Why crowd-sourced films are the biggest disruptive force I’ve seen in years

Warning: Severe disruption ahead

Something new for entertainment executives to stress over

Over the last few days, I’ve been playing around with a mobile video app called Vyclone.

Check the site, download and play, but I urge you to play with other people who have the app in the same room. It’s really important you do, or you just won’t get it.

If you’ve ever been to a large event, videoed it, and have then been disappointed at the results, you’ll love this app. If you’ve experience of storytelling in video, the possibilities will probably charm you.

If you work for a commercial broadcaster, or in electronic distribution rights for events, it will probably stop you sleeping at night.

Vyclone finds all the other people in the same place as you, recording the same thing, and stitches their videos together into a multi-camera shoot. If you don’t like what it does automatically, you can make your own camera mix.

It’s the most disruptive, fascinating, troubling, creative, delicious, innovation I’ve seen in years. This is a game-changer.

Some perspective: 15 years ago, worried rights-owners would try to ban people bringing video cameras into their events (some still do). They had already sold the TV rights to another company and were obliged to protect that sale.

With mobile phone video, there were too many people to police, but they quickly realised it wasn’t a threat because these individuals made rubbish content. They weren’t organised and had no scale or impact. The individual YouTube stats for the uploaded videos proved that.

These elements have now irrevocably changed. A crowd-source video app offers both organisation and scale, automatically.

Let’s say I’m at Radio 1′s Hackney Weekend music festival. I’m recording Nicki Minaj performing ‘Starships’

(top chune btw). My camera only gets a general view of the stage. But at the front, two other people I don’t even know are recording the left and right sides of the stage. One might have Minaj in full close-up. Yet another person is recording the crowd and their friends further back.

The app stitches all of those shots together into a music video.

If you’re a broadcast professional, I can already hear your say “it still won’t be as good as our planned, directed TV coverage”, and you are absolutely right. But, here’s the kicker:

It’ll be good enough.

YouTube doesn’t amass millions of eyeballs a day because it’s professional. It has content that for the most part, is just good enough for the few minutes those millions want to watch.

Now, take my music festival scenario and imagine instead a riot. Or a war zone. You see how powerful this might be for news gathering?

There’s still a long way to go obviously. For now, you actually have to be recording through an installed application for the auto-mix to work. There’s a limit of 4 other cameras in a single mix. The video quality is, well, from a mobile phone. All these will improve and become less restrictive.

But even now, it’s good enough.

There are fights to come. The technology raises massive issues about whether anyone can “own” the resulting video when anyone is free to remix and share the individual parts.

Given the massive, lucrative sporting event about to engulf my home city of London, I’ll give you one last scenario to imagine the impact of a crowd-sourced, non-owned, multiple camera recording:

The men’s 100 metre final.

I wish the International Olympics Committee a good night’s sleep.

Meeting Amadou Mahtar Ba

Amadou Mahtar Ba & Nick Kotch, originally uploaded by R Freeman.

Amadou is the first of the visiting speakers this week. He’s head of the African Media Initiative. They aim to improve media freedom, strengthen professional journalism standards and increase investment in African media.

Some of his main speaking themes:

The media are critical in shaping Africa by promoting democratic governance and economic growth.

A background into the development of AllAfrica.com – a need for Africa to tell its own stories, particularly at a time when many newspapers did not have their own websites.

The rise of mobile phones as a content creation device and a content distribution tool.

The need for journalists to act as facilitators and moderators of debate and constantly ask who their audience is and how they are best reached.

First visit to Nairobi

I’m in Kenya for the first time!

I’m with a group of journalists being hosted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation, at the Kenya School of Monetary Studies.

I’m hoping to add some pictures to this a bit later once I’ve got my camera hooked up and the internet speeds have got a bit faster come 5pm.

Practising taking photos

BP exert ‘chilling effect’ on oil slick reporting

Can’t control oil flow, but can control news

I don’t post very often (apologies, work commitments) but this needs wide dissemination.

Roy Greenslade summaries some of the reporting being done on the Mexican Gulf coast, and what seems like BP’s attempts to manage the news.

Do you remember why we need the media?

In writing this I am satisfying a deep-rooted need within you

In the last few months I’ve been remembering what it’s like to be back at University.

I’ve recently written a digital journalism training syllabus for the Thomson Reuters Foundation and I’m currently helping  seasoned reporters extend their skills in social media at the BBC Academy’s College of Journalism, under the diligent eye of Claire Wardle, PhD (no less!)

Selfishly (because I’m being paid to help other people learn) I’m finding it tremendously enriching. I’m able to read and think much more deeply about where we’re all headed in this fact-rich, analysis-poor media landscape.

I was tracking down some of the academic research I was forced to do a few years ago. At the time, I hated all the theory, all I wanted to do was get out with the gear and meet people and talk to them and write a juicy story and get back and run with it.

Little has changed. Except now I care slightly more about why I’m doing it and what it all means.

So here’s a blast from my past, a theory of why people use television, by some chaps called McQuail, Blumner and Brown. They wrote this in the early 70s well before I was born, but I don’t see why it isn’t immediately applicable to today’s media.

Anyone producing content today should remind themselves why people need to consume their stuff and adapt to suit.

There are 4 ‘needs’ a person has:

Entertainment

Relaxation, escape, filling time, release of emotions.

Information

Learning, advice, understanding the world.

Personal identity

Finding role models, forming personal values, understanding yourself.

Relationships

Understanding and identifying with others, finding roles for ourselves, sharing common traits, and (perhaps sadly) substitution for real-life relationships.

Read that last one again. As true now, and more achievable now, than when the good gentlemen wrote it in 1972. Is it any wonder Facebook has become so popular.

Check twice, publish once – the 4am curse

Don’t write it down, don’t even think it

For some reason at almost 4am on the 28th February I was surfing the Guardian. Right on the front page was a small link to ‘Chlie sausage’ with other links with earthquake coverage.

Intrigued, I clicked, and got this:

(click for the larger size)

28 Feb 2010, 3.50am

Oh dear.

This is clearly a case of a mistaken button push. It came down fairly quickly, and it’s not in Google’s cache anymore, but a search brings up the leftover metadata.

I suppose the lesson here is don’t add anything into a news system which you don’t intend to be visible to the public. I can remember this being impressed upon me during early days at Radio New Zealand. Journalists were actively discouraged from adding private notes in the news system, for the amusement of the newsreaders or sub-editors.

It was pointed out that a court request for information could make the comedy slur of a hapless newsmaker very public indeed, and perhaps lead to legal proceedings! Not fun.

The recent addendum to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines says much the same thing about personal web-presences for BBC staff: If you wouldn’t say it on air, don’t put it on the web.

TVTropes has a whole category of fictional and some real-life ‘Is this thing still on’ moments broadcast on television.

In the end, I’m reminded of the time I saw the Guardian’s mis-publish, nearly 4am. And surreal things happen in the wee small hours, as the poet, Rives, points out in this cleverly written piece at TED in 2007.  Enjoy.