Video is well-accepted as an important communication tool on the Web, but questions are still being asked about its future, be that financial, technical or otherwise.
Many see it as a medium of important self-expression, which should be available for all, having great social and cultural value embedded in it. Some regard it as an extension of TV on the Internet: a few provide the content, many consume it, and all pay for it in some way as the ad-supported model measures value outside the content itself.
Conference organizers at the first Open Video Conference, staged in New York City, are preparing their own answer.
More than 50 hours of conference sessions were captured, a dozen hours of in-house interviews recorded, and an as yet uncounted amount of crowdsourced, attendee video footage was provided and will be processed for online distribution.
Some sessions streams that originated live are still available online.
The conference was put on by Kaltura, Yale Internet Society Project, and Participatory Culture Foundation in partnership with Mozilla, Red Hat, Creative Commons, Level 3, and Akamai.
Open Video is a broad-based movement of video creators, technologists, academics, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, activists, remixers, and many others. They say it represents more than open source software or codec users; it is a growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video.
At the gathering of technologists, academics, filmmakers and others who call for a ‘freer’ video culture, speakers and participants addressed technology and business models, while sharing and documenting their insights on the social, cultural and political implications of video and social media.
Organizers say more video from the conference will be available soon, along with bogs, links, updates and more, at http://openvideoconference.org/