Posted by Erica, 2/2/06 at 7:14:32 PM.
Disclaimer: Please note that all live notes are taken by attendees, and are permanently editable by all blog group members. In note-taking by multiple parties during a running event mistakes of both content and attribution are highly likely. Live Notes are not a reliable source of quotable material; all notes are (sometimes significant) on-the-fly paraphrases by the various note-takers. When possible we attempt to return to the live notes and edit them to greater accuracy, but this is not a guarantee.
Meeting notes are a best effort – comment with or blog your corrections.
Attendees:
HW: Holmes Wilson
KD: Kevin Driscoll
EG: Erica George
AW: Amanda Watlington
CR: Colin Rhinesmith
? – guy: richard, biomed phd student
NW: Nathan Woodhull
RH: Rick Heller
MW: Mal Watlington
? – gal, shing, grad at ksg
j: j Baumgart
SS: Steve Schultze
BW: bill wendell
Holmes Wilson:
tool 1: broadcast machine. php app designed for publishing video. no db required, makes an rss feed of your vids. can integrate bittorrent, makes easy to use. goal: anyone with a website can have an online tv channel.
tool 2: DTV. desktop app now for mac, soon for linux, windows, makes it easy to watch the rss vid channels.
dtv written mostly in python
can subscribe to things, browse by categroy, tags, etc.
channel can be an individual’s work, an organization’s… one channel is the results of a film festival. another is a cartoon contest.
runs from very entertaining tv-ish stuff rto very personal stuff. includes vlogs.
what’s cool about the dtv program is that it’s downloaded not streaming so no buffering problems. large viewscreen, feels like tv.
you can catch up by autodownloading everything on a feed
in alpha testing: videobomb. goal to make reblogging videos as asy as delicious. there will be a reblog button, own personal feed of reblogged vids, with tagging. written in rails. like digg or reddit, has buttons on the site to “bomb” a vid you like into higher ratings, making part of your personal feed.
you can watch videobomb vids on the website but it’s easier to watch em thru dtv
mac version uses quicktime, windows version uses an open source player, so sidesteps the format wars.
goal to make open source stuff that works really well and makes participating in this medium fun even for nontechnical people
now working on: windows version readiness, and raising their budget for the next year… they welcome suggestions!
philosophy: give citizens tools to civic part=icipation, thru media…
RH: when police use video to spy it’s imbalance of power. often at demos ppl say no cameras for this. but it equalizes the power if you put video of a demo online, watching the police
HW: demos the vid search feature to show the dtv-ing of one such incident (search for rave, find title called fascism)
HW: people are voluntarily making more & more of their lives transparent. so the nightmare scenario that power has embarrassing footage of you to hold against you will fade as everyone has those things out there, and the public will have to become more savvy.
AW: slightly different take
NW: i don’t by the techno-utopian view
HW: (i was playing along)
AW: i worry about DIY monetizable porn, what it will do in terms of online ads etc… online advewrtizers have huge interest in porn. what are you doing to screen for adult content (if there is one)?
HW: our view is at base level this emdium should be as open as the internet is. but in the channel guide, places where we guide people to things, we have people monitor. if something is really pornographic we’ll removie it from the channel guide. but artsy goofy burlesqy stuff we’d allow.
AW: i still worry… as this goes more mainstream you may have to be more restrictive. in commercial porn the actors state they’re 18, etc…
HW: our plan is to follow the leads of other, larger orgs and companies who have paid for the lawyers and figured this out.
HW: Veoh is a bery proprietary, heavily drm-ed site. the porn industry is into the drm.
aw: i’m interested in the consumer of all this content
HW: the spaces we create, we want not to have porn on them. we don’t see any short-term problems for our mission and we will continually reevaluate.
RH: how did the org begin?
HW: began thru downhill batte, working on copyrightn in music industry issues. they come from activism background, and saw the filesharing tools as also enabling social activism. make software that reaches a ton of ppl and enables them to reach a truly wide range of audience. we approached foundations an d got seed grants.
CR: any idea how many ppl are using it and to download what?
HW: not right now. We know how many downloads there are of the mac version of dtv, 40,000. we expect more critical mass with the windows version. over 100 channels, maybe more, use broadcast machine. half the channel;s in the channel guide use broadcast machine.
HW: We don’t track the downloads because the content is on other people’s rss feeds not our site. but some channel guide folks, the popular stuff, is pushing 10s of thousands of downloads. rocketboom for example is 100,000/day, they are very popular tho.
NW: what about fireant. functionally the same. why dtv.
HW: fireant isn’t open source yet. they are focused on vlog community but we still think there needs to be an open source option out there. also we think dtv is simpler to use, and we’re shooting for a lower level of techsavviness for users, hopefully a broader audience thru that.
AW: you support yahoo media rss?
HW: yes. feed that do that show up better than those that don’t
AW: you could screen for adult content thru that then
HW: tho ppl could not put the flags on their feeds, etc.
?gal: tried google video to look for full house but only one was a real full house vid.
HW: google uses flash approach. streamed. google’s approach is super minimalist interface, while apple’s is packaged and slick.
AW: google throws stuff up and sees if it sticks… picks it out of beta eventually…
HW: many popular sites using flash. so content is oriented to webpages and becomes less sueful for aggregation tools and people who want to download and remix it, or move it to portable, so flash is less than desirable, tho it has the max audience. the further we move to more online video being flash-based, the further we are from the tv experience and manipulability.
HW: other issue is how much these tools acrtually push independent media or are just repackaging stuff that’s on tv, or just a big pile of funny stuff to float thru. rss is great for independent nedia makes. creates a lasting relationship because you can subscribe to a producer’s feed. google video is a big pile of ephemera. itunes vid is so focused on commercial content. the technology ppl end up usin g could determine how useful this ends up being.
aw: so explain about flash…
hw: it’s near universal on computers now
nw: now bandwidth isn’t as big an issue but the higher the connection the better flash web video looks and the less a client app
hw: but it matters also how well the provider serves you. is it the content you want to find?
remixing issue. every time you touch a video it’s a big mess… if you stay within one tool family it’s easier. so taking stuff from one format (like flash) takes a lot of time and pain to transfer formats, fix glitches, etc. we want this to be easy. flash is less easy for ppl to deal with.
aw: flash is unsearchable. you can;t easily remix it so to me it’s a front end tease for another medium that’s coming. do a tease for a piece in flash and then sell the other piece.
hw: google is doing super simple html and using flash cos it’s what everybody has. they’re not teasing with it.
?guy can flash go fullscreen?
hw: flash can go fullscreen but it looks junky. it pops up a window the size of your screen
?guy so it’s not a cinemating experience
hw: no, for a bunch of reasons
?guy: i think soemtimes that really matters. not everything si a quick bite, grab and go
hw: and fgor larger or longer files you don’t want to have to wait for it to buffer. it’s nice to just *have* it.
?girl: is there any kind of rating mechanism
hw: we will prob add both ratings& comments in the dtv channel guide. currently pretty crude: just the number of clicks.
hw: with the republishing tools you rate something as my feed or not, and the more people doing that does push something to the top.
SS: have u thought of putting the channel guide in web browsable format but still restricting playback to the dekstop. similar to itunes being locked away in the application, makes difficult to search. benefit to pushing it up to the web
hw: there is a webpage but it’s not fully integrated/ready for primetime yet
KD: how would someone use broadcast machine. say you want your channe to be int he channel guide
hw: simple to install broadcast machine. ftp a folder, change a few permissions. then go to a url, admin interface, on your website. post videos, create a channel, similar to a blog. submit the channel to the guide. very straightforward.
hw: it can be tricky if tyou’ve never heard of bittorrent. if ppl haven’t heard of it we rec they upload to archive.org or ourmedia layer on top of archive.org and link from there.
hw: quick & dirty: upload a bunch of vid to ourmedia. you get an rss feed there that works with dtv, itunes. not perfect… no pretty thumbnails or metadata. but it can work, fast & easy. there is even a drag&drop upload. we plan to integfrate that to dtv.
nw: is the ultimate app to also include editing tools for remixing?
hw: we don;t envision immediately. but ppl can make their own mix feeds thu videobomb. right now wb is a website but it’s also destined for dtv integration, easy and oneclick.
hw: the personal favorites feeds allow superusers to introduce their friends to this world thru their filtered, chosen content
hw: entering the vidmaking world is harder than blogging or podcasting, poss less interesting to the broader world. so it matters that ppl cna fill the role of editors for their friends.
?guy: is this focused on cultural videos? ex: labs are trying to get labs to share, openwetware. culture so far is not of sharing formally. trying ti wikify it. well one great thing would be to have instructional videos etc., ways for people to learn how to do things.
hw: some channels are jsut screencap vid from computer.
eg: like lisa’s how to listen to podcasts minivid
kd: i think about teachers sharing educational materials online. i think of ways for teachers to work collaboratively, not reinvent the wheel. hard when you hit barriers on print media. you can share classroom management technique in a quick vid rather than pages of transcribed classroom discussion.
kd: is cpsan were archived searchably we’d watch it a lot more.
hw: a lot of it’s copyrighted and not free to share
cr: the cable company owns it cos they filmed it
hw: aspects of us public life that could be more visible and useful if they were put online more, in more open sharable searchable ways
hw: lots have thoguht of suign for distance learning, for sharing things academically
hw: broadcast machine lets you passwod protect your feed.
hw: and that enables paid subscriptions. we might eventually offer paypal or similar integration.
hw: while the video is playing in dtv underneath the video there’s the ability for the rss owner to include a relevant message below. could be link back to a donation area, a store, a petition, whatever.
aw: yahoo media rss is built right, it makes sense as the standard to use both for podcast & video. it can do all the fields you need
hw: broadcast machine has shot form and long form for extra metadata.
hw: since the metadata isn’t in the video, when you make a republish tool you want to make sure it keeps the metadata. videobomb does that
aw: nobody’s figured out how to look into the actual vid file itself… so everything’s in the metadata.
hw: people talk about tv closed caption feeds, voice recognition, etc.
aw: tv eyes
hw: ppl want to be able to link to chunks of video that’s out there somewhere else without having to remix it into a new vid/
aw: for eduicational app, you want tags within the vid to show when to queue up, what student should do when, etc.
mw: is there correlation between length of file and # downloads? where’s the mass audience going in terms of minutes?
hw: you2 and google vid is short stuff. in dtv many shows are 8-10 min long, some longer. the cool thing about us using bittorrent makes it better, til everyone has serious bandwidth connections. right now a finnish star trek parody is the most popular finnish movie ever. distrib via bittorrent. 600 mb download but tons of ppl have watched it. but most ppl don’t put out something that takes that much work.
mw: we’re going back some to the 15 min shows of tv in the 40s, or older radio
hw: advertising is getting rediscovered too. nobody wants to start really aggressive. but ads are easy to try to make money. so lots of singleframe, simple ads. one company offers way to upload vid and attacha singleframe unobtrusive ad at the end.
hw: also the ads help ppl care less about copyright and drm… very few ppl will bother to strip the ads.
cr: and now itunes is going tos ell superbowl ads
all: ack, making us pay for an ad!
mw: but labeled clothing…
kd: i’ve seen ads that trump the actual shows they’re attached to
(we watch a vid of the sony superball drop in sf)
hw: it’s extremely importsnt that there be something open source that does this, that;s specific to video. itunes integrated podcasts very well but for vid it doesn’t hang together quite as well. for powerusers the one stop shop may be mroe attractive, but for less techy users, less so.
nw: can video ipod be synched?
hw: no…
nw: portable video seems sexy but who *uses* it?
hw: the main use case for portable video is this huge coastal bias: watching the daily show on the subway, when most of the rest of the country has to drive. portable music is handsfree, eyesfree. protable video is neither. no good for most commutes. but nportable lets you mkove vids with you.
some convo on driving while reading, self-driving cars
aw: how many podcasts are listened to on computers, not ever loaded onto an ipod. i think it’s a 7:1 ratio, most ppl listen to podcast shows at their desks.
hw: and most ppl don;’t have ipods
some discussion of the industry of things to waste people’s time while at work, the dependence of much online participation on desk jobs with computers. and resulting blocks on some workplace networks. presenteeism at work, even when sick, reflected by low amount of flextime. fear of job loss.
Thanks, Holmes!
