MONDAY, 29 January 2001
Plenary:
New Digital Distribution Options
Neil Sieling, moderator
Lawrence Daressa, California Newsreel
One of the many disadvantages of being as old as I am is that even revolutions tend to lose their luster. They are unwelcome reminders of the shattering of one's own youthful illusions, so what the first time seemed like a tragedy, is recapitulated, as Marx observed, as farce. Each time, the amateurs of new technologies extrapolate blue-sky promises of the vast public services potential opening up, and each time the only potential that actually gets realized is the potential for making money.
| "The value of independent production is that it is independent of mainstream values, ideologies, artistic languages, etc. Hence it isn't designed to service an existing audience, but a future audience, an audience in formation." LAWRENCE DARESSA |
In essence we're replacing a representative democracy with a consumer democracy, in the process reducing our vision of personal and social life to nothing but consumption. In this climate anyone who says that a telecommunications revolution will inevitably have a positive impact on the quality of civil life, must either be remarkably credulous or remarkably cynical. We shouldn't be led astray by this kind of technological determinism. To suppose that, just because something is technologically feasible, it's bound to happen, is to neglect a key fact, namely that technology is always socially embedded. Its actual development will be determined by who holds the power and the money. We could even postulate a law, which you could call the law of mediocrity, forgive the pun, which states that technology's implementation will be no better, and probably no worse, than the dominant values of the society which implements it.
I remember a foundation executive actually assuring video distributors that we could succeed if we trusted the good taste of the market enough to cut our prices. This advice reveals the common error that confuses access to a product with interest in it. Filmmakers and foundations would like to think that the bottleneck separating independent work and a mass audience is just a failure of marketing nerve. They fail to realize that there's a long-term political and cultural challenge inherent in the very nature of independent production. The value of independent production is that it is independent of mainstream values, ideologies, artistic languages, etc. Hence it isn't designed to service an existing audience, but a future audience, an audience in formation. Now, I can understand why foundations besieged by independents would love to think that the market could someday, somehow fund all our projects, but as I've argued, it will not and should not.
As a distributor of social-change documentaries for 27 years, I have been continually frustrated by the fact that any correlation between the media needs of social-change activists and the social-change documentaries that are actually produced seems purely serendipitous.
The advent of the web suggests that text can potentially be woven into a wider and richer telecommunications fabric involving all aspects of social-change organizing. Portals and websites cannot be seen merely as di
rectories of information, for they create their own contexts. They are necessarily frames embedding within themselves value systems and implicit social identities. They can model new social roles. The net offers opportunities that a television set or movie house never could. Thus the web can help build intentional communities organized around what we might call post-consumerist objectives. This shift of emphasis of text to context, which I've suggested may be a general characteristic of the net, is already having an impact on my particular area of expertise, institutional video distribution.
Even now, linear video is increasingly being acquired, not as an instructional resource for in-class screenings, but simply as a reference tool for individual student use outside of class. Furthermore, it is clear that as interactive multimedia learning modules are developed and classes become web-based rather than classroom-based, linear video will be integrated into these more interactive contexts in the shape of clips or sidebars, rather than as full-length, freestanding films. In the future, linear video proper may well be relegated to a narrative art form, while instruction is carried on primarily through more effective interactive formats. This should not be seen as an occasion for despair on the part of independent producers, but as an opportunity for innovation. We must try to imagine media forms that merely intervene, summarize or comment on a larger, ongoing conversation, rather than substitute for that conversation, as linear video has too often done. In short, a more ephemeral, more open-ended type of medium.
None of this potential will be realized unless independent producers recognize that their responsibility now is not just to produce content, but to create context - indeed, to create a context in which the civic sector can flourish.
Jan Hauser, Sun Microsystems
My view of media today, and I agree with Larry on this, is that it is essentially a reflection of our economic engine. That economic engine is a society founded on consumerism, on the marketing of goods and services for consumption. This really is the motor of the system, and radio and TV and newspapers have been pretty much completely taken over by it. Now, it's true that our technology and our society are co-evolutionary, that is to say that technology asserts some pressure on our society and our society asserts some pressure back. But I'd like to point out that there's a very big difference between radio, TV and newspapers as we know them today and the telephone and the Internet.
I look at these things from a systems point of view and I ask myself the question, what differentiates a living system from a dead system? If you look into biology, you find that everything that is alive has feedback in it. There's always a continual flow back and forth at every level, in all biological things. Continual negotiation or interplay at every single level. The interesting thing about broadcast media, whether it be the transmission of a magazine or newspaper through the mail, or a show on TV or on 700 broadcast channels, or Direct TV, is that there's little or no feedback and hardly any of the properties of a living system. The interesting thing about the telephone is that there's direct feedback. When people talk on the telephone, they're in conversation; there is a live interaction. The Internet, of course, is a descendant of the telephone, not of printed or broadcast media.
I think the important thing is the context that Larry talked about, for the Internet allows a living context to emerge - it is not dead in the sense in which broadcast media are dead. As each of the people in your target audience, whom you supposedly designed your context for, begins to interact, they can quickly and immediately feed back to you. And you can react to that feedback, and so on, creating living interactivity. Now, when it comes to context, one of the problems of the Internet is that in essence it has an infinite number of channels. People normally have limited channel space - ten or twenty channels, say, on broadcast media. And everyone competes for the channel space, which is owned, so that this is an economy of scarcity and everyone will pay a lot of money to get on. Not so with the Internet.
As for the editorial function, our approach up to now has been rather uncreative. So far we have done little more than adapt the magazine format: there's a table of contents that is hierarchical, content is laid out on a web page, and we say, okay, here's your portal, and it looks like a magazine. This is now very familiar, and people are comfortable with it, but I think that over time the Internet can (and should) get more and more interactive. In fact, I can imagine a time when interaction with the audience rearranges the layout of the magazine dynamically. But we haven't seen many people doing such creative things yet, and the idea that the editorial function can be dynamic has not yet made it into the mainstream.
Finally, I'd like to suggest that we can think of the Internet system as an epicenter of value, a kind of artificial intelligence, a little software agent that goes out there wandering around on my behalf and does things for me. So now I have a virtual presence out there in cyberspace. I think that there is a tremendous potential in having an agent-based or an agent-mediated relationship. I think that this gets right to the core of the editorial function, the ultimate goal being a piece of software that, on behalf of my values and interests, goes out and interacts and does what needs to be done to identify and engage other software agents with comparable purposes. When it comes to artificial intelligence, I feel that we will do much better at search engines over time. They're getting better all the time, and the computational ability to do interesting correlations is scaling up, but I think we have to solve a lot of social problems having to do with identity and the management of identity before more progress can occur. This is because releasing identity is a double-edged sword. If I release my identity it does some useful things for me, but it also gives power to the person on the other side of the identity exchange, and this brings us back in very short order to the social ramifications.
Kim Spencer, Worldlink
WorldLink TV managed to raise about $3m in its first year of operations. Compare that with Oxygen, which I think spent $300m in its first year. And I think we now have about the same ratings as Oxygen.
| "Getting people involved has to be the goal of many independent producers." KIM SPENCER |
Of more direct relevance to this conference is the fact that the digital platform constitutes an opportunity for us to explore the kind of living feedback that the previous speaker was talking about. We're interested in going beyond the programs we can present and begin to involve our viewers through the website, through enhanced television interactivity, and by whatever mneans we can mobilize to get people up off their couches. Getting people invloved has to be the goal of many independent producers.
Our original plan was to refresh the program schedule in about the fourth or fifth month, but we haven't been able to do that because of budgetary constraints. We haven't been able to buy new programs, so basically we've been running on the initial
licenses. We bought two year, nonexclusive licenses at really bargain prices from producers who were committed to the cause, and we've been airing those programs over and over. You would think this was going to kill the channel. Actually we have a strong following that likes the programs and, contrary to the usual programming logic, isn't too alarmed by repeated screenings. The quality of the programming has been crucial and the programs were the result of years and years of crafting and work by independents. So Jack Willis's strategy, which is to put on only the best programs, has turned out to be a good one.
Pamela Arthur
Imagine a box that's got a DVD player, a TiVo box, an Internet connection and then even more than that, all networked to your home. We're not that far away from that. You will soon be in complete control over what is delivered to you. It will be on demand and it will be an interactive experience. This is a very, very exciting time, I think, to be in the independent filmmaking industry, as well as a media artist.
| "You will soon be in complete control over what is delivered to you." PAMELA ARTHUR |
It is now quite possible to have a two-way type of communication on a disk or via your cable box or whatever. That's the great thing about what's happening, namely convergence. What does convergence mean? It means a two-way type of communication where all of our current devices are being combined into one, which will let us, as end users, decide what we want to see, when we want to see it, how often we want to see it (or change our minds), and at what quality.
Robin Mudge, BBC
Our vision is to produce new television or new material that's designed specifically for this delivery medium, rather than starting from the other end and taking ordinary television material and turning it or inflating it into what many people call an interactive experience.
The important thing is that it's always uni- and bi-directional. This is an Internet connection that uses standard Internet protocols, so any platform that runs a web browser will deliver this service. I might add that in the UK and Europe in general things are moving very rapidly. We have second-generation devices connected to our television sets that deliver these kinds of services already. And this is, to emphasize, a service that's delivered across the world.
We're talking about a giant database publishing system. It's all based on a big digital asset-management system. The passive TV just takes the video out to a broadcast server that has broadcast schedules and transmits television programs. But when we add the streaming server and the web server which runs various other applications to enable this on-demand service, we get the "Illuminated TV" model. And the full monty is the "Engaged TV" model with the community servers, learning-management servers, and - very important - rights management. We can break objects down to individual frames of video if necessary and make automatic payments to the owner of each of those frames.