Open video

[Jay dedman]

Like many Americans, I know that Hill citizens are overwhelmed and confused by new technology. However, we've come this far because early adopters and evangelists (like on this group) help spell out a vision of what could be. We see once abstract notions of "Transparency" unfolding concretely right now.

I apologize in advance if this is post is too geeky, but I thought these links are relevant to our debate over the House using Youtube as a distribution network. I personally am ecstatic that politicians are posting videos online in any form. BUT why be satisfied with crumbs? Let's go for the gold. Truly open video.

The Mozilla foundation just donated 100k to fund Ogg development. Ogg is a video codec like Quicktime or Flash. Unlike QT or Flash, it is open source.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/01/mozilla-contributes-100000-to-fund-ogg-development.ars

Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation a $100,000 grant intended to fund development of the Ogg container format and the Theora and Vorbis media codecs. These open media codecs are thought to be unencumbered by software patents, which means that they can be freely implemented and used without having to pay royalties or licensing fees to patent holders. This differentiates Ogg Theora from many other formats that are widely used today.

Most people wont care at all about this announcement, but it is a large step towards building a system of archiving video far into the future.
http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=977

Although videos are available on the web via sites like youtube, they don't share the same democratized characteristics that have made the web vibrant and distributed.  And it shows.  That centralization has created some interesting problems that have symptoms like censorship via abuse of the DMCA and an overly-concentrated audience on a few sites that have the resources and technology to host video.  I believe that problems like the ones we see with youtube are a symptom of the larger problem of the lack of decentralization and competition in video technology - very different than where the rest of the web is today.

It very important that government geeks be at the forefront of these movements. It would be dumb if we woke up in 4 years to find Youtube as the default place to find all government video. Geeks may be arguing if Ogg is the best video solution, but it's difficult to argue that we need some kind of open video standard that is Transparant and unemcumbered as well.

I don't just want to be able to watch polticians online. I want to be able to grab the videos, download them, edit them, republish, remix...without paying a penny for expensive software or copyrights.

Jay



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[Clay Shirky]

> Most people wont care at all about this announcement, but it is a large step
> towards building a system of archiving video far into the future.
> http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/?p=977

I just want to amplify this point.

I was the head of the technical work on the Library of Congress's
digitial preservation network (NDIIPP) in the early part of the
decade, and when we undertook a survey of threats to long-term
preservation of digital material, we assumed, dumb bunnies that we
were, that we were dealing with issues of storage, redundancy and
migration costs.

It turned out, though, that the biggest threat to long-term
preservation isn't hardware or cost, it's format; proprietary formats
don't just happen to hamper unexpected future uses, that's what they
are _designed_ to do. If you had an ASCII file and a WordStar file,
both from 1987, and had to open and read each one as quickly as you
could, what would the difference in elapsed seconds be?

There has been some back and forth on this list about possible threats
to putting USG-created materials into the hands of commercial
entities. I'm on record as worrying about that precisely because path
dependence on commercial motivation can easily come a cropper, and I
recently had an experience that seemed to highlight that risk.

Last Friday, I heard a talk at the Smithsonian from the awesome George
Oates, who was instrumental in getting the Flickr Image Commons going.
It was an inspiring talk, and when I went to introduce myself
afterwards and we were talking about what might be next, she told me
Yahoo had cut her job in the December round of layoffs.

Of course. Why shouldn't Yahoo have done that -- the Commons may have
been good PR for them in 2008, but its hard to argue that the cost is
going to be recouped in revenues somehow. When we are talking about
public goods, we are talking about goods that don't flourish in the
commercial market *by definition.* We need to make that part of all
the systemic thinking we do about open data; Ogg for video would be a
great addition to the arsenal.

-c