OPEN VIDEO CONFERENCE
Next month the Open Video Conference comes to NYU’s law school on June 19th and 20th. OVC is a special gathering of the tech and creative communities to discuss all things related to internet video.
I had a chance to ask the OVC conference organizers Dean Jansen and Ben Moskowitz a few questions about this year’s event.
What is OVC and why now?
DEAN: Video is blossoming online, but its future is still unclear. The big issues are: free speech, richer cultural engagement, and the pace at which we are able to innovate. Greater openness in online video strengthens each of these causes. This conference addresses these issues, and the need to move in a more open direction, as opposed to a more consolidated and broadcast style environment.
The event comes at a time when people are beginning to see limitations inherent in our current video landscape. This is a critical moment where norms for video are being set, and we want to make sure they go in an open direction.
BEN: At this very moment, in 2009, we have a chance to ensure that internet video retains these key characteristics. It’s still early and things are looking good, but we need devices that play nice with each other, networks that aren’t totally neutered, and playback and production tools that are low-cost (ideally free/open source) and easy to use. Developments like Hulu are pretty good for the user, because they can watch what they want, when they want. But we don’t want internet video to be a glorified TV on demand service. We want video to be a dynamic medium that invites clipping, archival, remix, collage, repurposing, and many other uses that are currently inhibited by law or by lack of tools.
Can you explain the mix of people that will be attending and what do you think or hope will happen with that type of pollination?
DEAN: The conference promises a very unique audience of creators, thinkers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and others coming together to discuss these opportunities and challenges. We hope to raise cross-awareness in a lot of different audience groups, because this is not a battle that is being fought alone. We expect over 500 participants.
Speakers include: NYU’s Clay Shirky, film producer Ted Hope, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, EFF attourney Corynne McSherry, and lots more! Also participating are hackers from free and open source software projects, including: Firefox, VLC, Miro, Boxee, Cinelerra and many more.
Who do you hope to reach?
DEAN: We’re really encouraging video creators of all stripes to participate. It’s not just for people making YouTube videos, because eventually most video will travel over the internet (in some form). All creators should have a say in what the future of video looks like.
BEN: Which leads into our point about innovation. There are lots of really cool video applications that aren’t seeing the light of day because corporate lawyers are incredibly risk averse. Google could turn on speech recognition today and begin indexing videos by the content they contain, but then copyright owners would pressure Google to remove “infringing content” and they’d be in the unenviable position of having to filter everything.
The net effect of all this is to hinder the emerging discourses that are only possible with video, and keep the moving image on the web from reaching its awesome potential. We’re trying to highlight a lot of possible futures at the event by inviting people like Eclectic Method (video remix artists), Witness (human rights video activists), Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show, a program that relies heavily on “fair use” of copyrighted clips), and others.
Conference registration is now open. For more info visit http://openvideoconference.org/registration/
