Why Wikipedia supports open video from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

From time to time, Socialbrite explores the use of open source tools by change-makers and social benefit organizations — see below for our past coverage of open video and how open standards can benefit nonprofit tech.

The second annual Open Video conference returns to New York University on Oct. 1-2. If you can make it, it’s a must event for evangelists of open content. At last year’s event, I got to meet Erik Möller, deputy director of the Wikimedia Foundation and an early advisor to Ourmedia.org, who helped (via email from Berlin) steer us toward the right set of Creative Commons licenses.

In this video interview, Möller tells me why Wikipedia decided early on to support open standards for all video used on the online encyclopedia. “We’ve always had a commitment to open standards,” he said. The Wikimedia brain trust made a decision early on not to support Flash, MPEG-4 or any other proprietary format on Wikipedia when the formats are controlled by a single vendor or handful of vendors. “If [users] all have to get permission from one entity, we would never accept that kind of market power” in other mediums, like TV or radio.

Without question, it was the correct decision — and a vastly important one.

As a result, today Wikipedia has more than 30 million text articles — all available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license — but only 3,000 videos. Erik hopes that changes. He encourages contributors to collaborate and publish “rich educational materials” through video, photo slide shows, animation and rich media on subjects like genetics or natural selection. “The potential is enormous,” he said.

Watch, download or embed the 6-minute video in Theora Ogg on Tinyvid.tv (and let us know if you can’t view it in your browser)

Watch, download or embed the 6-minute video on Vimeo

Watch or embed video on YouTube

For those so inclined, here is the Wikimedia Commons entry on converting video to the Theora Ogg format. The free Miro Theora video converter is available for Windows and Mac computers and features a simple drag-and-drop interface. Since version 3.5 of Firefox was released last year, Firefox now supports HTML 5 video and audio in the browser without the need for proprietary formats like Flash.

So far, Theora remains a promising but geeky codec that hasn’t advanced much since I last wrestled with it three years ago. I just tried converting my H.264 video into Theora using Miro Video Converter — and it came out as a green screen. Firefox 3.6, Opera, Google Chrome and Safari can play back Theora videos with varying degrees of success. But, to be sure, the era of open video on the Web has just dawned.

Side note: Erik Möller developed the proposal for Wikinews, a Wikimedia project, and organized the vote that implemented it. Before joining Wikimedia, Erik was a freelance journalist and author. He now lives in San Francisco.

A production note: I’m trying a new “outro” on this video — that is, the music over the closing credits — with “TheForce” by j1s, a CC BY-NC musical snippet that I found on beat.org.

Related

• Toward a Web of open video: an interview with Mozilla’s Mark Surman (Socialbrite)
• How open standards can benefit nonprofit tech (Socialbrite)
• Boxee and the promise of open media (Socialbrite)
• The promise of open source video (Socialbrite)
• Kaltura: open source video (Socialbrite)
• Creating media: Tools, tutorials, resources (Socialbrite)

The post Why Wikipedia insists on open video appeared first on Socialbrite.

Toward open video on the Web from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

A few weeks ago, before and after the Open Video conference at NYU, I sketched out the proposition that open video is a requirement for an open Web in two posts: The promise of open source video and Boxee and the promise of open media.

By some estimates, 90 percent of the traffic on the Internet will be video by 2013, so this affects free and open discourse online. Above is a 7-minute interview I conducted with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, who talks about how video is really separate from the rest of the Web in that it’s a much more closed system. “We need to look at how to make video a first-class citizen on the Web,” he said.

Surman said he hopes a concerted push toward open standards will “shift the market away from a black box video plug-in, where the video is separate from the rest of the page, to something where video can interact with Javascript” or other elements on a Web page.

Video today is locked up (technologically) and locked down (legally). In order for video to become part of the Web’s innovation ecosystem, Surman said, we need to be able to play, manipulate, transform and remix video in the same way we can with photos and data.

In the past two years, the vast majority of video hosting sites have settled on Adobe’s Flash as the format of choice because more than 95 percent of desktop computers and laptops can play them. But Flash isn’t an open source system, and video producers have been limited in how they can make video interact with other Web page elements.

“That may not sounds interesting to those who just watch videos, but it’ll be interesting first to video producers who can do all kinds of innovative things that we can’t even imagine now,” he said.

Firefox 3.5 may be a game-changer

With the recent release of Firefox 3.5, Web developers can now program video within the browser, bypassing Flash, QuickTime, DivX and other codecs altogether. “That means 300 million people will [eventually] have access to native video in their browser,” Surman said. Other browsers, including Safari, Chrome and Opera, are also on board the open video bandwagon.

Where firefox 3.0 was an upgrade for users, “we say Firefox 3.5 is an upgrade for the Web,” he added. That doesn’t mean we’ll see a shift away from Flash .flv video in the next few years, but now the door is open to innovation and experimentation.

Online video “will always be a contested space, but enough people love the Web that they’ll make it happen,” Surman said.

Watch, embed or download video in Flash on Vimeo
Watch or download video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download the original video from Archive.org or watch it in Ogg

Related

• Mark Surman’s tak at the Open Video conference in Ogg Theora

• Breaking: Firefox 3.5 is Released — A Historic Day for Web Video? (beet.tv)

• RiP: A Remix Manifesto: A movie by Brett Taylor

The post Toward a Web of open video appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Renee Blodgett
CEO, Magic Sauce Media

At this week’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, the open source video company Kaltura organized and participated in a SaaS Goes Open Source panel (SaaS as in Software as a Service).

In this video interview, Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel says open source is disruptive but on the rise, and it tears down those garden walls, giving corporations better control, flexibility and better integration. SpikeSource, Zimbra, Acquia, Fenwick & West and Alfresco were the other companies joining Ron on the panel.

The post Open source’s growing influence appeared first on Socialbrite.

As part of our silo-busting effort at Socialbrite, we’ll be showcasing cool technologies that haven’t received enough attention in the nonprofit and social change worlds. So here’s a one-minute video, announcing the launch of Socialbrite, that I created last night on Animoto:

Introducing Socialbrite.org. Nonprofit tech + Causes + Open source + Social media.

We’re using it at the top of our Media Center.

Check out Animoto: They’re doing amazing things with a very small staff. You can try out a few remixes for free, and choose from music and images on their site; after that, it’s 3 bucks a video or $30 a year.

I chose to upload Enur: “Calabria (Club Mix)” — given that it’s only a 60-second snippet and has a noncommercial context here, it clearly falls within fair use. (One image included in the video is Creative Commons licensed: Muchilottu Bhagavathy Theyyam ceremonial mask by freebird (bobinson).)

The post NPtech + causes + open source + social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

At last weekend’s Open Video Conference, where 850 people turned out at NYU to discuss the future of open media, the standout open source project — at least for me — was Boxee. It’s not so much a company as a cause.

This is a big subject, so, first, a word about the conference, put on by the Participatory Culture Foundation, Yale Internet Society Project, Kaltura, iCommons and the Open Video Alliance. I wrote about the promise of open source video earlier this month, participated in the conference, and now have a much better understanding of the issues at stake.

Jenny Attiyeh, host and producer for Boston-based ThoughtCast, conducted interviews at the conference and produced this riveting 4-minute video (embedded above) that looks at the importance of open media for getting the word out about the demonstrations and government crackdown in Iran.

Mark Surman of Mozilla, whom I interviewed (I’ll post the video in the coming weeks), gave a stirring talk and wrote this on his commonspace blog: “We love [the Web] because it’s all about transparency, remixability, participation. It’s about creativity and innovation. It’s open. And it’s wonderful.

“Sadly, we cannot say these things about online video today. To be sure, have seen a huge explosion of video creativity on the web. And web cams and phones have made video almost like an everyday language. Yet, the legal, distribution and technical underpinnings of online video remain much like television — opaque, immutable and centralized.”

The Open Video Alliance also summed up what’s at stake:

As internet video matures, we face a crossroads: will technology and public policy support a more participatory culture — one that encourages and enables free expression and broader cultural engagement? Or will online video become a glorified TV-on-demand service, a central part of a permissions-based culture?

Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. When most folks think of “open,” they think of open source and open codecs. They’re right — but there’s much more to Open Video. Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for independent producers, bottom-up innovation, and greater protection for free speech online.

YouTube and other online video applications are rightly celebrated for empowering end-users; however, online video lacks some of the essential qualities that make text and images on the web such powerful tools for free speech and technical innovation. Email, blogs, and other staples of the open web rely on ubiquitous and interoperable technologies that have low barriers to entry; they are massively decentralized and resistant to censorship or regulation. Video, meanwhile, relies on centralized distribution and proprietary technologies which can threaten cultural discourse and innovation.

My friends Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman put together this terrific compilation of interviews about open video — check out the amazing variety of organizations involved in the movement.

Boxee: Setting your TV free

Boxee, which styles itself as an “open, connected, social media center, took a big step into the mainstream Tuesday with the release of its Windows application. It’s software you plunk into your laptop — not hardware or a set-top box. (Here’s the Wikipedia entry.)

Here’s how it works:

“On a laptop or connected to an HDTV, boxee’s free software lets you navigate all your personal movies, TV shows, music and photos, as well as streaming content from websites like MLB, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm, and Flickr from one screen with a remote.”

And here’s why Boxee is an important ingredient in the open media ecosystem: It’s not for couch potatoes, as their home page misimplies, but rather for people who want to put the Web in their living rooms. There’s nothing passive or lean-back about taking control of your media intake by wrestling it away from Hollywood, the cable companies and satellite operators.

You cannot watch video from the open Web on AppleTV — only from Apple’s licensed partners. You can’t watch Web video on Joost — only from Joost partners.

On Boxee, you can watch anything on the open Web.

In my 2005 book Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (which had five stars on Amazon until the anti-free culture zealots — who didn’t read the book — dove in), I interviewed Warren Lieberfarb, the father of the DVD (the chapter is online here):

Hollywood looks at interactive media as an opportunity to shop or upsell merchandise, but the studios get nervous about true interactivity because they lose control over the entertainment experience.

Warren Lieberfarb, the visionary former head of Warner Home Video, thinks it won’t be long before we’ll be able to purchase and store our own personal collection of movies and transport it from device to device, anywhere within an extended home domain.

“I see a very, very, very big transformation that’s going to change the balance of power in media,” he says, choosing his words with care. “It will step away from the broadcast and cable networks to specialized niche programming that will be accessible through on-demand services. That is the revolution. And nothing is going to stop this.” …

“All this is going to bypass the broadcast and cable networks,” he says. “The whole notion that you sit at a television at a designated time and you tune in to watch what they say you watch—it’s over. It’s going to take a while, but it’s over.”

Just as the Internet and the proliferation of low-cost digital tools have reshaped other media, so the new technologies will transform our notion of television. A few years from now, when you say “television,” it may no longer be synonymous with the box in your living room because you also will be watching it on your handheld mobile device or tablet PC. “What’s on TV” may no longer be synonymous with network and cable programming because you’ll be able to access video feeds from a wide range of new content providers. When you do watch television in your living room, you’ll still wield a remote control, but you may be watching it on a stand-alone digital box or one that’s hooked up to a media-center device or wirelessly connected to a PC, giving you the power to pull niche material from a gushing fire hose of sources.

“People are going to discover that content doesn’t have to be produced by the major media companies,” Lieberfarb says. …

Lieberfarb is not saying the old order of Big Media programming will be overthrown by a cabal of camcorder-wielding Young Turks. But he is saying that the major media companies will no longer exercise exclusive control over what Americans watch on TV. …

“Change is not going to come from the media conglomerates that have too much at stake in protecting the status quo.”
— Warren LieberfarbFormidable business interests will oppose a mass rollout of easily accessible on-demand media for the public because it threatens their existing business models, Lieberfarb says. In the years ahead, vertically integrated media companies will use their marketplace dominance and their clout in Congress, the regulatory agencies, and the courts in an effort to maintain their role as exclusive intermediaries, as gatekeepers of information and entertainment.

“That’s why I think audiovisual media, available online on demand, will take place from the edge”—here he holds his hands wide apart—”and not from the center of the media industry. Change is not going to come from the media conglomerates that have too much at stake in protecting the status quo.” …

How to put television’s pieces back together? We need to arrive at a new place of user participation and interaction. The tools are at hand: a converged cable TV and Internet gateway that lets subscribers pay a small monthly fee (80 percent of Americans already pay for cable TV or satellite) in return for a high-speed freeway ramp connecting us to hundreds of niche video channels created by entrepreneurs, amateurs, and independent professionals.

Will the companies controlling the pipes into our houses also control what comes through it? Will they continue to be our visual gatekeepers? “No,” Lieberfarb says firmly. “People will be able to access any Web sites delivering movies and video.”

That is exactly what this battle is still about. We are now at the formative stages of this war over our television viewing experience.

A number of software applications have been around for years that let you connect your laptop to your digital television to watch Web video on your TV set, but they were kludgy and clunky. Boxee makes it easy. What’s more, it hooks you into a social community:

Users can see what their friends are watching and listening to via an online Web feed or directly inside of the application. Once installed, the home screen shows a list of content suggested by friends, their activities and even their newly added content. Users can also use the popular micro-blogging service Twitter or FriendFeed to automatically share what they’re watching or listening to, with the rest of the world.

At the Open Video Conference, Boxee CEO Avner Ronen described the Boxee open source media center as “a Firefox for the home.” You run it on your laptop, connect it to your TV, use a remote control to access videos, photos and online services like YouTube and Hulu.

Unlike companies like Microsoft and Sony, which put their own business interests above their customers’ interests, Boxee is focused strictly on serving the user. Conveniently, Ronen said: “We generate no revenues so it’s hard to be profitable. We don’t aspire to profitability.” The company is not charging for subscriptions or using advertising.

“The entertainment companies’ mindset is: If it’s in the living room, it’s ours.”
— Jonathan ZittrainBig Entertainment is not pleased, for a number of reasons. First, companies like Hulu don’t have the licensing rights for its programming to appear on your TV set — just on your computer screen. Second, the ads that appear on the Hulu website do not appear when you stream the Hulu video to your TV with Boxee (with good reason — they’re made for a small screen, not a TV screen). Third, programming created for the Web looks different on a digital TV — the colors bleed differently, for one thing. Fourth, and most important, Hollywood loses its control over your TV viewing experience. If you can access any video site on the Web, then Hollywood and the cable companies lose control over what you can buy or rent.

In February, Hulu contacted Boxee asking them to explain themselves. As Harvard professor Jonathan Zittrain said from the stage: “The entertainment companies’ mindset is: If it’s in the living room, it’s ours.”

Ronen said from the stage: “We now understand the industry’s concerns. We understand they want to control how videos and commercials are getting to the TV. They want control over the timing and delivery. But we’re not planning to slow down or change what we’re doing.” Huge applause from the audience.

On Tuesday, when more then 800 people turned out for the party in San Francisco marking the release of Boxee for Windows (it previously worked just on the Mac and Linux), Boxee took a big step forward into the limelight.

The jocular Avner says, “Consumer behavior is changing, resistance is futile.”

The reason Hollywood hasn’t come after Boxee to crush it? Not many people know about it. At least not yet.

Hollywood thinks it still owns your television. Time will tell if they’re right.

More background

• Mark Surman of Mozilla at commonspace: Building an open video movement!

• Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla: why open video?

• Socialbrite: The promise of open source video

• TechCrunch: Boxee Swings For The Fences: Windows Support, MLB, Digg, Tumblr And Current All Launch Tonight

• Mashable: What is Boxee Announcing Tonight? [Live Video]

• ZDNet: How-to: Install boxee and XBMC on the Apple TV

• NewTeeVee: For Boxee CEO, Hulu Desktop Brings Hope

• Engadget: Hulu to PlayStation 3 browsers: “This video is not available on your platform”

The post Boxee and the promise of open media appeared first on Socialbrite.

Socialbrite readers get 15 percent the registration fee (regularly $75 for individuals and nonprofits and $200 for companies). The event will be held June 19-20 at NYU.

“If you want an open structure of media to guarantee that the future of media is not proprietary and locked down, then open is the only way to go,” he said. “If we care about democratized media, where citizens in their living rooms can access programming from more than just three or four media conglomerates, then we should care about open video.”

But David’s warning is not a call to arms against entrenched corporate interests. “Millions of lines of code have been written in the open video world without a lot of success,” he acknowledged.

Rather, it’s a call for reasoned partnerships: public and private, new and old, for-profit and nonprofit. We need to think beyond licenses and consider how to build real businesses that are built on open and democratic principles — and translate that into real economic value. In short, he argues that open video is not just about serving the interests of users. Open video is good for business, too.

Surveying the open media landscape

Davis is one of the few people I’ve heard who can provide context around what has been happening in the open source movement. Some developers, like those working on Ogg Theora, are focusing on open-sourcing the codec through video compression. Others, like the Mozilla Foundation, are targeting the user experience through the Firefox browser. (Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari run on the open source WebKit rendering engine.) Still others, like ccMixter (a community remix site sponsored by Creative Commons) and Jamendo (a music platform and community where you can download and listen to over 15,000 albums legally) are targeting the content licensing layer. And David’s own Kaltura is the first open source video platform for online video management, creation, interaction and collaboration; with more than 25,000 publishers, “it’s the fastest-growing video platform on the Web,” he said. Wikipedia is scheduled to begin using Kaltura’s video platform throughout the online encyclopedia some time this summer. (Another worthy effort is the Participatory Culture Foundation’s Miro software.)

All told, a global community of developers has emerged around the open video movement, he said. “From my perspective, the world is divided into three parts: The technical architecture of an open system. The legal issues around who owns content management rights. And the infrastructure layer: codecs, formats, patents.”

The Open Video Conference is one measure of the movement’s robustness. With zero marketing budget, the organizers quickly heard from 180 different projects and nonprofits that applied to present. Somewhere between 600 and 800 people are expected to attend. From the website: “Open Video is more than just open codecs. It’s the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video.”

David said that over the past year or so, some clarity has come to the open video movement. “One of the things we learned is that we can’t use Flash in the production layer, because under Adobe’s term, we’re free to use it but not free to use and rework in the sense of free software.” Thus, Kaltura is participating in developing an open source alternative.

Open video adherents like David are not against Apple or Adobe, but they do want to create an alternative in the market that uses true open source technology as the basis for a for-profit business. “We’re running a business, not a charity,” David said.

Of the creative ferment in the open source video movement, he said, “I see a tremendous amount of interest in the market for this, connecting people who are working on browsers and codecs and players and bring them all together. There’s something in the air.”

Related

• My video interview with Kaltura CEO and co-founder Ron Yekutiel
• Streamingmedia.com: Shay David essay, “Industry Perspectives: The Promise of Open Source Video”

The post The promise of open source video appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Peter Jaszi
Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University

The answers to some of filmmakers’ most common clearance questions don’t really lie in the realm of “fair use” at all, but fall under the heading of “free use.” Some examples:

• Buildings that can be seen from public areas can be filmed for any purpose. Although there has been copyright in architectural works in the United States since 1990, the U.S. Copyright Act includes an exemption for filming. It doesn’t matter whether the building is the subject of the film or an incidental background.
• Federal government works enjoy no copyright protection whatsoever, whether they are the words of federal government employees or footage taken by camerapeople in civilian or military service. The purpose for which you use the material – as well as the source from which you obtain it – are irrelevant from a copyright perspective.
• Public domain works (such as 19th century paintings or medieval manuscripts) in museums or private collections are free for use as well, if you have access to a reproduction. Many institutions claim copyright in their own photographs of old objects in their collections. But if you have a different source, you’re free to proceed, without a license from the collection.
• For most documentary projects, filmmakers don’t have to be concerned about the so-called “right of publicity” that exists under some state laws. The cases (and sometimes the statutes themselves) make it clear that the right bars only the commercial exploitation of celebrities’ “persona,” and First Amendment-protected expressive uses are specifically exempted.
• In answer to a common (but not intellectual property-related) question, documentarians don’t need photo releases from individuals who are filmed in parks, streets or other public places where they have no expectation of privacy. If you single out an individual for special attention, you may a need a release.

Related

• Filmmakers’ best practices in fair use

• The rules around capturing public performances

• Guide to shooting photos in public

• Your rights as a photographer

The post What is off-limits to a documentary filmmaker? appeared first on Socialbrite.

I‘ve been following Kaltura for about a year now. It offers a terrific open-source platform, toolset and nearly free video hosting solution for small and large companies and nonprofits. (I think I have that right — it’s hard to explain what they do in a single sentence.)

From the site: “Kaltura’s goal is to bring interactive video to every site and to create the world’s largest distributed video network.”

Here’s a 9-minute video interview with CEO Ron Yekutiel. They’re about to give users the capability to add video and widgets to Wikipedia, and they’re working with MediaWiki.org as well. They also offer an extension that provides WordPress blogs with video abilities.

Watch the video on Vimeo
Watch the video in H.264 (QuickTime) on Ourmedia
Download the original video from Archive.org

The post Kaltura: open source video appeared first on Socialbrite.