Channel 4 is the first advertiser to take advantage of the new advertising channel, using the poster sites to promote FourDocs, its broadband documentary channel which encourages the public to view and make their own 4 minute documentaries.

The BBC’s Creative Archives project, in works for almost two years, launched in conjunction with Channel 4, the British Film Institute (BFI) and the Open University. Channel 4 will actually make very little of its own broadcast content available under the scheme – at least initially – because as a commissioner of content rather than a producer, it does not own the rights. Instead, the channel plans to use the licence to build on its PixnMix music video project.

The BBC has plans to make some of its factual and learning content available during an 18-month trial. The new licensing scheme is based on a flexible copyright scheme from the creative commons.

Other media databases are developing around the “free” concept:

• A free service, called the Open Media Network, is aimed initially at letting traditional public broadcasters and independent filmmakers distribute their work on the Net. Two pioneers behind Netscape launched a network which will also allow ordinary computer users to publish their files.
• OurMedia.org is a similar project, started by members of the creative and technology communities in the summer of 2004. People who create video, music, photos, audio clips and other personal media can store their stuff on Ourmedia’s servers, free, forever, as long as they’re willing to share their works with a global audience. Partners in this effort include the prestigious Internet Archive, Bryght, Creative Commons and Broadband Mechanics.
  
• Google lets users worldwide upload and store digital videos at the Google Video service and has a photo sharing service, Picasa.
• Yahoo bought the online photo-sharing site Flickr and recently opened Yahoo 360 a blog that lets you send text and photos from your computer, PDA or mobile phone to your blog.
• Motorola and Yahoo! have a mobile application that allows drag and drop podcasts from a PC straight to a mobile phone through the Yahoo! Music Engine. It also lets consumers directly download podcasts over cellular networks.
• YouTube Lets you instantly find and watch 1000′s of streaming videos and quickly upload and tag videos in almost any video format. You can upload videos in AVI, MOV, and MPG. Videos can be of any length, but must be less than 100 mb in total size. The service is completely free to users (publishers and viewers). YouTube converts video to a flash format. Like Flickr, YouTube is a sharing network so you can add friends who are also member of the network, and email any video to anyone.
• BlogMatrix offers video, audio storage and blogging services, that’s cheap and easy to use. Online 100 Mb storage costs $5/month. Vimeo is a similar social network with video upload and downloading.
• Stickam acts as a video chat host and can be added to almost any webpage. It supports AVI, MOV, WMV, 3GP and MPEG and plays videos, music, and has a slideshow.
• Ultimate Blogger consists of twelve contestants blogging over four fast and furious weeks for a $1000 prize package. Each week, the game’s hosts will issue challenges to contestents in the form of video segments, which must be interpreted, then posted into Ultimate Blogger’s central battle arena — “The Den.” After each challenge the hosts and a special guest judge will determine who has immunity from being voted out of the competition.
• The complete Wikipedia Encyclopedia, WiKi Quotes and WiKi Dictionary can be displayed on your handheld or notebook or downloaded and stored locallly. Free. Might be handy for a $100 laptop or a free city cloud.

• Engadet notes that if you’re not quite up to springing for an Airport Express or a Squeezebox to wirelessly send your tunes across the house, Nathan True has a guide for how to build your music player on the cheap with large rubber band. He’s based the system around a Netgear WGT634U router running OpenWrt Linux, which gave him a USB 2.0 port to add an MP3 player.
• Daisyphone (below), is a java applet that can be downloaded free to cellphones or PDAs to create collaborative public media. It lets individuals compose their own sampled sound, then upload it to a public sound sculpture. The tempo is set by the speed at which a ‘radar arm’ rotates around the daisy. You place notes on the petals of Daisyphone and choose your instruments from the stamen. People are given different colours.

Bob Garfield says “The media world faces an interim of chaos”, (MP-3). Network television and cable audiences are down. The Internet and a host of other new technologies are emerging…and marketers are shifting their dollars accordingly.

Yesiree, by George, it’s a brave and exciting new world that the near future holds, a democratized, consumer-empowered, bottom-up, pull-not-push, lean forward and lean back universe that will improve the quantity and quality of entertainment options, create hitherto unimaginable marketing opportunities and efficiencies and, not incidentally, generate wealth that will make the current $250 billion domestic ad market seem like pin money.

Alas, the future — near or not — doesn’t happen until later…. Because revolutions by their nature are neither seamless nor smooth.

Because there is no reason to believe the collapse of the old media model will yield a plug-and-play new one

And now the news.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Posted by Sam Churchill on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 4:22 pm.