For the past year or so, I’ve been hearing bits of the film industry slowly wake up to the fact that the state of media metadata is a mess. The complete lack of open, common data formats leaves media producers struggling to conform their data to a variety of proprietary formats, only to result in outdated and inaccurate information left under the control of others. Worse, existing processes discriminate against independent producers by limiting what counts as a “real” movie, album or other work.

I have been working on a project called Open Media Object Format, which is a free (both as in beer and as in speech) protocol and file format for publishing rich metadata on a range of media. The protocol creates a distributed network of information on media and its participants, allowing the information to spread while every creator maintains authority over their own work. And the format is designed to store semantic data in more detail than we’ve seen before. The Open Media Object Format is an effort to address the above problems while bringing metadata away from the mere administrative, opening up possibilities for pretty cool stuff we haven’t seen before.

Details for the roundtable and the demo are below.

Open Video Conference Roundtable

Metadata Roundtable II: Best Practices
When: Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Where: Vanderbilt Hall, NYU
Conference registration required (it’s pretty cheap)
The participants are:

• Devon Copley (session leader) – Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University
• Brian Chirls – You know it.
• Ben Dean-Kawamura – Developer, Participatory Culture Foundation
• Mario Pena – SafeCreative
• David Rice – AudioVisual Preservation Solutions

Hack Day Demo

On Sunday June 21, 2009, I will talk through the details of Open Media Object Format and demo the first implementation of it, a major WordPress plugin (still in early beta) that any creator can use to bring media in from almost any source (YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, etc.) and republish it as a blog post with OpenMOFo XML metadata output.

It will be a great opportunity to participate in shaping the metadata standard and to get a first look at a new blog publishing platform. I’d appreciate the feedback. Hack Day is at Vanderbilt Hall, NYU, the same location as the conference, and it’s open to the public for free. I’m still figuring out the rest of the details, so check back here or follow me on twitter for the exact time. Contact me if you want to suggest a time or let me know you’re coming.

Bookmark to:

The video is also available in higher-bandwidth Flash or as an AVI download on my blip.tv channel. Please comment here and/or on the YouTube Watch page, where you can rate it as well. As usual The Film Panel Notetaker has notes.

Peter Goldwyn and I disagreed on a few things, which made for a fun and interesting discussion. He seems like a smart guy, and it was good to hear from Peter and Clémence, who have very different sets of experiences.

Correction: In our discussion, I compared the theatrical film industry to the bottled water industry. I mis-stated some figures. Upon further research, I realized that the global bottled water business generates $50bn, whereas the U.S. market is closer to $10 billion (source: ResearchBuy MarketWikis). However, this is still more than the annual U.S. theatrical gross of $9.49bn (source: MPAA). So I think my point is still valid.

Bookmark to:

• Aaron Levine (moderator), Film Division Manager at Gen Art
• Peter Goldwyn, Vice President Acquisitions Samuel Goldwyn Films
• Clémence Taillandier, Head of Theatrical Sales, Zeitgeist Films
• Erik Davis Managing Editor, Cinematical.com

Details

I’m looking forward to this panel, because it’s a new batch of panelists for me, different from the usual suspects at Vancouver, IFP Market and London. We’ll be discussing some of the same topics as past panels: on-demand theatrical booking, content discovery, the up-scaling of the theatrical experience. But the added perspective of the bigger-budget, older-school Goldwyn and Zeitgeist representatives should be interesting, and if we’re very, very lucky, maybe we’ll see another showdown. Aaron will also ask us about how the writers strike ties into Internet distribution. One of the greatest consequences of Internet distribution is a shift in power, so we should have a lot to talk about.

See Erik’s post, and check out the Facebook Event to RSVP and see who else is attending.

A little help?

Would anybody be willing to volunteer to shoot the panel so we can get it up on the web? Thanks.

Update: I posted the video of the full panel.

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