Reel Word

A digital watermark is a small amount of data that is embedded in a known manner into digital video, audio, image, text, or other file type.  The mark is embedded in a manner that allows it to be detected, read, or extracted later when the file is accessed.  The more successful watermark technologies embed watermarks that are undetectable to most humans, yet can be still be detected by a digital processor after the file in which is resides has been manipulated and distorted to a point just short of being rendered useless for its original use.  The data in the watermark can be an instruction to do or to not do something.  If a watermark detector is present when the digital file is played or accessed, then the detector will read those instructions and pass the instructions on to the device it resides in.  If a watermark detector is not present when the digital file is played or accessed, then the watermark goes unnoticed.  It effects nothing.  The file is treated as if the watermark is not there at all.Tools like watermarks and DRM have been demonized in part because they were deployed to trigger restrictions without offering a clear consumer benefit that outweighed the impact of those restrictions.  They were implemented as an antipiracy tool and in some cases also as a means to limit the way the content could be used.  Without a counteracting benefit, all consumers saw was a restriction to be counterbalanced by their own self-selected and self-administered desired benefits; which most often was the ability to move, copy, remix, and share the content.  With that purely negative consumer proposition that the content provider offered, the paying audience had no incentive to not remove the DRM or prevent the watermark application from working properly. 

But the same watermark technology that can trigger an application to not do something can also trigger an application to do something.  A watermark can trigger access to bonus material, admission to an online community, delivery of a discount coupon, and any number of value-added activities that a consumer might want.  If these benefits are valued by the consumer and are regularly updated, then for a measurable number of people the desire to access those benefits will outweigh the desire to disable the same watermark technology because it is triggering other, undesired actions.  If the balance is struck effectively, the audience will seek out the content with the watermark along with the devices that respond to the watermark, helping the value-add content sources and devices attract and retain an audience for traditional and additional monetization opportunities.

Up until recently, watermark technology vendors have been marketing their technology primarily to the antipiracy market because they thought that market was where the revenue opportunities were.  But more recently the broader view of watermark technology described above has begun to be pitched by a number of the leading vendors  and associations .  As content companies explore this value-balancing approach to content management, I predict that the revenue potential of legitimately distributed content will increase, and the battle over content protection will retreat from the forefront of the debate over the future of digital content, fair use, etc. and slide into the background noise of an emerging marketplace.
 

Recently Kevin Kelly posted a blog titled Better Than Free .  (He essentially leveraged Clayton Christensen’s ideas from Innovator’s Dilemma.)  Kelly posited that “When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.”  He went on to describe “eight generatives better than free”; immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, findability.  

BluRay disks are currently being marketed primarily for the high definition quality of their image.  Behind this, they are being loaded up with linear content extras that take advantage of the much higher capacity of the BluRay discs’ technology (blue laser) relative to standard definition DVD disc’s technology (red laser). 

At the JavaOne show in 2005, Java creator James Gosling suggested that the inclusion of a Java Virtual Machine as well as network connectivity in BluRay disc devices will allow updates to BluRay discs via the Internet; adding content such as additional subtitle languages and promotional features that are not included on the disc at pressing time (source: Wikipedia BluRay entry ).

My $99 standard definition DVD/VHS combo device has “angle” and “zoom” buttons of the remote that have never been made active by the content. 

BluRay disks have the potential of being more than huge data buckets; efficient delivery systems for large amounts on content.  By design in their technical specifications, they are capable of seamless interactivity, game play, and other stand-alone features that take them far beyond the capabilities of standard definition DVDs - or any of the mass market BluRay DVD disks that have been released to date.

But I would argue that loading the disks with content and building these capabilities onto the disc itself is neither the best business application nor the best creative application of the new technology specs to which the discs and the players have been designed. 

Per Kevin Kelly’s point, as long as content can be rendered visible/audible at playback, it can be captured and redistributed by someone else.  All content loaded onto a BluRay disc is a nicely packaged challenge to hackers. 

Per James Gosling’s comment, if the content on the disc can be updated through web connectivity and the storage capacity on the playback device, why not leverage that flexibility and connectivity to the artist’s and their rightsholder’s advantage.  Why not use that feature to help the artist direct their creativity in ways that help them monetize their work - or gain whatever other benefit motivates them (ex. attribution, attention, etc.) in a way that “promote[s] the Progress of Science and useful Arts”. 

I have previously blogged that the linear content should be viewed as the extreme end-member of a multimedia landscape that includes bonus content of all types, community, commerce, data, gaming, virtual worlds, enhanced reality, and a panoply of emerging and yet-to-be developed elements. 

Perhaps what BluRay discs contain should only marginally exceed – albeit in high def - what consumers expect to be on standard definition DVD discs.  Then, taking advantage of the connectivity and ability to accept data updates built into the design, the BluRay discs should be loaded with highly robust and renewable cryptographic keys to enable legitimate access to online resources.  This would be an more defensible, and an infinitely more monetizable, use of the BluRay infrastructure.

There are a growing number of online sites serving up HD content, including UGC HD content (ex. Vimeo), so compression problems, ‘pipe capacity’, and other technical obstacles to the movement of large data files over the internet appear to be falling away. 

The gaming industry’s global deployment and market adoption of MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) has shown that real-time interactivity with minimal latency is possible for a very large market population.   

The disc should contain enough bonus material to distinguish it from SD DVD, just as the first music CDs contained a few bonus tracks not available on cassettes, in order to motivate consumer adoption.  But they should not contain so much content as to become a frontline in the battle between the hacker’s desire to liberate the content and the artist’s and rightsholder’s desire to gain benefit from the content and maintain the incentive to keep creating and/or funding creativity and innovation. 

Renewable BluRay technology could become the secure mechanism for establishing a legitimate content distribution and access environment that benefits BOTH the consumers / secondary contributors / repurposers of the digital media and the primary creators of the digital media.

I moderated the New Filmmaking Technology: What’s Now and What’s Next panel in the New Frontiers area of the Sundance Festival. It was an honor to moderate the first panel of the festival. Surprisingly, we had an overflow crowd for that lunchtime event on a sunny Park City afternoon.

Writer/Director Alex Rivera whose movie, Sleep Dealer, was developed here and premiered here, discussed how he was able to incorporate over 400 special effects shots to achieve his SciFi vision on a very limited budget.

Alex Buono, the D.P. on Bigger, Stronger, Faster, an excellent documentary on steroid use in America, sings the praises of Apple Color, a free application bundled in Final Cut Pro that he used in his postproduction work on the feature. He believes that if Apple Color is an acceptable program for a Digital Intermediate, it will completely change the finishing model for all independent films.

Mark Randall, filmmaker, hacker/inventor, and Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media at Adobe, explained how he does a complete videotaped walkthrough of his movies before he begins filming. This is how he storyboards, since he can’t draw (he says that even his stick figures don’t look like stick figures). For the videotaped walkthrough he doesn’t worry about lighting or acting or the set/background in the shot. But he sets up the shots the way he envisions them, has people who may or may not be actors act out the parts, and uses the captured material to create a rough edit of the film. (Mark developed a system that enables his cameras to record directly onto a harddrive.) This allows him, at very little cost, to get a true sense of the pacing of the scenes. It also allows his crew to discuss and alter setups to improve the quality of material shot for the final film. Then, as he shoots the story with digital equipment, he drops the ‘professional’ footage into the rough edit of the feature. His ‘storyboard’ is, in effect, the feature; just shot with very low production values.

In our Saturday Webolution! - Hollywood Adapts to the Web panel, Kara Swisher mentioned the issue of ‘professional content’ versus ‘user generated content.’

When it comes to storytelling, I believe this is not a particularly meaningful discussion; although it clearly is applicable to other areas, such as news coverage versus editorial and advocacy, and open source software development versus closed software development.

But in the area of storytelling, that dichotomy is based on budget and the politics underlying many discussions of the web. It is not based on factors that either the audience or investors care about. There are enough box office bombs to clearly illustrate that there is not a direct link between budget and quality, audience appeal, and return on investment. Similarly, while there are enough one-off and serial “UGC” successes to illustrate that the ability of the storyteller to engage the audience is not completely governed by budget or gatekeepers, there are also enough videos about kittens, puppies, and people being hurt or embarrassed to illustrate that the unfiltered delivery of content is not a pancea either.

As far as I’m concerned, the dichotomy that matters when it comes to storytelling is simply good versus bad storytelling. The budget indicates what resources the director/creator/author had on hand to achieve their vision, but not how successful they were at developing and realizing that vision.

Alex Rivera’s movie, Sleep Dealer, depicts a distopia in which the US/Mexican border is sealed, water resources are defended by the military, and US agriculture and businesses are able to exploit Mexican workers without allowing them into the US by hiring them to remotely operate robots from facilities in Tijuana via implanted neural and muscle connections. The story plays well, and more importantly, he has done an incredibly impressive job of realizing his vision on a very limited, independent film-level budget.

There is now a continuum between UGC and Professional storytelling (i.e. linear entertainment). Every creative person in Hollywood is creating User Generated Content. The output of skilled nonprofessionals using widely available tools can have Professional-level production values. What ultimately matters is the quality of the story and how well it can find and connect with an audience.

 (I’ve reposted this older blog because it is relevant to my Saturday Sundance panel.)

Linear content can be instantly pirated and distributed over the web without the permission of, or attribution to, the artist and owner of the rights to the work. Since that is the case, what is the incentive for creating anything above low cost long-form content? What is the incentive to pay the artist a licensing fee, or legally place ads in or around the content?

Historically, long form linear content has been the primary deliverable. Today, until the mechanisms for respecting the artists’ rights to chose what happens to their work are developed and generally accepted, alternative incentives for the creation of what is widely viewed as high value content must be identified and tested.

One approach is to view the long form linear content as the foundataion platform on which to build evolving and regularly changing value-added content and services that people are willing to pay for.

I recently spoke with a writer/director who wanted to pitch a feature for which his primary distribution would be over the web. He was thinking that he would shoot some of the scenes from multiple angles and offer up multiple versions of those scenes from different perspectives. He estimated that this would add 10 days of shooting to the project, at an estimated cost of $100,000 per day for a union crew and professional-quality production and postproduction work. He believed that this would add sufficient value to the online release to justify the added expense.

The obvious question he needed to answer is; would this bonus material be adequate to not only pay for itself but also contribute in an ongoing manner to the cost of creating the feature itself?

Even for a big name writer/director, the odds of a hit, multiplied by the odds of an online hit, multiplied by the odds of getting paid for a reasonable percentage of view of the online hit, result in a pretty small probability of recouping expenses – and by extension getting the project funded. His ideas are good from a creative standpoint, but do not address the problem that the material can be instantly ripped off, so they can’t be relied on to build a sustainable revenue source. The Long Tail argument might have people looking at the content over a long period of time, but it does not address the problem of motivating those people to go to a place where they can be asked to pay the artist for her or his work. He clearly needed a longer term creative and cash-flow vision.

One approach is to create regularly renewed, lower-cost and community-driven content that is subscription-driven or accessed via a menu of purchase options. Some examples are:

• Voice-overs by different characters throughout the program; such as the character’s inner voice articulating what they are thinking as events unfold. This can be inexpensive to produce and can be renewed regularly. The fan community can comment on the voiceover, which can lead to additional voiceovers in response to their comments.
• Plot point forks; ask the audience to write what happens to characters between the scenes in which they appear. This can lead to multi-branch story ideas, which in turn can become the basis for a related game or spin-off stories
• Community chat with the characters; pose dilemmas and alternative event ideas to the community and ask “what would you do”? This could lead to alternative story lines, which could then be the basis for lower-cost story-boarding, manga, and other alternative multimedia story-telling approaches, as well as potentially another foundation long form linear program.
• Spin-off products and merchandise; including allowing the audience to suggest products. Allow for ‘insider’ products and services to emerge, because they may help strengthen the community.
• Behind-the-camera commentary; such as encouraging and linking to personal comments by those involved in the production. Building communities around the cast and crew, including the post-production community, will extend the scope of the potential audience. The fan community will include people who produce their own content. Those creative individuals will want to ask advise and share ideas with the people involved in the production as well as others in the community. More links back to the platform long-form program will translate into more opportunities for people to join the fan community, participate in activities on the site, and contribute to the financial and professional success of the artists and other rightsholders involved in the site.
• Other: there are always more ideas that will emerge from the web community, prosumers, and professionals.

Linear content used to be a controlled, stand-alone product. It is now an extreme end-member – although one that is highly valued by consumers and advertisers – of a multimedia landscape that includes community, commerce, data, gaming, virtual worlds, enhanced reality, and a panoply of emerging and yet-to-be developed elements. An overriding question is; what art can artists create today that holds the possibility of sustaining their ability to create art. One approach, as articulated above, is to use high cost, high value linear content as the platform for building a fuller artistic vision, which in turn helps pay for the high cost, high value linear content.