The 6th Screen

Chat It Up: Livestream, UStream and Justin.tv

By Hannah Eaves

Just over a year ago we witnessed an historic event when President Barack Obama took office. But in the virtual world another—albeit less monumental—breakthrough was happening. CNN took the event live online, alongside a Facebook Live Stream Box, allowing viewers to chat with friends and strangers, their conversation appearing next to the video. CNN reported 21.3 million streams by mid-afternoon, breaking all records. To Facebook, 600,000 updates were posted, with 4,000 updates per minute during the broadcast. Several months later the Jonas brothers came along and utterly shattered that record: 23,000 posts per minute. Long ago we dismissed chat rooms as dark holes filled with unpleasant people and noise. But with live steaming services surviving and event-based communication growing, has this become a case of, The Chat Room is Dead, Long Live the Chat Room?

topics: digital filmmaking, diy, internet

The 6th Screen

Coming around to "convergence"

By Hannah Eaves

There is something in the very thought of AV cables that fills most people with dread, and a small few others with child-like joy. A few beers into Thanksgiving I looked over to see my cousin Tom pointing excitedly around his home entertainment system, and when he stepped aside I saw a Dell computer shoved in there on its side. Tom does not work in technology—he’s a specialized registered nurse. And he’s not alone, as more and more people make the connection that TVs and projectors are, in their most basic form, just really big computer monitors. While set top box, Bluray and TV manufacturers are now offering a closed set of web enabled applications in an attempt to make themselves the gateway drug to getting internet on your TV, many others out there are doing it Tom’s way. That is, by just buying a couple of cables. The industry calls it convergence . But why do so many people have trouble with it?

topics: bay area, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, diy, internet, tv

The 6th Screen

TechCrunch 50: Clicker and AnyClip—two new film sites to watch

By Hannah Eaves

TechCrunch, the blog dedicated to all things Internet, has developed a reputation for pushing out breaking news so fast and hard, it occasionally snaps. Earlier this month, Facebook took advantage of the blog’s tendency to jump quickly on stories by posting a fake feature that only TechCrunch could see—"fax this photo"—and waiting for their unverified announcement, which was forthcoming. Earlier in the year Last.fm rankled when a story was published about the site providing the RIAA with user information which proved to be much more complex than originally stated. Even the NY Times quotes information from TechCrunch’s enterprising, muckraking posts that are often sourced anonymously.

topics: bay area, digital distribution, directors, diy, internet

The 6th Screen

Free and open: video's Cambrian explosion

"Where is it written that everyone who participates in the creative arts should be able to quit their day job?….My daughter has already figured out how she’s going to spend the money from the tour in the band that she hasn’t yet created because none of the band members have learned how to play instruments….The fantasy that your creativity is a career is a fantasy we all indulge in right up until we hit the real world."
Chris Anderson, at a recent presentation on his latest book, Free.

In the next few months Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to edit entries, will start allowing visitors to add videos to articles. Users will be able to click on that edit button and add some demonstrative video to illustrate the point at hand, and then any other user will likewise be able to delete it. But then there’s a Wikipedia twist: anyone will also be able to edit that video, or create it from scratch using in-browser video editing, and any other user will then be able to say, that sucks, and re-edit it however they like. Don’t like that title card? Bam! Gone!

topics: digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy

The 6th Screen

Augmented Reality at SXSWi

By Hannah Eaves

Imagine you and your friend have smartphones, and are standing at a table facing each other. You hold up your phones’ cameras, and can see each other in the luxurious (if small) screen. Your friend walks to the left, you can see him/her walk to the left in your phone screen. Now imagine, looking into your phone, that there is another layer of reality there. A ping pong table. And when you move to the left your phone can hit a virtual ball, and you both see it bounce on the table in your screen and your friend moves to the right and hits it back. Welcome to aug-mented reality, cellphone style. Watch it here.

topics: digital distribution, diy, how-to, internet

The 6th Screen

Unresolutions of 2009

By Hannah Eaves

End-of-year lists, top ten films and new resolutions have now come and gone. But what about all the messy things we haven’t resolved? Certain questions in 2008 endlessly plagued us, leading to outlandish predictions, flame-war mayhem and an outbreak of opinionated public speaking. In case you missed it, a few were: "Is the ‘profitable indie film’ dead?" and "Will the last film critic please turn out the lights?" (I’m referring to Mark Gill’s June speech at the Los Angeles Film Festival entitled Yes, the Sky is Falling. and a critic-crisis neatly summarized here, as well as the ques-tion of optimism concerning new-tech distribution strategies from Peter Broder-ick and Scott Kirsner). For more on those lingering issues, I leave you to Google. In the meantime, The Sixth Screen issues opinions on a few remaining unresolved technology issues below.

topics: cinephiles, critics, digital filmmaking, directors, independent film, technology

The 6th Screen

Greenscreen envy

By Hannah Eaves

For anyone working in the Internet video industry, walking into the Revision 3 studio is a little like stumbling into Xanadu (Khubla Khan’s, not Robert Greenwald’s). Live switching in a control room that sports a massive mounted flatscreen HD monitor alongside a row of compositing systems, multicam teleprompter-assisted shoots in a spacious greenscreen studio, and a fridge full of beer?

Senior Director of Marketing and Product Management and iFanboy producer and co-host Ron Richards tries to tell me that it’s all on the cheap—the monitor replaces the traditional window into the studio and was a sweet deal, small prosumer HD cameras are mounted on low-tech wheelie dollies. But coming in from a traditional production environment where we’re still shooting on BetaSP and trying to dress an old studio, this looks like paradise. And these guys aren’t even going out to traditional TV broadcast. Instead they’re part of a new generation of pioneering Internet broadcasters.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, technology, the web, tv

The 6th Screen

Greenscreen envy

By Hannah Eaves

For anyone working in the Internet video industry, walking into the Revision 3 studio is a little like stumbling into Xanadu (Khubla Khan’s, not Robert Greenwald’s). Live switching in a control room that sports a massive mounted flatscreen HD monitor alongside a row of compositing systems, multicam teleprompter-assisted shoots in a spacious greenscreen studio, and a fridge full of beer?

Senior Director of Marketing and Product Management and iFanboy producer and co-host Ron Richards tries to tell me that it’s all on the cheap—the monitor replaces the traditional window into the studio and was a sweet deal, small prosumer HD cameras are mounted on low-tech wheelie dollies. But coming in from a traditional production environment where we’re still shooting on BetaSP and trying to dress an old studio, this looks like paradise. And these guys aren’t even going out to traditional TV broadcast. Instead they’re part of a new generation of pioneering Internet broadcasters.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, technology, the web, tv

The 6th Screen

The basics of Web 3.0. Wait, Web 3.0?

By Hannah Eaves

What does “jaguar” mean to you? If you’re a fan of Bush’s tax cuts, it’s probably a brand of car. If you are a Mac user it might be an operating system, and if you’re hearing strange noises on the Mexico-Guatemala border, it might be a very big cat. But if you’re interested in the future of online technology, it is the evergreen example used to explain what’s called The Semantic Web.

Semantic web proponents argue several things pretty loudly, and one of them is that computers should be smart enough to understand the deep meaning of words by their context, just like hu-mans understand sentences. Computers should understand that when you ask “Are jaguars ex-tinct in Central America?” you are looking for an answer, and you mean the animal, not the car. They should also understand this automatically, without a user having to manually tag the con-tent where it lives (page or video) with the words “jaguar” and “mammal” and whatever hundred other keywords might make sense. Instead, it should be able to use its context, combined with the infinite informational pages on the web, and human interaction, to make its decision. This implies a level of artificial intelligence whereby computers are able to infer meaning from lan-guage—from the structure of a sentence, from the sentences on a page. Not “how frequently does this word appear” but “I get what you’re saying.”

topics: digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, technology, the web

The 6th Screen

SWAG: Free feature films on the web

By Hannah Eaves

Acronyms and abbreviations occupy an ever increasing part of our modern lives. Some of us spend at least a small amount of time pretending we understand them (IMHO) and feeling proud we can actually use them in crossword puzzles (IMHO, the New York Times, Sunday September 14). But this one—SWAG—goes way back. In fact, according to Wikipedia, it’s actually a backronym. Which means it existed as a real word first and then collectively we made up a series of words for the letters. Originally, it was defined as a small bundle of stuff, and really it still is: Stuff We All Get (of course, this is how the "S" is represented in polite circles).

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, documentary, dvd, web

The 6th Screen

To French Polynesia and back with Seesmic

By Hannah Eaves

As my ship cuts a sweet line through the South Pacific, it seems that nothing could be further from this distant spot, where there is no land in sight, than the intricacies of the Bay Area Internet industry. When you look at a globe, French Polynesia falls exactly at the point where all other land masses disappear around the curve, and, if you squint your eyes, there is exactly nothing but ocean around it, with maybe a hint of the Americas or Australia.

The 6th Screen

What's fair (use) is not foul

By Hannah Eaves

Earlier this month the Center for Social Media (CSM) and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) at American University released a report called Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video or, as it was immediately zeitgeisted by boingboing, "HOWTO Make online videos without getting sued." For techies in the online world, "fair use," Creative Commons and net neutrality occupy the same level of heaven as bizarre sea creatures, steampunk gadgets and cryptozoology. But the paper also makes a very handy tool for ordinary Joes experimenting in the new creative freak zone of User Generated Content.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, directors