The 6th Screen

Chat It Up: Livestream, UStream and Justin.tv

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

Chat It Up: Livestream, UStream and Justin.tv

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"

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

First-person

Indie Toolkit writers rewind/fast-forward on the year/decade in film

The decade in screenwriting: Looking back over the past several years—to 2006, for example, when four of the American Film Institute’s top 10 films of the year were comedies, as opposed to just one each in 2008 and 2009—a number of prominent 2009 films took on serious topical subjects, from war to racism to financial insolvency. An ever-expanding number of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror vehicles offered near fatal adrenaline rushes and perhaps a needed relief from everyday troubles. But an especially notable trend in the stories told on film in the past year was toward the dark, lonely, inside story.

topics: activism, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, drama, dramatic films, dvd, hollywood, how-to, independent film, internet, screenwriting

Critic's Notebook

Graphic transformation: Animation rises, CGI sinks in 2009

Science fiction has often dwelt upon the fear that machines will overtake man—which of course they kind of have, from the Industrial Revolution through the Digital Age, in terms of lessening the need for manual labor or even organic brainpower. But while technology may have taken some jobs, polluted our environment, etc., it hasn’t yet completely stolen humanity’s place in the scheme of things.

Except, one could argue, in the realm of movies. With this year’s summings-up extended to considering our first post-millennial decade, it’s a good moment to consider where mainstream cinema has gone since CGI sank its bloodless talons into the already less-than-exquisite corpse.

topics: animation, anime, bay area, comedy, cult cinema, filmmakers, genre films, hollywood, independent film, internet, red vic movie house, sf international animation festival, world cinema, youth

The 6th Screen

Coming around to "convergence"

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

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