Open Video

The dream for Open Video is to be able to collaborate on video work with the same level of ease and facility that I'm able to collaborate on a Wikipedia article An open video editing and distribution platform that is free and open source in terms of its licensing For me, what I think would be really exciting to come out of this is something along the lines of a social movement and I think the Open Video Alliance has an opportunity here to really bring those energies together and focus them and really create something amazing out of it For those places where Open Source is important how can we actually make it work, in reality so that people can actually use these tools and formats I think we need to figure out a system that lets us reach a mass audience of people with tools that are totally open and not dependent on any big company For me the biggest thing is just making content free and getting people from across the world access to the content they want in the format that they want it in You can have a situation where everything's open and all the API's are open everything is accessible and it's wide open and amazing but if no one is using it then it's a moot point so it's all about bringing it to average people who would use it casually I want to see a lot more strong connections being made between grassroots media activists and policy makers—policy hackers inside the beltway I think we're moving into a future where everything is going to be reusable it's not going to go on 16mm film in some vault somewhere it's going to be born digital and so people are going to expect it to be there and expect it to be used and reused It's truly hard to convince people who are working with traditional and old media, particularly documentary film makers about the value of sharing their footage This idea of being able to use popular culture in video work and we need to be able to use that without fear of being sued every time that we're commenting or critiquing or whatever Somebody makes something just with a web based editor that can plug into the software I might already be using and that I'm trained to use and the other way around so that they might be able to take work that I've done and keep building on it If it's going to be a movement, if it's going to succeed there has to be cooperation and even if we're all going in the same direction if people haven't even talked to each other that's not really cooperation, that's just sort of mass movement There's not a great tool set, from end-to-end for people to make, publish, and watch Open Video in a really friendly, easy way and that's what the commercial tools are doing right now and that's what I think Open Video tools need to do One of the things I want to see is a consistent story around what Open Video really means that has to be the first thing that we do Free Software tools and their usability and uptake how we can all implement free codecs into what we're doing The browser platforms have to become capable of playing and editing video without reliance on any additional proprietary tools The most important thing is getting Firefox 3 shipping Ogg Theora, and that'll solve all the problems