Andy Oram has an article up on on the O’Reilly site about the potential effects of the webcasting treaty. There’s a new restriction on content waiting in the wings–a “webcaster’s right” that allows websites to control the dissemination of content they put up. With this new privilege, they’ll be able to prevent retransmission even if [...]
Moving Past GormanGate is a nice little satire published last week by The Shifted Librarian. While the piece itself is entertaining (I’d like to add “no one will ever watch MPEG-2 moving images, they lack quality”) to the list, there is a real issue: when are archival copies of sufficient quality for different apps? There’s [...]
The press release cuts to the chase with the $17 billion figure, and the observation that “The cross-over point between MPEG-2 video transmission bandwidths and sustained broadband access bandwidths in volume deployments has now been reached, making it possible to deliver a quality digital video service to consumers over a broadband connection.” Written by a [...]
One of Yahoo’s top 25 most emailed stories today is about BitTorrent, and Hollywood’s response to it. The speed at which television programs are being digitized and being made available via BitTorrent is astonishing. In 1996, few sound archivists would have been believed that most of the world’s commercially available recorded music would be digitized [...]
Very interesting piece at Salon on the use of digital video equipment and archival footage to quickly produce new documentaries. Also has a useful set of links for would be documentary makers. “Documentaries may soon become as ubiquitous as a voice-mail message or a phone, or any of the content elements that we use in [...]
It seems unlikely the cameraman ever expected this footage to become evidence in the presidential campaign. As with the Edwards – Cheney meeting that didn’t happen until a video of the event was produced, access to old video footage initially judged unimportant has gone on to affect public discourse at a national level. Video Shows [...]
Matthew May urges the administration at Purdue University to bring the C-SPAN archives back on campus in this editorial in the campus paper. It follows a similar piece that appeared last month. While the state of the C-SPAN archives is important, the fight over how to manage and fund them speaks to the challenge archivists [...]
Henry Jenkins has a nice riff on Downloading Television, Legal or Otherwise that offers up a vision of ‘re-runs on demand’ and points to Salon’s recent feature, Must Download TV.