| Home > Media > The Australian Film, TV and Radio School has a bold new initiative for the digital industry. Gary Hayes leads it and explains the plan |
| The Australian Film, TV and Radio School has a bold new initiative for the digital industry. Gary Hayes leads it and explains the plan | | Date Created: Aug 24, 2005, 11:31 AM |
 Gary Hayes was senior development producer at the BBC for eight years before coming to Australia to head up the Australian Film, TV and Radio School's new Laboratory for Advanced Media Production (LAMP) initiative. While in the UK, he managed many of the BBC's interactive television and broadband TV services and in this interview he describes the lessons he learned during that time.
For example, he says that a backchannel for viewers to comment through is just the start. It quickly becomes apparent that viewers can and will provide their own stories through richer and richer multimedia uploads. This means collaboration becomes crucial - between the audience and the producers, and between users of broadband networks and the service providers who establish and contol those networks. "Producers will have to be slightly more humble in the future because there are many rich stories from the audience that must be nurtured and drawn out," he says.
Hayes says IPTV is just one mechanism for getting content to homes; technology will provide many other opportunities to do that. The key trend, though, is the shift to "content on demand". If Australia's bandwidth wasn't glued up by the need to broadcast an analogue, standard definition and high definition version of the same content, Hayes says we would see a lot more innovation.
He says today's best creatives are still working in the traditional TV space where there is still the biggest audience. But when they eventually move into the interactive space, far more innovative audience experiences - more in line with the work of the BBC - will flourish. "There will be everything from multi-stream alternate angles of events, to the things that turn people in the UK on most,...where people get the impression they control the route they take through the video content," he says. "There is a long way to go yet."
His advice for entrepreneurs is to find out as much as they can about new forms of distribution. Content distribution is being "democratised" and more ways to monetise content are now available, he says. Small independents should team up to create reasonably sizable content portals so they are ready when companies such as telcos buy such portals in their drive to aggregate content that differentiates their services. The "cool wow factor" is most likely to emerge from such collaborations, he says.
Meanwhile, new types of video content are finding their way onto video-capable phones with increasing frequency. People are even watching movie-length content on such tiny screens. Hayes believes the real driver in the area, however, will be "interoperability": the ability to watch content on a large screen, then port that to a laptop or even a phone. He says his LAMP laboratory will build prototoypes that plumb how people will really use such content and devices. And in particular, it will look at the hybrid of video and game devices such as the Sony PSP.
Hayes also explains the significance of "location"-aware and "presence"-aware devices for personalised information to your "augmented" reality. This has immediate commercial significance for points of sale. But it may become even more impactful in the area of games and new types of story-telling. Whether moderated or nurtured by producers in real-time or not, these new technologies allow participatory, location-based entertainment that may add fascinating new layers to "reality TV" as it is now understood. "Whether it will be just a fad is difficult to say, but this is only one of the areas we'll be looking at," he says.
Hayes describes the opportunities for both high-end and low-end game development in Australia. He says the move from film to games and back again from games to film are key parts of the LAMP agenda. The quest for Australian developers is to find a value proposition that is sufficiently compelling to command a big enough audience, but at a realistic budget. "Wim Wenders told me the more money he gets the less he has to say," Hayes says. "That should ring across the industry at all times."
Finally he tackles the question of whether the broadband Australia has at present, is good enough. Would more and better broadband really make a difference? And if so, what kind of difference? "The free-to-air broadcasters know their days are numbered and they are doing everything they can to inhibit broadband proliferation," he says. "...[but] The BBC [for example] has realised that 10 or 15 years down the line it is going to have to be effectively content delivered on-demand to the people who have paid for it and it is moving into a traditional, commoditised market."
The future will be about better collaboration between all industry players, he says. That will create new ways to deal with changes such as digital video recorders and peer-to-peer networks.
Quicktime for Mac users here
Flash Video for Windows PC users here
Sony Playstation Portable version can be right-click downloaded here
3GP for video-capable cellphones can be right-click downloaded from here.
Microsoft Windows Media can be right click downloaded from here.
Audio only MP3 version: can be right click downloaded from here.
Note for OSX Safari users: Browsers such as Internet Explorer and FireFox work fine for a right click download for the PSP and 3GP files above. But if you are using Safari, do not right click, but instead, press the option key as you click on the filename and, after downloading, change the filename to end in .3gp or .mp4 respectively.
Note for PSP users: after downloading the special .mp4 PSP version above, change the video's file name to the Sony PSP naming convention that is compatible with other file names you may already have on your PSP to avoid conflicts and ensure that the video shows up in the PSP video directory. |
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