Institute For The Future

The Unwieldy World of Peer-produced Video

From the San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 30, 2007, interview with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia:

Q: Do you plan on adding more audio and video features?

A: There's not a lot of demand for that from the community. An encyclopedia is inherently textual. Audio or video is a little tricky because it's hard to collaboratively edit it. People can just submit stuff, but if you don't like it, you can't fix it, so it doesn't really fit our style.

 

While communities of collaborators have proven that computer operating systems and encyclopedias can be "peer produced" with extraordinary results, in the unwieldy world of video production, few peer-produced works have managed to gain widespread popularity… until recently that is. In the past few years a convergence of developments in video technologies, bandwidth cost drops, and new open- and closed-source web video platforms have led to a real flourishing of what we might call “open source video” endeavors.

 

Makeshift distributed video processing cluster at sunset in São Paulo: With two borrowed laptops and a few major headaches, I managed to compress 18 hours of HDV video to the H264 codec and get it out to translators and collaborators around the globe. Photo: Gabriela Herman

 

The feature-length film, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, is perhaps the most often cited case of a success in this realm. Touted as the one of the most widely seen works in the history of Finnish cinema, the sci-fi parody was produced on a shoestring budget by a network of collaborators distributed across Finland and the world. Star Wreck Studios’ new Wreck a Movie website claims to offer tools that will allow for the production of thousands more works of peer-produced cinema. At the same time, one can hardly consider it an “open” work, as it’s noncommercial, no-derivatives license prohibits any remixing of the work.

The Basement Tapes “wikifilm” project at OpenSourceCinema.org, is an interesting attempt to build another feature-length film by publishing an open and editable script as a wiki and asking audience members to download, remix, mashup, and reupload high-quality clips. In this case the topic of the film is copyright itself, which adds an interesting dimension of reflexivity to the project, as its very construction is an exploration of the subject it addresses. While the technology for collaborating on the video is far from convenient, one can see emerging here an effort to truly build generative communities of collaborators around open video.

One early predecessor of such work that is often forgotten (or deliberately left our) of the history of Web 2.0 is the Independent Media Center or Indymedia. Launched in 1999 during the Seattle WTO protests, the group’s website has allowed uploads and downloads of copyleft video work since long before Wikipedia, CC, or YouTube even existed as organizations.

Then You Win, an initiative of Loin de l'Œil and Yooook in France, is a mashup of a series of traditionally produced documentaries that will be licensed under progressively freer open content licenses depending on how much the group receives in donations. Produced primarily with open-source editing software, the project is pushing limits with both its business model and technical production strategies.

A Swarm of Angels is another movie-making project with an equally innovative business model behind its production, inviting collaborators to subscribe by paying a small fee (£25 for individuals) to join their community and then have privileges to edit wiki scripts and participate fully in the creative process of writing the screenplay. With a sci-fi / thriller orientation, the group eventually aims to raise £1 million through donations and fund production this way. Though not overtly radical in its content, this film, if successful, stands to have a huge impact in terms of remaking the future of the creative process in cinema.

Other emerging projects to take a look at in this realm include DotSUB’s in-browser subtitling tool, Kaltura’s web-based video editor, the wealth of truly open video content at the Internet Archive, CurrentTV’s distributed TV production network, the WikiMedia Commons, and the Otaku remix and anime fansubbing communities.

It’s easy to see from this brief survey of a handful of emerging open and collaborative video works that the field is ripe for collaboration. Looking backwards in time, one might note that the lag between the emergence of widespread desktop word processing and email and the rise of Wikipedia ended up taking a few decades. Desktop video production is still fraught with many more compatibility, format, portability and simple software stability problems than word processing was decades ago, but as the technologies mature and bandwidth increases, it’s inevitable that we’ll see many new projects and processes on the horizon.

Whether or not we might get a peer-produced work of such scope, scale and significance as Wikipedia in the realm of video anytime soon is an exciting topic to speculate on. At its core, such an inquiry hinges on some much deeper questions about the nature of the written textual form, and all of its potential to be classified, standardized, etc., and even effectively disembodied from its speaker, and the effective impossibility of this type of separation of subject and object with visual and even spoken media.

 

David Evan Harris is the Executive Director of the Global Lives Project and Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future. Responses welcomed in any medium to dharris [at] iftf [dot] org. This article is being cross-published to the iCommons Annual (2008 edition in press) and Some Room of my Own.