The present and future of post production business and technology

A Web-a-thon to fund a web series? http://bit.ly/az2jXF Anyone But Me plans to give it a go.

While the first two seasons of Anyone But Me were funded by a private investor, show creator Susan Miller said via phone today that said investor contributed to the show’s production only to give it momentum in its initial launch. “We now feel obligated to pursue [a third season] without tapping that resource,” she said. “People don’t have unlimited funds, after all.”

Knowing this going into season two, at a Strike TV panel last December Miller said that she and co-creator Tina Cesa Ward were considering a subscription model for the third season. But they’ve since changed their minds, and instead, Miller and Ward are initiating a donations program, but with a twist: On July 27-29, they’ll run a video “web-a-thon” to engage with fans and solicit their contributions.

Why not give it a try, I say. It might work!

Will Tiered Pricing Lead to “ProxyNets” and Destroy The Universe? http://bit.ly/c35alS INstead of more revenue, no customers for Telcos?

A very interesting take on how increasing cost for data on mobile devices could ultimately lead to an almost complete drop in revenue to the Telcos because networking would be all peer-to-peer, what Shelly Palmer is calling ProxyNets.

You can think of this network as a self-assembling, self-healing, invitation-only social media sharing network on steroids. It won’t need the Internet or any phone network because it will simply connect to whatever device invites it to connect; hence the idea of a Proxy Network or ProxyNet. I really wanted to call it a “Subnet” because it’s a network that exists under the radar. But, subnet is a term of art in the network world and it has a very specific and very different definition.

Any way, the end of the world comes in the following form. People download the ProxyNet apps and they start to form personal networks that almost mirror their social media networks. This happens automatically. Want to think about it in a contemporary way, think about Foursquare or Twitter. If a ProxyNet app simply connected to your friends’ devices when you were in proximity to them, you would not need the Internet or a phone company data network. The WiFi radios in the devices would do it all.

If this were the case, it would be easy to imagine five hundred students in a Junior High School whose smart phones and laptops are all connected to each other, but not connected to the Internet. The students would decide to share everything 1) ’cause they could. 2) ’cause it’s free. You can’t get into the network unless you’re invited. You can’t shut down the network because it doesn’t really exist. You can’t get the identity of anyone on the network because they are hidden by proxy (in the true network sense).

Independent Filmmaker’s take on bittorrent release of his film http://bit.ly/cJaT6a Only doc filmmaker making money back, thanks to ‘breach’.

In the Filmmaker’s words:

I contacted the uploader of my film and asked she spread a message of support with the torrent, asking for donations if a viewer likes the film and explaining that was a self-financed endeavor. The result? I received many donations and emails of support from those who downloaded the film, but I furthermore believe that viewers spread the word of the film to their non-torrent-downloading friends and that DVD sales increased due to the leak. For me, the torrent leak was ultimately “free advertising”, and I am the only truly independent documentary filmmaker I know making his money back this year.

Only bad or mediocre films need fear unauthorized distribution? According to Sam Bozo.

3-D Without the Glasses http://bit.ly/dgugBL From Microsoft, but not any time soon.

The new lens, which is thinner at the bottom than at the top, steers light to a viewer’s eyes by switching light-emitting diodes along its bottom edge on and off. Combined with a backlight, this makes it possible to show different images to different viewers, or to create a stereoscopic (3-D) effect by presenting different images to a person’s left and right eye. “What’s so special about this lens is that it allows us to control where the light goes,” says Steven Bathiche, director of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group.

Google adjusts WebM license to be more like Apache and GPL3 http://bit.ly/cJqsWt

Creating another variation on an open source license would make it difficult to bundle WebM with other software using a different license.

On Friday, Google announced that, in response to the community’s concerns, a “small change” was made to WebM’s license, restoring the “pure BSD nature” of the license as well as GPL compatibility. The change modifies the license’s patent clause to reflect the GPL3 and Apache patent clauses, which separate rights to patents from rights to copyright. Under the original license, anyone bringing patent litigation against Google would have surrendered all rights granted by the license — the new language clarifies that only patent rights would be terminated, the same penalty incurred under the GPL3 and Apache licenses.

Yet another 3D glasses issue: they’re not clean (even in plastic) http://yhoo.it/b5ZGGr No good housekeeping seal of approval!

I should also point out that most surfaces in a cinema will have similar levels of “germs” (ie bacteria and viruses if we want to be accurate) but it’s the yuk factor of having them on your face for two hours that I’d simply rather not think about!

Bottom line: There’s probably nothing to be alarmed about, but if you’re really concerned about the cleanliness of 3-D glasses, you’ll probably need to clean them yourself with a disinfectant wipe before you put them on. Failing that, there are plenty of perfectly watchable 2-D movies that require no special eyewear still making the rounds.

Earlier this week I recorded a podcast with Carl Olson fro his Digital Convergence Podcast. We talked for nearly an hour and covered a wide range of topics, from my desire to overturn the current Television regime and make it more democratized, to Apple’s announcements at the WWUG keynote.

http://bit.ly/bFyBZW

Locals and Tourists heat map for Flick’r uploads http://bit.ly/9ipzzn

As well as being just darn cool and showing off what we can do when we have large amounts of data and the ability to analyze it, I really like this use of Inferred Metadata. Inferred Metadata is not explicit. In this case the inference is that people who upload photos about the target city during a limited period (a month) are tourists, particularly if they usually upload to Flick’r from another city.

There’s a lot that can be done with Inferred Metadata. Check out my article The Mundane and Magic Future of Metadata in Supermeet Magazine number 4 (it’s free).

What exactly does HTML5 mean?http://bit.ly/cCM89x

Just like AJAX/Ajax before it, there’s a battle running over what, exactly HTML5 means. It means many things and this article at Ajaxian.com (would it be html5.com if it were started today?) explains in detail what all the different references mean, and what features are in each. Good read for anyone trying to better understand “HTML5”.

Going deeper, I’ve broken these down into separate areas:

• “HTML5 Strict” – Things that are strictly inside the W3C’s HTML5 spec.
• “Referenced by HTML5″ – Things that are referenced by the HTML5 spec and which can optionally be parsed into the DOM and displayed.
• “Broken out of HTML5″ – Things that used to be part of HTML5 or its older iterations, called Web Applications and Web Forms.
• “HTML5 Family of Technologies” – Extended set of technologies not strictly part of HTML5 spec or referenced but likely to be used in conjunction with HTML5.
• “HTML5++” – More experimental technologies pushing the web forward that are not part of the HTML5 spec at all; may or may not see broader adoption.

One small note; there are actually two HTML5 specs, one maintained by the W3C and the othermaintained by the WhatWG.

A Guide To The Cultural Battle That Is Reshaping The Media Business http://bit.ly/bhV7qC Top-down vs. Passion-driven; The Hero vs The Masses.

A much more thoughtful post than you’d expect from the “icanhascheesburger” guy! It’s not a long article but it’s well worth the read to understand the tension between traditional media and Internet Media.

The challenge for big media companies is not just financial. They have to find a way to embrace the power of their users and change their thought process and attitude towards their customers, while not alienating the creator-centric model that currently pays the bills. Interestingly enough, it’s the music industry (thanks to the pains caused by file-sharing) that’s beginning to experiment with ways to embrace the fans through merchandise and concerts, even if it means less short-term revenues.