Video on the web has come a long way.
It wasn’t that long ago when streaming video was a pain in the ass to watch and impossible to publish without a big budget or sizeable skills. We now enjoy free streaming video on demand that can easily be discovered, shared, and re-published…to the point where it only takes a week to galvanize political revolutions (i.e. Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain,) and transform childhood dreams of celebrity into bizarro nightmares (i.e. Rebecca Black).
Video on the web can be more than just Next-Gen content delivery.
The power of YouTube has become such a luxury, that it’s hard for us to imagine what the future holds because we’ve already shattered the boundaries that were firmly in place by movies and television. However, our conception of what video is and what it’s capable of are still hampered by conceptual boundaries that moving images have to be viewed in linear time, and within a simple box with limited controls. This is why Ben Moskowitz of Mozilla put the Open Video Alliance together and launched three consecutive Open Video Conferences. Here are some demos that came out from the weekend of the third conference on September 10-12th, 2011 that might get you thinking about the potential of open source video online.
The Gendered Advertising Remixer
Two drags, one click, and blamo! You’re My Little Pony squadron is now equipped with turbo fire power!!!
Standalone HTML5 Mixer
no need to limit your instant mashups to toy commercials (though it’s clear why they make great demos). You can also practice the art of remix right in your browser
TEAM: Boaz Sender (@BoazSender), Zohar Babin (@zohar), Martin Leduc (@ikat381), Elisa Kreisinger (@elisakreisinger), Mark Reilly (@alien_resident), Greg Dorsainville (@ScienceLifeNY) Brian Chirls (@bchirls) and Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes)
Source: http://boazsender.com/Remixer/
*note: you’ll want to mix clips that are exactly the same length if possible.
Seriously JS – by Brian Chirls @bchirls
A javascript library for live video effects using WebGL. The fact that it does this live means that you can feed it from a webcam and have it automatically change the background, apply color changes, and perform other real time effects.
One of Brian’s future ideas for Seriously JS is to run a mirrored chroma swap in the style of Stephen Colbert’s “Formidable Opponent” segment where the red tie Stephen debates a mirrored copy of himself in a blue tie.
Why not think bigger? How about adding custom video effects to a live video tapestry of musicians webcam’ing from all over the world, playing a freestyle jam in the same key? Something like in♭flat but the tapestry of video feeds come in live and can have effects instantly applied to them.
at the moment the homepage has a demo which lets you play with effects on an OK Go music video …♬ ♫ ♪…and speaking of music…♪ ♫ ♬
Papio – sync audio and video across multiple machines
Solving latency issues may seem rather trivial but the results could actually be quite epic. For example, I once attempted to orchestrate a collaborative musical choir of 30 people across the web using a Big Blue Button video hangout. The problem was that all the video streams had slight latency delays from each other and there was no way to sync up a metronome so that everyone would be hearing the same beat at exactly the same time. This could have likely been solved with Papio, allowing a real time musical get-together with participants chiming in from anywhere across the globe. To try it out, connect a bunch of machines from any location to pap.io and click “Start demo.” They should all be boomboxing at exactly the same time.
9/11 Television News Archive by archive.org
The folks at OVC were very fortunate to have Brewster Kale and Tracy Jaquith of the Internet Archive debut this phenomenal work at this year’s OVC. Compiled from 3,000 hours of international TV News from 20 channels, scholars and citizens can not only witness the events of September 11 as they unfold, but also compare the coverage from a variety of perspectives in the US and around the world. During the presentation it was suggested that this tool could be used for other scholarly research to compare international television news coverage of other events and milestones in human history. Great idea! Tracy spent some time during the working groups sharing the methodology so others could build their own “TV Grid” — let’s see what happens.
Time Map
It was great to see artists like Jacob Quinn of knowyourecology playing with browser based video for the first time. Jacob showed me a little experiment with triggering different time points in a video based on clicking an image’s location
I also highly recommend you check out other these other open video experiments:
- Popcorn JS- a javascript library built for the HTML5 video framework that allows video components to interact with other web elements. For example, you watch a video that pulls up wikipedia articles, google maps, twitter feeds, flickr photos, which are timed to show up on the site during certain time points in the video.
- A couple cool examples (must have latest version of Firefox and Chrome)
- Europeana Remix – an interactive experience around the story of an unlikely friendship during the First World War
- State of the Union – an annotated version of the President’s speech synced with expert commentary
- Right Wing Radio Duck – an annotated version of Jonathan McIntosh’s Donald Duck remix of Glenn Beck programming. Regardless of the politics, this demo provides a good model for annotating source material for any sort of documentary or video journalism.
Learn how to make your own Popcorn movies via WebMadeMovies.com and their Google Group.
Further reading:
- The Ambiguity of “Open”…(via AntiMatter15 — genius teenager who explains politics of the codec)
- How HTML5 Will Transform the Online Video Landscape (via Mashable)
This post was submitted for the September 2011 Carnival of Journalism topic to write on the “Future of Online Video”
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[...] been a great honor to be a part of Team Popcorn over the last few months, sharing the gospel of video beyond the box and experimenting with new ways of networked learning through an online peer to peer youth program [...]