What I did at Beyond Broadcast

I was thinking that rather than write up an internal report about Beyond Broadcast and a separate blog entry, I’d kill two birds with one stone and just post the whole thing here. So if my tone sounds a little more official, that’s because it is.

Last weekend Tina and I drove up to MIT to attend the Beyond Broadcast conference. While I think it was a little less groundbreaking than last year’s conference, it still was good and more importantly, still relevant. Although many of the same people were there talking about many of the same issues, it’s still important that people continue to talk about and think about how media is changing, and what the implications are for both creators and consumers of media.

YouTube was one name that continually came up. Last year it was just one of many sites trying to compete in the user generated video space. This year it is the de-facto platform for online video. You could argue that the reason YouTube entered into the public conscious was the 1.6 billion that Google put into it, but I think YouTube’s success is more like that of AOL in 90’s, that is both provided a simple and easy-to-use interface allowing people to do what they wanted online.

YouTube makes it easy to upload and share video and more than a few people at Beyond Broadcast complained about YouTube morphing into essentially a broadcast platform, and abandoning it’s user-created roots. I would take this one step further and argue that YouTube is the 1990’s AOL of video and that as video-as-public-medium gains wider acceptance, people will migrate away from YouTube and other sites that limit what people either can do or are allowed to do.

The “Video on the Net: Beyond YouTube?” working group discussed these trends and conjectured about what video would look like in future. Shawn Van Every, who helped set up our Town Hall brainstorming meeting at ITP last year lead our breakout group and wrote up his thoughts on our discussion here. Also in the discussion was Audubon Dougherty who introduced herself after the discussion since she had worked with Sam on some Burma campaigns.

After the conference, I led a BOF (Birds of a Feather) dinner on “Change Oriented Media” – a term which I hopefully just coined, but I highly doubt. The idea was idea was to talk about what potentials exist for media creators to use the emerging collaborative and socially networked media platforms as a way to change and hopefully benefit society. The reality was there was a lot more discussion on environmentalism and architecture that on media – at least at my end of the table.

Still I did meet some interesting people. David Tamés from MIT and Kino-Eye.com, Perla Ni of ClickTV, Rob Berridge of WikiForGood, Nathalie Applewhite of Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Matthew Worsnick of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture NetLab, Benjamin Roe of NPR, Paul Kamp of Backbone Networks, and Ethan Kiczek of CivicActions. Since my session was quite full, I didn’t get a chance to talk to everyone, and there were a couple people who I’m not sure had signed up so I don’t have their names.

In the end, it was a good conference and an opportunity to reconnect with people who’ve helped us in the past and whose advice will undoubtedly be useful in the future.