Now that online video has gone supernova, will its future by shackled by intellectual property and copyright wars and other restrictions? Will it become television on the internet, owned and managed by the few and sold to the many (along with mind-numbing ads)? Or will it evolve to become a more participatory workspace, where suits, artists and surfers alike splice media into open-sourced masterpieces?
The Open Video Conference, taking place Friday and Saturday in New York, wants to know.
It’s got more than a few interested parties along for the ride. Organized by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and iCommons, the video conference is swimming with profs, artists, techies and other inquiring minds.
The healthy list of speakers and presenters includes Clay Shirky, DVD Jon, Xeni Jardin, Amy Goodman, The Daily Show creator Lizz Winstead, RiP: A Remix Manifesto director Brett Gaylor and representatives from The Mozilla Foundation, Adobe Systems and media centers at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Southern California.
Which raises the question: What kind of future does the Open Video Conference, and all of its bright minds, wish for?
“One where video is ubiquitous,” explained the Open Video Alliance’s media coordinator Adi Kamdar in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Everybody has access to low-cost, or even free, tools and software, and open standards allow all devices to be interoperable. It’s also a future where everybody knows how to manipulate video, and where video is freely created, edited, shared, remixed, quoted and archived. Participation is king and free expression is the norm.”
It’s a media utopia, for sure, and one that is begging for evolution. Whether it’s text, music or video, the future demands digital sharing. Might as well hurry up and get there.
Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Given our current mediascape, whose anachronisms and vagaries are ably dissected in the latest issue of Wired, everyone from studios and labels to litigators and telcos are holding on to what they can hoard before the new, new economy gets here.
“If we stay on the same course,” Kamdar said, “we risk a future of television 2.0. We’re already seeing Hulu getting more popular, and while it’s cool to watch shows and movies on demand, we want internet video to be more dynamic and participatory. We’ve also seen the rise of YouTube, which is a great first step, but videos should be everywhere, not simply delivered from one website. By continuing down this path, we’re still allowing the current powers that be, rather than the people, [to] determine how culture is made and shared.”
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