“So it finally happened. After over a century of cinema, the power of moving image is in the hands of anyone with so much as a camera-phone and a web connection… The web shrinks the world: for the independent artist it removes the need for a studio distribution network… [It’s] the arrival of a level playing field, which the independent producer – long forced to compete with shelf and screen space with the major studios – has until now been denied.”
We live in an age of listicles – from the Sight and Sound poll to the top 25 films about eating doughnuts – yet the web never built a standardised curation layer. So unfriendly are the various gated monopolies towards each other that despite sharing an HTML foundation that was designed to connect everything everywhere – there’s not even a curation-layer monopoly. ‘The internet has devolved into screenshots of screenshots of other social media sites’ (ref) because it’s the only way we can bridge these gated monopolies.
The closest are DJ-sites like Mixcloud and review sites like GoodReads and Letterboxd. But both of these exist outside of your other media and networks: I can’t buy a song I like in a Mixcloud session; GoodReads links me to bookshops and libraries but my reviews there can’t also sit on my blog or LinkedIn. They’re inside the gate.
A real curatorial layer needs to be at a distance from both the source of the media and the player its outputted on. It’s as simple as a video store being a different entity to the video player in your house and the distributors and studio’s who’s films are in the store. We’d never consider going to a video store that only shopped films from one distributor or that only played on one brand of VHS player – yet that’s exactly the web we’ve ended up with.
VHS/DVD distribution was really competitive at four levels…
It’s quite similar to the web’s design…
But somehow we’ve ended up with this…
We’re so used to end-to-end gated media it’s hard to imagine any different. Re-intermediation is built on restoration of this separation through common standards – and restoring a curatorial layer is only one of the advantages.
A protocol-led film ecosystem that separates distributor, platform and player also supports an architecture where you don’t need to keep logging in and out of different subscription services to see media owned by different platforms – you just have your choice of player which works seamlessly with all of them. And best of all, because the player isn’t tied to one platform, the hundreds of thousands of films that aren’t on these platforms can be found…
The craziest thing about how film is distributed online is 98% of films aren’t available legally…
1,115,944
70,000
12,828
20,774
source ReelGood, Finder
So the web distribution architecture is really…
Reintermediation is about splitting that middle step in two again.
Where the indie video shop was built on the VHS standard, and the indie record store was built on CD and vinyl standards – the reintermediated web is built on protocols and follows the same four steps of 20C media distribution and the web’s foundational architecture.
So the idea is to ditch the platforms that invest billions in production?
Not at all. The idea is just that they compete at each level, just as a Universal film, would show in a Warner Village cinema, and at a Blockbuster (same owners as Paramount) video store, broadcast on Disney’s ABC channel to a Sony TV. Every step of 20C media distribution had a level of competition, and this allowed for a viable and sometimes thriving independent film scene alongside the studios. So the idea is something more like this…
Here a Disney film might be stored on an Amazon streaming server, and play through my Netflix subscription onto my Apple TV.
At the heart of this is the idea of rights-holders tagging each of their works with a minimum price for renting, owning and streaming their film in different countries, which platforms can then re-offer to their users and subscribers.
Currently, for most rights owners Amazon Prime only pays around 1 cent per feature film play; with this model a rights-owner might say ‘our film needs a minimum 1 cent for each 10 minutes played of the film’ and only the platforms that meet that requirement can stream it – potentially even those without subscription fees who can meet that license fee via advertising (unless the rightsholder stipulates ‘no ads’).
Filmmakers get their work on all platforms without doing deals with each, and platforms have access to a far larger pool of titles. And viewers can choose the platforms and players that either have the best price, the best curation and discovery, the interface they find easiest or the community where their friends hangout and chat on.
Where this gets really confusing for newcomers is all of these, other than Threads, are open source applications – and while many have their own official community (e.g. Mastodon has mastodon.social, Pixelfed has pixelfed.social) – most people sign-up with other servers hosting ‘instances’ of these apps.
But this doesn’t matter to the wider ecosystem. A Mastodon user on a Mastodon Android app can follow and engage with any user on any Mastodon instance, if it’s not been blocked by their instance moderator, which is how moderation is handled. They can also follow PeerTube, PixelFed, Bonfire, Lemmy, Ghost, WordPress and Threads users. The interactions available vary with client and server app – but the principle is simple – use ActivityPub to support interactions between actors and objects across different servers and apps.
At the centre sits ActivityPub, a protocol that describes how people (‘actors’) can create and interact (‘activities’) with content (‘objects’) regardless of where they are. Different open source server applications such as PeerTube for video and PixelFed for images are hosted as instances by different groups. Users of each can follow each other – unless they’ve been blocked either at user or instance level. So there are white supremacist / X-like Mastodon instances, the instances listed above block them through a shared block list. The final step are the client apps that let users interact with their instances from their phones and desktop.
But what of BlueSky? And the rest?
The reality is it can be both. Federation allows mountain communities to keep protecting themselves, or build a high-speed train station (/ space port). The protocol lets each community choose the type of village they want to be, and this often varies depending on what media is the focus. If it’s music or cinema many would want the biggest library of songs and films possible; if it’s news it’s a bit larger (but not too large); if it’s opinions or blogs or social video many people want something smaller, that’s probably unique to them.
The question of how the creative industries – musicians, filmmakers, photographers, artists and writers – could make money on the Fediverse was the heart of Monetising Open Video Architecture (MOVA), the large project Netribution led in 2021-22.
At the heart of this is the idea of subscriptions that travel with you as you browse the web and move between apps; while the media you buy online is stored independently of any cloud platform or proprietary system. It’s yours for life, just like owning a printed book, record or DVD.
The reintermediation part is the added-benefit of allowing the human who recommends you that work of culture – DJ, librarian, film programmer or art curator – sharing some of the revenue. It sees a shift from an algorithmic intermediary for a smallish number of films on multiple competing services, to humans helping humans discover culture from a far bigger ocean of media.
This is what we looked at in 2022, and centres on a few separate concepts…
We developed three projects using and inspired by these ideas:
Netribution’s history starts with arriving too early – our first website was designed to be a place to watch films, but most web users then had dial-up modems and struggled to get large photos to load on the screens, let alone movies. With Netribution 2.0 we were in sync – with our “Imagine a newspaper written by its readers” document coming ahead of the rise of social media. These two experiences give two different reasons for caution: having the right idea at the wrong time; and having an incomplete idea at the right time.
The technology for a different kind of web has been built, but the systems within it to scale and provide an income for creators and moderators hasn’t yet. Furthermore, the tools to scale community-led decision-making as the number of users scales isn’t there yet. A different kind of web media can’t just be the powerhouse for the techies who know how to navigate a code environment to change things. As a result I’m not presenting this as something happening right now that will arrive in the next six months; I’ve been saying for a while it will take the rest of the decade. There’s also a chance it doesn’t happen at all.
Google’s biggest selling point when it first arrived was that most of it’s home page was white. It just had a logo and a search-bar and two buttons (search and ‘I’m feeling lucky’) plus a tally of how many pages indexed, at a time of over-cluttered website. There weren’t even ads on the results back them (how will they fund themselves? we foolishly pondered).
Facebook introduced Ajax, a technique that let you update just a small part of the page after interacting with it, rather than re-loading the whole thing. Before them clicking a ‘like’ button reloaded the entire page to update the count of likes – Facebook reloaded only the count – a tiny barely perciptable thing that made it nicer to use than MySpace.
iPhone introduced pinch and zoom for web browsing. Twitter forced people to write succinctly. Instagram solved the problem of aligning landscape and portrait photos on a feed by forcing square pics on everyone, which work just as well whether you’re on a portrait phone screen or landscape desktop computer. TikTok kept videos short and in the same portrait mode people hold their phones.
Each of these platforms did something that made life easier for users. And that’s probably why many people are going wild over AI – not because it reliably produces better quality work, but because it’s so much easier to use than us humans.
