Well, this post is a bit late but it relates to the Darklight Symposium which was held here in Dublin two weekends back. Well unfortunately I missed most of it as I was up to my eyes finishing off some work. It was a bit of a waste of the admission fee in fairness for me, as I really wanted to partake in the talk on the future of television. It was called “Television: 2.0 The Future of TV” and you can find out a bit more about it on the Darklight blog here
There is an podcast of the talk available from the blog and I just finished listening to it. It was all very interesting but I did find myself disagreeing with a lot of what most of the panel talked about as well as views from the audience. I have been immersed in this area with my own company for the past year and a half as well as with previous positions I have held. I won’t go into too much details on my opinions on the topic as they are central to my business plan and all will be revealed on that soon. One thing I will say, is that I believe that the future of audiovisual entertainment will be more creative when the power is taken away from the broadcasters. The content creators will not need to jump through hoops to get their work shown and the audience will decide whether it’s good or bad, not the commissioning editors. This is already happening. The big broadcasters have been slow to adapt on make there own presence known online and it may be already too late as a generation have come of age being entertained primarily online. There is a lot of talk from the traditional media industry that there is no money in putting work online. They are so wrong. The tool to make media are so much cheaper now. Equipment that cost ten of thousands and hundred of thousand of pound euros or dollars twenty years ago are confined to the rubbish tip. Everybodt can now create their own media. It may not be all that professional but a good percentage of it is very creative. I do see the content creators being fairly paid in the future. The only difference now is the distribution of the media. It’s easier to spread worldwide as opposed to locally. (This is so important to break down our borders). Compare this with the rise of cable and satellite tv, where in America at least, these operators didn’t originally pay the broadcasters for the content. They were considered pirates. Anything that has been seen as a threat to the way the entertainment industry happily operated was seen as piracy. This goes right back to the birth of Hollywood and Disney. Pirates, the lot of them! To find out more about this read Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. This is one of the most important books I have read over the past year. It’s freely given away by the author from the site and is a real eye opener to how the media industries have dealt with change over the years. So, I find myself biting my tongue on this because although I value the opinions of all the panel on this topic, I overall disagree with their outlook. For the record I am not supporting a free for all system. I am aware that worldwide rights are tricky when it comes to law in individual countries, but new standards need to be set and the laws need to change. Otherwise what will happen is we will be faced with a localized internet which would essentially be a supped up teletext controlled by individual governments and corporates. That would be a reversing a progress and a very bad thing for the world.

OK, so that was a bit of a rant and it is only the tip of the iceberg. Moving on. I did manage to catch the tail end of the talk on Archiving in Filmbase on Saturday afternoon. This was quite interesting and the obvious conclusion is to make multiple copies on multiple formats and store them in multiple places. Formats are changing all the time but digital formats will translate across all it’s mediums. There is however good reason to hand onto analog equipment and keep it working.

And now for the fun stuff! I partook in the Youtube Saloon on Saturday evening. You can see some of my stuff on Mercury Boy’s podcast, The Bubble. I mashed up some pieces featuring Marshall McLuhan and you see a bit of it in the podcast. It’s edited out of context but there was a point where the amp blew and when the sound cam back, Marshall was talking about an amp malfunction. A happy accident! Anyway, it was great fun. I will have to get some of the footage of the good folks at Mercury Boy for my own record. Check out their podcast on the Symposium here.

So, that’s about it. I would have more to say if I’d been to more of it. I look forward to hearing more of the podcasts though.