Television Archiving

CNBC Erases All of its Enron Footage?

• April 27th, 2005

In the discussion with the director, Alex Gibney, following a showing at the San Francisco Film Festival of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, it came out that CNBC claims to have erased all of its coverage of Enron. It would be good to verify whether this is the case, but if true, it would seem to put CNBC a little closer to the level of the Texas office of Arthur Andersen, which shredded Enron-related accounting documents.

Open Media, with DRM?

• April 26th, 2005

The newly-announced Open Media Network bills itself as the future of public tv and radio, and looks something like OurMedia - producers can upload content and have it hosted for free.

A system that uses the Internet for distribution and allows creative workers to be compensated for their sound and moving image productions could be a good thing. And OMN promises to do this. But the press release shows the kind of schizophrenia that results when “open” and “commercial” get too close to each other:

“Because OMN uses Kontiki’s grid delivery technology, all content is centrally managed.  Programs which violate copyright or are unsuitable for viewing can be removed from the network.  Kontiki’s battle-tested technology has built-in digital rights management (DRM) through support of the Microsoft Windows Rights Manager and allows publishers to choose whether content can be shared, duplicated or viewed a set number of times.  Future versions of OMN, due this summer, will offer producers a secure payment system for premium content.”
“All content is centrally managed” with “battle-tested technology?” “Programs….unsuitable for viewing can be removed from the network?” And it’s all Windows-only?

That doesn’t sound open.

OMN has some smart people behind it, and its p2p approach to media distribution is right. It could even make a good platform for broadcasters like Current.tv and for archives that want to make programming available. But asking everyone to download yet another client app just to view video will be a hard sell, especially if the same material is available elsewhere in genuinely open formats.

Wow! FCC Tells Broadcaster to Label VNRs

• April 15th, 2005

Amazing: sponsorship rules are getting re-examined and the FCC is warning broadcasters to identify the source of video news releases.

Of course, the counterpart to this action should be an examination not only of broadcasters’ practices, but also of the government practices which the GAO called illegal.

MIC Vendor Directory

• April 15th, 2005

In addition to creating a union catalog of moving images, MIC is also creating a vendor directory. Jane Johnson writes:

Just a reminder: we are planning to build a MIC Vendor Directory listing individuals and organizations supplying professional services and products for archival moving image collections. If you are a vendor, service provider, or potential Directory user, please help us make this the best possible resource. Review the specifications on the MIC site (http://mic.loc.gov) and send comments and questions by May 1, 2005 to Jane Johnson, MIC Project Manager, at
j j o h n s o n ( a t ) l o c . g o v .

The specs can be found under ‘In the Spotlight’ on the home page, or go directly to http://mic.imtc.gatech.edu/pdfs/mic_service_providers.pdf….

Including the contact information for vendors exhibiting at the NAB next week might be an interesting start…

Seriousmagic’s Vlogit!

• April 12th, 2005

Seriousmagic’s Vlog it! looks very similar to Varasoftware’s Videocue, but for the PC. The ability to have a dynamic background is nice advantage, though I suspect that will soon to be included in Videocue. The items produced by Vlog it!, hosted at Vlog.com, don’t work for Mac users running Safari, and require Firefox users to install Active-X controls, which is unfortunate. Of course, PC users may find Videocue’s Quicktime output requires them to download a plug-in. Still, this looks like The Tool for PC users looking for a quick way to put short clips up on the net.

BBC Creative Archive Launches

• April 11th, 2005

Informitv has a good article today on the launch of the BBC’s Creative Archive, which will provide materials for non-commercial use and serve as a model for other archives in the U.K. that wish to provide enhanced access to their holdings.

Client Side Tools for Video News Production

• April 7th, 2005

Along with the new hosting services from the Internet Archive, Ourmedia, and Google, and the server-side video searching and selection services from companies like Yahoo, BlinkX, Google, and Feedster, there is a growing crop of new production tools. Some, such as Vided, are server-based, and oriented towards assembly and transcoding.

But the one that has really struck a chord with me is Vara Software’s Videocue, which lets you quickly hack together presentations and news segments, and even publish them to various blogging systems. Videocue is kind of like Powerpoint combined with Ecto or Marsedit for video; it makes it easy for non-professionals to develop decent looking presentations and post them to to a blog. I made a quick demo in about 30 minutes last night (and learned that it does take skill to use a teleprompter.) At $99, it’s priced a bit high for the blogging market, and a bit low for the professional market; for those determined to roll their own system, a teleprompter app combined with iMovie would be an alternative. Still, I was very impressed with the product and how easy it was to use.

Note: I’m talking quickly in the demo because the free version is limited to 15 seconds.

Google’s plans to host video, and what it might mean for TV

• April 6th, 2005

Bandwidth and storage have dropped to the point where it’s possible to think about hosting video for free. Google plans to start doing so soon and the Internet Archive, which has been doing so for a couple of years, now has a spiffy new front end with Ourmedia.org. Still image services such as Flickr and Webshots seem likely to begin emphasizing video as well.

So how long before it becomes a matter of course for television stations to make their past broadcasts available, just as newspaper make their past editions available? My guess: in three years most major television stations will have everything they own up online (though of course many stations own just a small fraction of what they broadcast.)

Kuro5hin’s Paean to C-SPAN

• April 6th, 2005

Kuro5hin has a nice write-up about C-SPAN today. C_SPAN’s American Political Archive provides access to past footage as well as to radio programs, and is quite interesting to browse, though unfortunately it’s using Real for encoding rather than an open standard.

IndTV Launches as Current.tv

• April 5th, 2005

IndTV is now calling itself Current.tv, and planning an August 1 launch. From AP:

Gore Launches TV Channel for Young Viewers
Tue Apr 5, 8:11 AM ET
By BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - Al Gore has a plan for luring the Internet generation back to television: make it more participatory by having viewers contribute their own video.

The former vice president and longtime Internet champion joined investors Monday to announce the creation of Current, a cable TV channel that will target younger viewers with a blend of news, culture and viewer-produced video…

[Gore] and Joel Hyatt, the founder of Hyatt Legal Services who will serve as Current’s chief executive, assembled an investment team that paid $70 million last year to acquire the Newsworld International channel from Vivendi International.

The site has the first of a series of contest winners; the second place winner, an amateur documentary from Iran, is more interesting than the first place satire of campaign commercials.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. If IP networks can substitute for cable channels, it may be that Vivendi got the better end of the deal, or rather, that the $70 mm raised so far might have been better spent on creating great content, and using BitTorrent for distribution.

Panorama Ephemera

• April 4th, 2005

The New York Times reviews Panorama Ephemera. Congratulations Rick!