dcinput

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.

Ze Frank goes to Hollywood! I’ve always thought that Ze was the webs answer to Andy Koffman. It sure will be a sad day on March 17th when he posts his last show. Better to quit while you’re ahead and move on to bigger and better things, that’s what I say. I’m imagining a film kind of like War Games but instead of playing thermo-global nuclear war with Joshua, he plays bizare games with people all over the world using only a powerbook and a dv cam.

Steve Rosenbaum: “Power is shifting from content pipe to contextual”.

Jeff Jarvis reports on how the Davos conference this year is experimenting with the web by opening up the conversation into and out of Davos. Get to the Davos conversations here.

Reuters: “U.S. news organizations are increasingly calling on their reporters and editors to write news blogs and compete with the expanding Internet format for informal analysis and opinion”.

Apollo is a cross-OS runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills in Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax. You can sign up for the Beta now. Ted Patrick presented Apollo at Mashup Camp.

Cinematical: “Crumley and Buice have been asked to travel to Sundance to shoot daily videos which will be broadcast through YouTube as part of a collaboration (their first) with the Sundance Channel”.

The collaboration comes right after their very successful experiment in Second Life. Anything that the guys from Four Eyed Monsters touch I’m sure will be huge. I’ll definitely be watching. Independent film making is breaking out onto the web quick. If main stream film companies want to know what the world is going to be like in a few years, this is the direction they should look.

D-Cinema Bond

Last night I went to the Odeon in Leicester Square to go and see the new James Bond film Casino Royal. I chose that cinema because I new that they had a d-cinema screen there. Now I’ve seen what the d-cinema screen at work looks like but never actually been to a big theatre with one. I knew that the trailers and adverts most probably weren’t going to be digital but as soon as the feature started it was obvious to me that film is dead. If you don’t believe me then watch the opening credits to Bond on a massive d-cinema screen. The colours are so incredibly vibrant and everything moving on the screen so incredibly crisp that you find yourself looking with your eyes wide open in amazement.

Google Video: “This short by Neill Blomkamp depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa. Producers: Neill Blomkamp, Simon Hansen, Sharlto Copley, Shannon Worley”. Amazing what a few people can do these days. I’d love to know how long it took them, what tools they used, what workflows they were using, how they colaborated etc. Great short.

Another great short by Vancouver Film School graduate Ori Ben-Shabat. Lots of neeto vfx in this one.

More on the disintermediation of film making

Wired News: “You wouldn’t show a sitcom at a movie theater, right? […] You make movies for the big screen, sitcoms for TV, and something else entirely for the Internet. That’s the lesson of Lonelygirl15″.

A few days ago Penelope Trunk’s post Thinking about videoblogging? You should probably forget about it caused all sorts of discussion on the videoblogging mailing list. Anne from Loaded Pun explains why people on the videoblogging mailing list were annoyed and also ends with what I think the crucial question is: What are you hoping to get out of your vlog?

After reading my post on the disintermediation of film making, Penelope asked me via email whether I thought that the lonelygirl15 affair (check this article) on YouTube was what I was talking about and yes that is absolutely an example of disintermediation of film making. There is a guy, he has this idea for a web based show, he shoots it and puts it out there. Classic disintermediation. What was Mesh Flinders hoping to get out of his vlog? There’s no doubt about it, he was wanted to make money.

So to make money you have to have a product. What’s his product? He’s giving away the show for free to his audience, so it’s not that. He sells advertising space. That’s his product. It kind of feels like it’s the show, but actually it’s the advertising space. The more people watch his shows the more his product is worth. Seems simple doesn’t it: that’s how you make money in videoblogging.

The truth however is slightly different. In fact to see the truth you have to think a little differently. You see lonelygirl15, Rocketboom and ZeFrank are special cases. The thing they are selling, their product, happens to be the videoblog itself (well the advertising really). The vast majority of people in the world sell things we more easily associate with the word ‘product’ like software, food, televisions, holidays.

Blogging, podcasting and videoblogging are all personal media platforms. They are personal information processors that you can use in any endeavor you choose, from making a web based show to raising money for charity to making people aware of a particular issue, to building a business and more generally for selling products of any kind. Use them for communicating, for publicity, for feedback, for gererating new ideas. You’re in control.

You think Adam Curry just has a hit podcast called Daily Source Code? Wrong. The Daily Source Code is his media platform for building his business called Podshow. He also sells advertising so it’s a little confusing. Wait until people start using these mediums to sell products, build companies or to run political campains. That’s when things will really get exciting. That’s what I saw at Podcastcon UK last weekend: normal people who run normal businesses using the mediums in new and interesting ways.

Film making won’t disintermediate with people in the film/entertainment industry alone. There aren’t enough people and there isn’t enough money to be made. It will disintermediate when every person in every industry can use it to build their business. Sure you’ll need some talent, but you need talent to be a good at anything in life.

In the mailing group the title that linked to Penelope’s post was “Disturbing opinions”. I would disagree entirely. I think her piece was a fantastic conversation starter. It got everyone thinking. No doubt some people will think I’m talking a lot of crap, but then we’re all learning as we go along.

Over the last few years I’ve been watching and learning what effects the web is having on business, on society, on people. As I learn, there are all these new words, ideas and technologies that are floating around in my head like podcasting, videoblogging, Web Services, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Salesforce On-Demand Architecture, open source, virtualisation, vendor relationship management, gestures, and more. Everyday is like one of those tests where you have to find the odd one out from a set of shapes. As time goes on these various things accumulate in my head, some get thrown by the wayside, but for some unknown reason others clump together because they seem related in some way.

The one big idea that I keep coming back to is the Internet as the Great Disintermediator: the disintermediation of the aggregators and repackagers of the world. I keep wondering how this idea applies to film. How will film making become disintermediated? A few experiences over the weekend have helped me get closer to the answer to this question.

I was at Podcastcon UK over the weekend. I don’t have a podcast and I’m not a videoblogger but I find both of these activities so interesting that I thought I should go down there just to see what people were talking about and also to be in an environment where others understood this interest [most of my friends think I’m mad].

What’s funny was that the panel sessions that I thought I would find least interesting ended up being the best ones and the ones I was really looking forward to ended up being a bit of a disappointment. The Creative Podcasting session in the end became a session about advertising and the Citizen Journalism segment ended up being a discussion about nomenclature and old media techniques applied to podcasting.

It was the Business of Podcasting panel that surprised me the most. This was all about how people were using podcasting within the corporate space to expand and often to diversify their business. One example was Tom Hall from the Lonely Planet who explained how they were using podcasts to compliment their travel books with travel casts of various locations around the world as well as using user generated audio from travellers moving around the globe.

Last night after I posted about the Net Neutrality Open Source Documentary, I was pondering why it was that I had found that so powerful and why it was that the seemingly boring Business of Podcasting Panel had turned out, imho, to have been the most creative. It suddenly dawned upon me that the first question to answer shouldn’t be ‘how’, rather why should we disintermediate film making in the first place? If everybody could make films easily, why would they do it at all?

Making films is about telling a story. It’s about getting ideas from inside your head into someone else’s. Loosely speaking, the film landscape tends to have factual documentaries on one edge and fictional films at the other and there’s obviously lots of mixing in the middle. Now although there are plenty of people who create fantastic fictional film work, I would imagine that for most of the people on the planet, it would be far more useful if they could quickly, cheaply and easily use the medium of film to put across an idea in business.

It’s very hard with words alone to put across an idea that has been building in your head over many months, sometimes years to someone (perhaps a boss, or investor) who has not met the people you’ve met, not read the articles you have, not payed attention to the people you find influential. Making money by the disintermediation of the film making process is going to be made by giving people a way to make their profession easier. In the future CEO’s will be film makers.

Who knows, maybe there will come the day when you can walk around putting bits of media in your pocket as you roam and you then seamlessly use this accumulated media stuff to tell stories to your friends around the table down the pub in glorious 3D hologram. Fictional story telling is for fun, thank goodness.

I’m on my way to the West Coast of Ireland for a few days and am patiently waiting for my flight at Stansted airport. Pretty good wifi though a little on the expensive side. Airport security is still high from what I can tell but no transparent plastic bags for hand luguage.

The support team at Flickr have narrowed my upload problem down to my ISP having bad routing to their site. All much of a muchness really as my broadband agreement with Be has expired and I’m not renewing it since I am packing my things and uprouting to Kentish Town in North London. The new apartment is really impressive, massive open plan kitchen/living room with breakfast bar and two big double bedrooms. Wood floors throughout. I can’t wait!

Todd Zeigler has some tips for news websites. In my opinion some of the d-cinema news sites should take some advice because as I see it most of them are in the dark ages. Getting d-cinema information is painfull.

I must say despite its ugly appearance, I’m really tempted to get a Blackberry or a Trio looking at all the hive of activity thats been brewing in this space over the past few weeks. Winer has some come up with something I’d like very much to play around with: Yomoblog.

It’s been 12 days since my last post. Rubbish.

I’ve been completely caught up in the final phase of a big project at work which is literally been sucking all my time. In fact I’ve barely been online at all and have completely lost touch with what’s going on. If anyone ever tries to tell you that digital intermediate is easy, they’re lying.

A while back I wrote that I was going to start researching topics that I thought were interesting to the world of digital cinema and that I would write about them as I learnt new stuff. Well I’m going to link to two good Ze Frank episodes where he looks at the subject of copyright. Here and here. It’s complicated ok.

“So in my adulthood I decided to go back to my childhood strategy: just start playing with it. Very quickly you start to understand the activity or idea that is at something’s core”.

This is a key idea IMHO. You can procrastinate all day long but at some stage you have to start the thing you are planing to do. The more you think about something the harder it can seem. It’s often more productive and fun to figure stuff out as you go along.

The Cinema Expo 2006 kicked off yesterday in Amsterdam.

One of the nice things that came out of my brunch on Sunday was some great reader feedback. I’ve known Pete for around 5 years now and he’s been a reader of the blog from back when I didn’t even talk about digital cinema. At the time he told me that he liked my style of writing, that he found it quite engaging. What he’s noticed of late is that since I’ve taken to the digital cinema route, that not only is he finding it less interesting for him but that he doesn’t even understand a lot of the stuff I link to.

Why did I take to writing about things in my field of work?

One important aspect of having a blog is how it helps you to find out things about yourself. The simple act of writing on a regular basis about things that cross your path and catch your attention changes the way you look at the world. It makes you more curious, more engaged, more interested. It helps to structure your thoughts.

The idea behind giving dcinput a digital cinema direction was to help me explore my current field of work and discover where my interests lie within it. The world of cinema is in such an exciting period of change right now, the boundaries of what is possible are being pushed on a daily basis. Understanding and being interested in this ever-changing environment is of the up most importance.

Using the internet as a tool for finding information and the blog as a way of structuring that information in a way that is meaningful to me is certainly one aspect of the ‘why’. If this was the only reason for having a blog then why bother making it public? Why take the risk of saying the wrong thing and end up with an unhappy employer?

These changes are without a doubt happening on a global scale. The blog then is also a tool to get around the problem of large distances. You see with this blog I can join into the global community of people involved in digital cinema. I can for example find out what technologies are being talked about, what social changes are occurring, and I can take part in the conversation.

In many ways I am still trying to find this digital cinema community on the web. It may be that there simply are not many people from the industry using blogs in this way. I am hoping that this will change. Taking part in Bloggercon IV over the weekend have made me sure of the importance of this new medium.

Even if I have not found the community I am looking for just yet, blogging it seems has another trick up its sleeve. Seen in a bigger picture sense, blogging is perhaps the most useful and powerful as a tool for building bridges between communities. In this new digital age, fields that have traditionally progressed on their own are converging massively. A blog allows you to have a foot in many communities at once. It helps you to build bridges.

Shaping a Blog around reader feedback

Now that I’m on my way to understanding why I do this blogging thing in the first place, I’m going to try to take Pete’s comments on board. Over the last few months my busy work schedule has meant that simply linking to digital cinema related articles has been faster and easier than actually putting across my personal views on issues that matter. I find that most of the things I actually work on I can’t actually talk about for several months and are in any case of a pretty technical nature.

Over the next few months I am going to try to identify certain topics that are of concern to the digital cinema landscape as well as others that cross into other areas. I’ll then concentrate my exploration of the internet somewhat around these areas and write about them as I learn new things. Though you will certainly find me occasionally talking about some new geeky piece of hardware, I will also do my best to venture into themes like Net Neutrality, Intellectual Property and Copyright for instance. I welcome any suggestions!

Thanks again Pete, I really value your opinions.

Looks like the Frontier kernel is heading for a spot of performance tuning. I have certainly noticed peoples blogs on blogs.opml.org acting real slow lately. It’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to stay with Wordpress for the moment.

Rex Hammond has also been thinking about why he blogs: “remember that: The core product, the core brand is you and your cause and your product or service”.

The making money angle is interesting. Making money is definitely not something I am looking to do with this blog. I have no plans to put any advertising in the sidebar and I won’t be pushing any products. This blog belongs to me, only me, and I like it that way. It’s my tool to explore, to experiment, to learn and to communicate. I won’t compromise on this in any way. Ah-ha.

AccessIT announces 4th quarter fiscal 4th quarter end of year results. Net losses it seems of $16,812,000.

Digital Cinema Matters: “For now, those shareholder seem happy to bankroll further losses in the hope of a bright and cash-flow positive digital future”.

I noticed that with the acquisition of PLX Systems, Access IT is taking its next step into the world of digital distribution and licensing of content. I’ve also noticed lots of .NET positions on the film job boards recently. Maybe they are hiring?

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.