June 21, 2005
 Current TV Announces New Submission Terms via: ThisRevolution.blogspot.com
Current TV, a new cable television station started by Joel Hyatt and Al Gore will soon be announcing the winner of their latest video contest, about the same time and probably with far less fanfare, Current will also release a new licensing agreement to govern all future Viewer Created Content.Under Current TV's present terms, if you submit a video, you give Current the right to use your piece as they deem fit. I irrevocably grant Current the non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid license and right to use and otherwise exploit the Submission, and the title thereof, in whole or in part, in any manner or medium now or hereafter known or devised (including, without limitation, film, television, videocassettes, interactive devices, Internet and on-line systems), throughout the world and in any and all languages, including, without limitation, the right to copy, edit, change, modify, add to, subtract from, re-title and adapt the same and to combine it with other material. However, these are non-exclusive rights and you're free to try to get the video out through any other avenues that might be available to you. You do, however, still grant Current the "Rights of First Negotiation and Last Refusal" -- basically Current TV has first dibs should you try to go about selling the piece. Additionally, "the most consideration that Current will be required to provide [you] to acquire all available Retained Rights is... the Writer’s Guild of America minimum scale payment for five minute single news program script (currently $1,237)." Under these old terms, you could still take your video (that you submitted to Current) and put it on your vlog, or submit your piece in an unrelated online film festival. Well, that's all in the past now. Under the new new licensing agreement, by uploading a video to Current TV, you can't do anything with it for six months three months. Even if Current TV doesn't want to put your piece on television, you are contractually forbidden from putting the video on your videoblog, and from trying to get it out through almost any other avenue besides Current. In the event that Current TV decides they want to air your video, it is my understanding that they would obtain all rights to the piece in perpetuity; you would be compensated for your work according to Current's new incremental pay-scale.  With this latest announcement, Current TV, a television station that promises to "democratize television," seems to be falling short of it's stated goal. While everyone that I've talked to at Current seems to really get the personal media revolution, this development runs against everything the network should be doing. If the network is really about helping young voices to be heard, then Current should be embracing the growing movement of videobloggers and encourage participants to put their submission videos up on their videoblogs. The videobloggers would, in turn, put a link to Current TV on their blog entry and this would help drive more content to Current's site. JD Lasica, the author of Darknet, and the co-founder of ourmedia feels that Current's decision to pursue the new licensing terms "will seriously undercut the quality of the material that people make available to Current." He describes Current's new terms as "a holdover mindset from big media, where six-month exclusivity contracts are common. No doubt some percentage of users will consent to the restrictions, while others will say, No way." While trying to figure out what prompted Current to pursue these new terms, I came across this interesting article about Current TV's Head-Of-Programming David Neuman regarding his days at the Digital Entertainment Network. I pointed out that this much original content would be very expensive, and suggested that one thing kids (and other Internet users) sometimes like is to be given recommendations about other useful and interesting Web sites. Neuman cut me off with a laugh and condescending sweep of his little hand.
"I don't think we need to be sending people away from our site! I don't think that's how we make money!" ("No! Definitely not!" said the chorus, laughing with him at my stupidity.) "Look, as soon as we're as big as Macy's, then we'll tell people how to get to Gimble's! I'm concentrating on getting as big as Macy's!" Just as this is simply not how the web works, the industry approved 6 month exclusivity option is not how new media will prove to work either. While I still have very high hopes for Current, it's dawned on me that some people at Current TV only wants to democratize televison as long as they can have a monopoly on democracy... Technorati tag: Current TVNote: I am the volunteer organizer for The San Francisco Current TV Meetup Group and obtained this information through a conference call with Current TV and the other meetup organizers. I was never instructed not to share any of the information that's contained in this blog entry and thus feel that it's acceptable for me to share and comment upon this information in my blog.
Posted by jkinberg at 11:09 PM
This is spot on. CurrentTV has some major problems. First of all, Current is trying to cram the best of prosumer content through a channel that is inherently supply limited. The whole point of long tail content is that it is governed by the laws of abundance. You want everything available so that no matter how small the niche, it's needs are met. This is nothing more than some next generation version of America's Funniest Home Videos without the laughs.
I keep hearing about how these guys get it, but their entire business model is based upon the wrong strategy. I saw their launch in SF and Google's promo video did its thing and the entire audience bagan to boo. The reason was that they were showing the top ten search results on Google. The people interested in democratized TV are the very last people that are going to care that more people searched for Brittney Spears today than Paris Hilton. As I've said before, they're merely replacing the tyranny of a few guys in Hollywood for the tyranny of popular public opinion. Democratic media is about everyone having a voice, not those that Current has determined are worthy.
The problem with Current is that they're going to have to make all this money to pay for this enormously expensive distribution channel they've bought. The economics will never work. Locking up submitted content is a consequence of the poor foundation upon which Current is built. They need to start all over.
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We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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This is spot on. CurrentTV has some major problems. First of all, Current is trying to cram the best of prosumer content through a channel that is inherently supply limited. The whole point of long tail content is that it is governed by the laws of abundance. You want everything available so that no matter how small the niche, it's needs are met. This is nothing more than some next generation version of America's Funniest Home Videos without the laughs.
I keep hearing about how these guys get it, but their entire business model is based upon the wrong strategy. I saw their launch in SF and Google's promo video did its thing and the entire audience bagan to boo. The reason was that they were showing the top ten search results on Google. The people interested in democratized TV are the very last people that are going to care that more people searched for Brittney Spears today than Paris Hilton. As I've said before, they're merely replacing the tyranny of a few guys in Hollywood for the tyranny of popular public opinion. Democratic media is about everyone having a voice, not those that Current has determined are worthy.
The problem with Current is that they're going to have to make all this money to pay for this enormously expensive distribution channel they've bought. The economics will never work. Locking up submitted content is a consequence of the poor foundation upon which Current is built. They need to start all over.
Posted by: Alex Rowland at June 23, 2005 02:47 AM