Category: Streaming Media

The Canadian Film Centre has a collection of Interactive Projects that are impressive examples of what you can do with digital video online. For example, Meanwhile, by David Clark, Jeff Howard (a graduate of Multimedia at Mac), Chris Mendis, and Shelly Simmons, uses a simple interface so you can navigate what happened before or during or after a clip you have seen. You can follow individual trajectories or leap across.

I wonder if one could hack a mashup that lets you do this with YouTube clips … using found digital video.

So today I cancelled my subscription to Zip, the Canadian equivalent to NetFix. I liked the idea, but it didn’t work for me. Some of the reasons are:

• You don’t get the DVDs you want in a timely fashion. At best you chose something and it comes a week later, but most of the time I would have forgotten why I listed something by the time it came, if at all. In other words you can’t scratch a desire.
• All the stuff you really want to watch never seems to come. You have to have this long list and stuff comes based on availability which seems random. With a video store at least what you find on the shelf you can see that evening.
• I had the 4 DVD service, but they didn’t seem to send me more than three at a time. I suspect they don’t have enough copies to handle the traffic.
• The stuff that comes never seems to be the stuff I want to watch tonight. That’s the problem of depending on availability – you get what they have on hand not what you feel like any particular night. So I would go out and rent a video while letting the Zip DVDs lie around unwatched.
• It’s not worth the money unless you watch the DVDs when they come in and send them back pronto.
• I began to get notices that DVDs I put on my list were not available at all. Why is this? Do they list things they don’t have and then buy them (or not) when someone asks for them? Or do they not replace damaged copies?

To be fair, I’ve seem some hard-to-get movies through Zip that were terrific like Ali Zoua: Prince of the Streets (2000) – one of the most moving movies I’ve seen for while. It’s about and acted by glue-sniffing street kids in Casablanca and felt more authentic than anything else of its kind. Zip is also good for TV series. Once they send you the first episode in a series you get the others in sequence. (What would be more annoying that get the first DVD of the second season of the Wire and then not getting the second DVD for a month?)

Anyway, I’m back to renting while I wait for the ability to buy/rent online directly.

The National Post has published an opinion piece by Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies about the state of Canadian copyright law. He and othes have formed the Canadian Music Creators Coalition. See A Barenaked guide to music copyright reform. In the opinion Page lists three principles for copyright reform:

1. First, we believe that suing our fans is destructive and hypocritical. We do not want to sue music fans, and we do not want to distort the law to coerce fans into conforming to a rigid digital market artificially constructed by the major labels.
2. Second, we believe that the use of digital locks, frequently referred to as technological protection measures, are risky and counterproductive. We do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music, nor do we support laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures, including Canadian accession to the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Internet Treaties. These treaties are designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies.
3. Third, we strongly believe that cultural policy should support actual Canadian artists. We call on the Canadian government to firmly commit to programs that support Canadian music talent. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms such as the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent.

Good to see such a new voice.

What is identity? The OSCON 2005 Keynote – Identity 2.0 by Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity is a neat and short presentation on identity on the web. The presentation is obviously aimed at promoting SXIP (Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol) technologies, but still is an amusing and short intro to identity 2.0 (online identity for the web 2.0). The presentation is interesting in a number of ways:

• The presentation style and use of lots of simple slides that flip rapidly is engaging. I’m not sure I could perform the way Dick Hardt does without losing the synchronization of slides and text.
• It presents a clear case for how identity should work online – how it should work like using a driver’s license to prove age at a liquor store. At the moment each site from Amazon to iTunes has its own identity directory. I have to get an account on each one. Identity 2.0 should allow me to get identities from different providers and use them for different services. Thus I could get one from a bank that covers my financial identity and then use it for buying things. (I think that’s the idea.)
• The presentation also presents a pragmatic view of what identity is in general – who you think you are, what others think of you, and what you can prove using trusted identity providers like the government.

Thanks to Shawn for this.

The Indexical Inscription of the Acoustic by John Puterbaugh, is a short “preliminary investigation into memory and its role in technologies used to reproduce sound.” It has one of the best short descriptions of transcription, inscription and acoustic technologies. The investigation leads to the interesting idea of how neural nets might be explored as a form of associative memory device for recording sound which would be closer to how we remember acoustic events than how a CD is a memory of an event.

Would we want recordings that were associative rather than “soley indexical”? Would we want memory technologies that were interpretative rather than literal? I’m not sure I know what that would mean except that it would be the difference between depending on my memory as a record of information (lets say of a conversation) and a transcription to a text file.

How would one use a computer that used associative memory? Imagine calling up a paper and finding it subtly different at each recall the way your partner’s memory of a conversation drifts differently than yours.

Ubiquity has an interview with Doug Kaye about, among other things, The Conversations Network, a non-profit online audio publisher. Here is a quote from the interview on content in universities,

the university situation is fascinating because most universities already have a program to record lectures. They may not be recording classwork per se, because in some cases the class work is proprietary, and they don’t want to let it out without a fee. But in any case there is a lot of stuff that is being recorded that these universities seem to be putting into vaults. They have no distribution plan.

Some universities, like Stanford, now have podcasting strategies, but the deeper problem is that lectures make boring podcasts. There is archival value in them, but they are rarely edited to be easy to listen to and are often detached from their context and slides.

Kaye has a blog called Blogarithms. This is from Humanist.

Xich lo (1995) by Vietnamese/French director Anh Hung Tran is unlike the other two features he directed (see
my earlier entry). The photographic cinematography is there, but the style is urban and violent. In Cyclo a poor and naive brother and sister enter a cycle of underworld prostitution and gang violence, almost losing their innocent lives. The treatment of the random violence in post-war Vietnam is unlike the methodical American lyrical violence. It is the random cutting of street life. The director puts it well in this Film Scouts Interview.

That’s why I hope you felt another kind of violence here, a moral violence. I often hear people say that in American films violence is gratuitous, I don’t agree. It’s always justified, meaning the hero’s wife gets killed early on, so he retaliates, therefore it’s justified. That’s mechanical violence. In Quentin Tarantino’s films, on the other hand, the violence is playful, jubilant.

When you deal with violence, you must avoid the playful, the jubilant, the laughter, and the justification. It’s easy satisfaction. When Cyclo’s bicycle is stolen, there’s no need for the young robbers to hit him. Yet they do, and I show it, to give you the feeling of how unfair it is. I even make the scene a tad longer, so as to make the unfairness of it all, and the violence it entails, even more unbearable, and you can’t desire it. As opposed to “Reservoir Dogs” where, after the guy has had his ear chopped off, you’re frustrated because he’s not burnt to ashes.

That’s why I’ve never been comfortable with Tarantino’s taste for blood.
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