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The Beat Box Fame Game. Superb video.

Marshall Kirkpatrick on the Four Eyed Monsters: “The promotional model is one that many future independent film makers will likely study closely”.

An interesting IT Conversations podcast with Doug Kaye and Jeff Bezos about how Amazon Web Services can be used to create a massively scalable solution for digital audio and video manipulation. Outsource your infrastucture.

Amazon offers it’s own queueing service but I’m wondering whether it would be possible to setup a render farm on EC2 and S3 controled by a specialist render queue manager such as Rush. A pay as you go render farm, yes please.

Update: Greg Ercolano from Rush emailed me to suggest RenderRocket which is a virtual render farm. Very interesting, I’ll have to check it out.

Dave Winer: “There once was a time when we entertained each other. If you wanted music on a Saturday night you’d have to perform it yourself or listen to a neighbor. Before there was broadcast radio, music was personal. It will be personal again, and it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, because the joy of creating is something we should all share.”

Scott Kirsner: “I would just note that most TV and movie execs think of user-gen as the Internet version of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and that’s a mistake — it’s much broader and more diverse… and that pigeon-holing seems like the kind of thing that’s destined to lead to some strategic blunders”.

Jeff Jarvis: “That is the job of media, government, business, and technology: to enable us to make better connections, to set the conditions for our collaboration. But this will frighten them more than it has already.”

It has been really interesting following Jeff at Davos this year. Typically a conference for the elite, for the fist time I felt I was able to see inside it properly. How very interesting to see his observations of the rich and the powerful starting to realise that the internet is changing things in a big way. Even more interesting to hear him say how unprepared they are for their realisation of the shear magnitude of this change. They are in for a shock.

BusinessWeek: “Uploading video to the Internet is so 2006. Now the question is what to do with those clips once they’re in cyberspace.”

I’ve been waiting for an article about this subject for a while now. Digital asset management is the world that I live in and its pretty complicated. The internet disintermediates and it does this faster than people expect. The role of big film and TV companies will change in the comming years and they need to be paying attention to this.

MiniBar - the web meetup for Londonites

Friday night I was at the London MiniBar at Corbet Place, Old Truman Brewery. This was a chance to informally meet and chat with other people who are involved or interested in web related projects. With so much of the web related action seeming to be happening stateside it was really good to meet people who were London based.

The theme for this months meeting was “Online Video - What to do with all this user generated content?”. Michela Ledwidge did a presentation on Modfilms that aim to become a platform for storytellers to exchange film components and remix them into new works. I had a chat with her afterwards and the project is definitely one to keep an eye on.

John Wilson was live blogging the event, info about the other presentations in his post.

It was good hanging out with Toby Harris (*spark), Ali McClymont (superfineshag), Amit Kothari (QuotationsBook), Marton Dow (Rightscom), Deirdre Molloy (Chinwag) and Pete Tayor & Nana Aganovich (Aganovich).

The MiniBar is rapidly gathering momentum, I’ll certainly be there next month.

Arin Crumley’s latest videoblog “The Collective Experience” made at the Sundance Film festival looks at whether going to the cinema is dying out. Arin is a natural born storyteller.

I just bought my own private television station: marksmith.tv. I guess you guys aren’t ready for that, yet. But your kids are gonna love it.

The Future of TV

This past week I’ve been following a conversation that started with Mark Cuban and later added to by Dave Winer. The penny didn’t drop however until this evening when I read this article by Doc Searls.

Mark suggested that the recent push to get your computer hooked up to your TV so that you could display internet content on it was actually the wrong way around: let people use the internet to upload content to satellite and cable companies and these then send it to our screens using their networks.

His point was that sending data over the internet requires one stream per person, per video (unicast) whereas traditional TV methods only require one stream to deliver to everyone who is subscribed (unicast). Streaming over the internet is way expensive.

Dave suggests is that set top boxes will have HTTP servers in them aswell as the decoders used to make sense of the satellite or cable signal. TVs themselves will have HTTP clients inside them that will act as viewers. You’ll be able to subscribe to marksmith.tv no sweat.

With equipment comming out soon like the Red Camera which allows you to digitally shoot the same quality as 35 mm film and with a price tag of $17,000, it won’t be long before the price is driven down even further. Young film makers are getting really excited about this. Home cinema projectors are cheap and extremely good quality. I have an HD one in my flat and it is incredible.

As the barriers of production and distribution are erroding, the reality of fully digital film making pipelines is getting closer than some realise. The next few years will be all about indie film making.

Doc Searls: “The marketplace that emerges in that flat new world will be many times larger than the old pyramids it replaces”.

It’s very interesting to see how other industries are being affected by the web. Jeff Jarvis tells a story about his experience of working for People, following 289 people loosing their jobs at Time inc yesterday.

Watch YouTube videos on your ipod or psp with Free YouTube to iPod Converter.Some Wordpress tricks and plugins.

The latest podcast from fxguide is with Tyler Leshney from Ascent Media talking about their Digital Media Data Center in Burbank and how they maximise content lifespan. If you want to know the sort of world I work in, listen to this.

Will Video For Food: “Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg will give aspiring filmmakers from around the world the chance to earn a $1-million development deal at DreamWorks”.

Ze Frank has been playing with his Wii.

I’ve had a Wii at the flat since they came out and they are a lot of fun. Four player tennis gets pretty interesting, I’ve had other people’s controlers hit me in the face a few times. I’m not massively into gaming so the novelty is starting to wear off. I don’t know where Ze’s getting his games from though, sounds like pirate Wii games to me.

Follow this link for an amusing take on the Anshe Chung Second Life Scandal.

The 1K project II is a short generated entirely from digitally combining over 1000 car races in the driving simulator Trackmania. Sounds majorly geeky but it’s actually pretty cool.

Techcrunch reports that Amazon may have inadvertantly let slip that they are releasing a new web service called SDS - Simple Data Service…or maybe not.

One of the most frustrating things for that I find with itunes and the ipod is the whole way the syncing process works. The whole idea of syncing is appealing to me since like most people on the planet I’m a pretty busy person. The ability to be able to wake up in the morning plug the ipod into the laptop for a minute while your latest podcasts load up and then skip off to work listening to your favorite mind snack is a killer feature.

Unfortunately the apple implementation of this feature is pretty lousy. Out of all the settings, what I want is to only have on my ipod at any one time all the podcasts that I haven’t listened to yet. Now iTunes does have such a feature but according to iTunes listening to 1 second of a podcast equates to listening to the whole thing. Setting out on a journey expecting to continue listening to a podcast that you have partially listened to, only to find that it has been marked incorrectly as played and therefor has been removed from the player can do only one thing: it makes me mad.

Anyone thinking of making a podcast device needs to fix this. Please.

Something I realised today about the disintermediation caused by the web: if your profession has the word intermediate in it, start getting worried. For some reason this wasn’t obvious to me yesterday.

Aniboom is a website that is devoted to animated short films.

I’ve just come back from having Thanksgiving lunch with some old friends. Heaps of amazing organic food and plenty of ice cream and pie. Sundays are most definitely for roast dinners

Playing Connect-4 with a five year old can be a bit challenging. I realised that at that age things like forward planning and strategy aren’t all that important. What was far more fun (I thought so too) was racing to see who could fill the game up with all the pieces first. It’s always fun when you figure out a way of using an object which wasn’t intended.

Another great autumnal game when you’re 5: puddle jumping.

It’s World Environment Day! Time to examine how big your environmental footprint is.

I got up extra early this morning to spend some time blogging as I’ve had to leave it on the back burner for the last couple of weeks but I’ve just had to spend the last 30 mins deleting spam comments. Literally hundreds of them. I’ve enabled registration for comments, something which I wanted to avoid but it seems like the only solution. Thank god for Wordpress “Mass Edit Mode”.

Scott Kirsner links to a Wall Street Journal video interview with Barry Sonnenfeld talking about digital intermediate, digital projection, digital distribution and digital cinema.

DCinemaToday: “Doremi Cinema has been selected by Deluxe Digital Cinema, Capital FX and EFILM London to provide its DMS-2000 DCI 1.0 JPEG2000 mastering station for encoding movies in 2K and 4K formats. The purchase also includes two Doremi DCP-2000 DCI JPEG2000 digital cinema servers”. I’ve been so busy I totally missed this press release. The Doremi server is in the building and hopefully I shall be able to play with it very soon.

Scott Kirsner: “My working thesis about the visual effects business is that, despite the growing number of big-budget movies relying on computer-generated imagery, the ability of “blue chip” visual effects firms (such as ILM, Sony Pictures ImageWorks, Digital Domain, and Rhythm + Hues) to command premium prices will drop”.

Screen Digest: “On the back of the Hollywood studios releasing their technical specification for d-cinema in June 2005, there was explosive growth in the number of d-cinema screens globally during the second half of last year, with numbers doubling in a six month period”. Their report is pretty pricey at $2475 for print and get this, $4950 for an electronic copy.

Great superb article in CNNMoney about John Lasseter: “We have this precious entity that is Pixar. It’s like a living organism, like we had found out a way to grow life on a planet that had never supported it before. We wondered if a deal like this would ruin it all”.