture, the access point should therefore provide solutions that provide for syntactic, semantic and linguistic interoperability between collections and objects. Needless to say: this is an extremely complex task. Therefore, expectations are high for the EDLnet, the recently launched initiative that tries to overcome exactly these obstacles and create the envisioned single window to the collections and objects. The press release states:
“The project – the European Digital Library network (EDLnet) – runs for two years, and will develop a prototype that demonstrates proof of concept, bringing together content from some of Europe’s major cultural organisations.
The project will be run by The European Library together with the National Library of the Netherlands. The project will look at the political, human, technical and semantic issues that will contribute to the creation of an interoperable system able to access fully digitised content. It will invite feedback from different types of users in order to create a service that enriches the widest public and answers the needs of researchers, students, teachers and the creative industries.”
Through Sound and Vision, Images for the Future is well represented in this network and contributes actively the workpackages around which the activities are organised. Representatives of the Video Active project participate in the workpackages on User Requirements and Interoperability, whilst mr. Edwin van Huis (general director of Sound and Vision and president of the International Federation of Television Archives) has a seat in the Executive Board of the EDL Foundation, the body that has been established to govern the further development of the European Digital Library.
I will– after this introduction – continue to report on the developments within this exiting initiative. Already, trough portals like Video Active, Images for the Future is making sure that we fully comply with the standards defined by the EDL Net. The content we offer online will be a great addition to the collections of others, the real power is enclosed in the relations that can be created between objects from different organisations; contextualisation on a pan European scale in the making!
(Johan Oomen is policy advisor at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Contact: joomen[at]beeldengeluid.nl)
Tags: COMMUNIA, EDL, European Commission, European Digital Library, MultiMatch, Video Active
This entry was posted by Johan Oomen
on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Product development, Technology.
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Your social network is quickly opening up to all kinds of new business oportuntities. Last week Google unveiled a new set of application program interfaces (APIs) that allow third party programmers to build widgets that take advantage of personal data and profile conections on a social network site. In other words, applications will be connected to your Linkedin network so that, for example, people you know will be able to see which books you read or which airline you prefer. The initiative dubbed Open Social was marked ‘open’ because developers don’t have to create completely new applications for each site (read more about this on ZD news). This allows one single application to tap into not only the network of Linkedin but also into the networks of say Hyves , Plaxo and friendster, indeed connecting your knowledge and tastes with the millions. Interesting showcase is Shelfari that let’s you create a virtual bookshelf of the books you are reading that you can share with your network(s).
This opens up a whole new ballgame for all the digital heritage files we are in the process of digitizing: Open Social may allow you in the future to build a whole library of film footage and art collections you want to recommend to friends or colleagues; Tapping into the right networks may also allow much more efficient sharing of information about photographs that that nobody knew existed anymore. Who knows, adding metadata might become a favorite social activity of our children and grandchildren.
Tags: digitizing, open social, social network
This entry was posted by Harry Verwayen
on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Product development, Technology, User research.
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