The Democratization of Video: Everyone Can Have A Voice

Editor's Notes

• #2: OPEN VIDEO is about giving everyone a voice To tell stories, persuade, & reveal To create, manipulate, & share video without barriers. We all have the power to reach the masses & the freedom to produce.
• #3: Open Video is a movement to promote free expression & innovation in online video, while encouraging sharing & a participatory culture. Basic technologies for transmission of video must be open source & available to use on a royalty-free basis.
• #4: We all deserve freedom of expression & freedom from censorship. Open video requires legal & business structures to support the ability of large numbers of individuals to use video in many ways. OPEN VIDEO MUST BE PART OF THE OPEN WEB.
• #5: Broadcast used to only refer to radio or TV & was created by media companies, however now everyone has the opportunity to create, produce, & broadcast media on the internet, with the proper tools & accessibility. The TV broadcast model is dying & consumers are increasingly moving to an online, on-demand viewership model.
• #6: Video is becoming a primary tool for self-expression. Video cameras, even a Flip or cellphone, & desktop editing software, like Cinelerra or Open Movie Editor are now cheap & ubiquitous, making it easy for casual computer users to speak to a mass audience.
• #7: The Principles for an Open Video Ecosystem are a technical road map for a more decentralized, diverse, competitive, accessible, interoperable, & innovative future of video. A more democratic, ubiquitous use of video will make it comparable to text & images today.
• #8: Video creation, editing, & playback tools should be accessible, as well as interoperable royalty free formats & codecs. Software platforms should support open standards & licenses, while video content must be available without technological barriers & allow for self-distribution.
• #9: Open video has some specific issues including: fair use, licensing, device freedom, broadband & educational access, HTML5, net neutrality, privacy, & universal accessibility.
• #10: Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share, remix, & reuse the work of others. They provide creators with a simple, standardized way to grant copyright permissions to their creative works.
• #11: Last month Vimeo announced support for Creative Commons licensing. YouTube will soon follow by rolling out a program with several University partners. And Wikipedia now encourages the upload of user generated videos under the Creative Commons Share Alike license.
• #12: Most videos on the web are delivered using a combo of proprietary technologies: Flash & H264. HTML5, like Flash, allows for the writing of advanced web apps, including video, but its apps are woven into the fabric of the web, unlike most Flash apps.
• #13: In May, Google, Mozilla, & Opera announced a new open video format, WebM. Google is freely licensing their VP8 compression technology. With the introduction of a freely licensed, high quality codec, Google may help to advance HTML5 adoption.
• #14: Apple supports H.264 in Safari & on all of its devices. It’s one of the technical reasons Steve Jobs cites for why there is less need to support Flash. H.264 is owned by the MPEG-LA consortium; of which Apple & Microsoft are patent holders.
• #15: Microsoft’s IE9 will support playback of H264 video. However it will also support WebM, if the VP8 codec is installed locally by the user. The relationship between new & existing industry players will play a major role in shaping the open video ecosystem.
• #16: Recently, the Electronic Frontier Foundation won a new protection for video remix artists. Now, amateur creators don’t violate the DMCA when they use short excerpts from DVDs in order to create new, noncommercial works for purposes of criticism or comment.
• #17: There are a plethora of opensource video editors for Linux & Windows. Additionally, there are online tools, in fact YouTube introduced their cloud video editor in June. If you are looking for a multi format player, options include Miro, VLC, & MPlayer.
• #18: There are also opensource audio editing tools for recording audio, editing the duration & timeline, mixing multiple tracks, applying simple effects & converting between different audio file formats. This is a screenshot of Audcacity, which works with Windows, Mac OSX, & Linux.
• #19: Kaltura is an open source platform that enables any site to seamlessly & cost–effectively integrate advanced interactive rich–media functionality. Miro Community is a free, hosted CMS for online video websites with an emphasis on feed aggregation & viewer interaction.
• #20: The Open Video Alliance provides a framework to help incubate new projects & campaigns to advance the open video movement. Core OVA members like Mozilla, Participatory Culture Foundation, & Kaltura are actively building open video with free and open source software.
• #21: I encourage you to check out the Open Video Alliance’s site if you are interested in this topic. I have also included my “openvideo” bookmarks, which encompasses a lot of my research on this topic. Why passively consume; when you can actively participate.