Ourmedia (a spin-off of the Internet Archive) has just launched. This is a hugely ambitious project that the brilliant head of the Archive, Brewster Kahle, alluded to a year ago in a Notcon talk I blogged about. It has been spearheaded by J D Lasica and Marc Canter.
Their intention is to provide a place for anyone who has any kind of digital content to post it publicly, have it indexed, stored and made available online forever, for free, no matter how much of it there is. The price of camcorders has declined steadily and it is reasonably easy to turn video footage into digital files on recently-bought computers. But until now there has been no easy way for people to get their video stored unless they have connections to some kind of digital art organizations or can afford to pay - this is because each minute of full-screen video takes roughly 8Mb of space to store and streaming video over the Internet is a costly business. (Several commercial companies have come and gone offering some kind of video streaming for consumers - Streamload is one of the few I have found still around with a good free offering).
Flickr (which has just been bought by Yahoo) has already demonstrated that providing an environment where people can share picture content and easily form communities around it can enable fascinating and stimulating creative and social activity. Ourmedia lacks Flickr’s interface slickness (it is still in alpha, despite launching today) but it adds audio and video storage to Flickr’s pictures and text and while Flickr has a free offering it is not as capable as their paid subscription features.
With this service, one of the last technical/economic barriers to widespread personal Internet video broadcasting has disappeared. But broadband is still vital for uploading video files and almost as essential for viewing them - and only around 150m households worldwide have broadband.
The biggest overall barrier, however, remains a knowledge barrier. While on the surface using a video camera is simple - just point and shoot - understanding how to do it well to tell a story remains an art. And the software tools for video production available on computers remain difficult to use and time consuming. My father just finished producing a short video of our wedding but it took him two years to complete and a lot of frustration.
I have made an account on Ourmedia but I don’t know what I will do with it yet.
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