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Videos in Public Libraries

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Videos in Public Libraries
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New models of collaboration in Europe
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4
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CC Attribution 3.0 Germany:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2016
Production PlaceHannover

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Providing access to video can be challenging, especially when it comes to film. To clear the rights, to get hands on the material, to manage the licenses, different language versions and age ratings - all this needs to be solved before a film is shown to any kind of public. More often than not, public institutions do neither have the expertise, the personnel, the money or the experience to answer to this challenge. The solution suggested by AVA – Audio Visual Access is collaboration. Film festivals, public libraries and a technology company with a focus on Video on Demand work together to provide festival films to public libraries and cultural institutions across Europe. The festivals select the films, curate programs, clear the rights and provide the video files and the institutions provide the space, visibility and the audience. The technology company is providing the services and solutions: In AVA we are creating a platform that allows all the different partners to work together on rights management, access for the audience, cloud transcoding, VoD, authentication services etc. etc. Another aspect is worth mentioning: Money. Collaboration projects like AVA are proving very successful with funding institutions. AVA is being financed under the Audience Development call by the MEDIA program of the European Union. Another project run by the reelport GmbH on Virtual Reality with a similar consortium has been awarded funding by the H2020 program of the European Union, too. In the light of this success of AVA we strongly encourage partnerships between everybody dealing with digital video, science and other public institutions, content providers and tech – companies alike.
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VideoconferencingCollaborationismEndliche ModelltheorieElectronic mailing listLibrary (computing)Streaming mediaRight angleComputer programmingExtension (kinesiology)Projective planeCuboidPlanningExploit (computer security)Term (mathematics)Different (Kate Ryan album)Video gameBitLine (geometry)Integrated development environmentView (database)Focus (optics)Touch typingPoint (geometry)Student's t-testMultiplication signForm (programming)1 (number)Computing platformNumberPhysicistDirection (geometry)Order (biology)Moment (mathematics)QuicksortSheaf (mathematics)Selectivity (electronic)Computer fileSparse matrix2 (number)MultilaterationComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
We are going to continue with a presentation on videos in public libraries, new models of collaboration in Europe. And this is a quite interesting set of models, which will be presented by Tillman Scheer. Tillman is managing director, founder and owner of RepoRT,
which is since 2004 operating the website report.com, which is an online submission platform for short films. By now, already 92,000 filmmakers have uploaded more than 170,000 short films, coming out of more than 300 festivals, I believe.
So that's really quite impressive. Furthermore, in 2008, Tillman founded the website picturepipe.com, which is a leading VOD service for the film and TV industry.
Picturepipe handles, for example, the online streaming of a Marche de Filme of the Cannes Festival. And it's also offering on-site video libraries, including the world's largest video library at MIT.com and MIT.doc, with 270 screening booths.
And finally, Picturepipe offers VOD solutions for film awards. For example, the selection and online voting for the European Film Academy Award is being offered by Picturepipe. And Tillman is a regular panelist on the industry events about video on demand and virtual reality.
And to do all this, he has a degree in art and history and law, which I think is also important, actually, in this context, that we will hear and understand, I believe, during your presentation. So what you can gather from the CV that was just reported, I'm not from the science world.
You can also see that in the publication that I submitted, which is just one footnote, which is actually not from me, but from Anna. So I'm really from the media world, and I don't link my videos, I don't do footnotes, so I'm really an industry person, which is interesting.
Maybe to give a little bit of background to what we do, because it is, to a large extent, explaining what we do with the project AFA, which I will introduce today. We have a submission platform, just to explain how it works. We have filmmakers around the world, pretty much from any country that you can imagine.
They upload the videos, the videos arrive on our platform, we have a pretty big online transcoding service, so we transcode all these files into other files, and then the festivals from around the world can watch these films. So it's basically like YouTube, but just for the world of film festivals. Picture pipe, this is running in a platform, if that works.
So this is this platform, you see current festivals that run, here you see a list of festivals, so you can submit to these festivals, upload your film, and hopefully your film gets selected, wins an award, and you become a famous filmmaker.
The second thing that we do, this is our platform, we develop the technology behind that, the upload, the cloud transcoding, the play out, the digital rights management, the content management system, and everything that is related to that. We have, and then we, this started in 2004, then we took the technology that we developed
for this platform, and offered it to the film industry as what is called a white label service. So basically we take our technology and plug them to other people's websites. One of the websites that was just mentioned is the European Film Academy, European Film Academy is like the Oscars, so all the producers
of great European independent films upload their films here, and all the jury members of the Academy, they have to watch these films online, rate them, and the best one gets the European Film Academy award, which pretends to be as important as the Oscar, which of course it isn't. But it's the most important prize that the European industry has to award.
So basically we also get the statistics who watches which films, which is very interesting, and theoretically we could watch all these great films, which of course we can because we work so hard. So we, but all this website, what you see here, the filters, the play out, the transcoding, and the statistics, it all comes from us.
Second example is Sinando, which is the, actually you have to know that for each film festival you also have a film market. So the market is like a fair, like for cars, like for furniture, but for films. So you have people with stands where they present their films, and you have buyers running around buying these films.
And this is the online version, and the biggest in the world is the Cannes Market, which runs parallel to the Cannes Film Festival. And the website of the Cannes Market is called sinando.com, and here you can see, in sinando.com you can stream a lot of films. Here you see films, and I don't have an internet connection, but I will have some anyway.
If there would be an internet connection you would see that there are about 45,000 films on there, feature films, that are streamed through us. So let's go back to the presentation.
So this is what we do. And this is also what led to the project that I am now going to present. Ava. Audiovisual access. Actually there, the name is, because I saw a film with Ava Gardner and I found the name Ava pretty cool, then Anna helped me to basically say, well, at least we as serious scientists, we need some explanation,
so we found audiovisual access to explain the name, and this is where it stands. Ava. The principle is just as I have explained. Basically we have a great number of films coming to film festivals,
and these films will be presented in public libraries. So instead of showing the films on a big screen, we are going to show them at viewing posts in video libraries. I made a small picture to show you and to remind me what's going on.
So basically the workflow is the following. We have the rights honour, which is a producer, a world sales, anybody who owns the rights to a particular film. This film is being uploaded to either Ava directly or to one of the festival's accounts in our platform.
Of course the filmmaker puts in all the metadata, the filmmaker uploads the file itself. Then, if he is lucky, the film is selected by the film festival, and the film festival puts together a program, as every film festival does, so the program will be, I don't know, special shorts of Germany, horror movies,
the children perspective, actually some film festivals have science sections, as I have just learned. So all these films are put together by programs and then shown at the film festival in a cinema. So the film festival puts a lot of work into that. Big film festivals receive between six and seven thousand submissions each year.
That's a lot of work. Don't talk to the jurors when they watch the submissions. And out of these six to seven thousand films in a big festival, you create a program of about two hundred to three hundred short films,
put together into programs of one and a half hours, and then they are presented to the audience during the film festival. Of course, this is, as you can imagine, a lot of work. The problem for the film festivals is that once the festival is over, it's over. So you put half a year's effort, three quarters of a year's effort into creating a program,
then you have five days of festival, even less sometimes, and then it's gone. So the film festivals have always had a very strong interest in prolonging their reach, not only in terms of time. So they want to show festival films longer outside the festival.
So that is the need of the film festival in this project. There are some problems with that, but I will come to that later. So the second thing is, this is when we came to the idea that we could present these films in a library environment.
The idea is that this is a completely new audience, first of all, because a typical library goer, well, students maybe, but all the other visitors of libraries are not necessarily the ones that visit a film festival. So from a festival point of view, you would achieve a new audience that you could get.
But also for the libraries, I think there is a big advantage, because as libraries, they come from books, and as we have learned also today, videos can be a difficult sell to traditional publishers, to traditional institutions like libraries. So film is still a relatively new medium in libraries, and if it happens, it happens on DVD, it happens on Blu-rays,
also for financial reasons of course, but let's say it's not the focus of attention in a library. And because it is not the focus of attention, you don't have a big stock of films, but also especially the smaller libraries lack the personnel to choose films, to present films, to select the right films,
and also to put them into an environment where actually libraries users can learn about these films or can interact with these films. So the bottom line is films need to be promoted more in public libraries.
So the idea is that we take the films from the festivals and we show them in the libraries. The libraries have the advantage that they get the knowledge of the festivals, in terms of curation, in terms of putting the programs together, also in terms of selection of this vast amount of films that are in the market.
So that is the idea. The libraries provide the venue, the venue being the library itself, and the festivals provide expertise and the films. Of course there are some, let's say, challenges to that. Actually I listed it here, which is for a better overview.
And there are some challenges to that, the major challenge being rights. We had the issue already today. The thing is that for DVDs, at least in Germany, I'm not so sure about other countries, it's easy to buy the rights because you're familiar more with that than I am.
But if you buy a DVD as a library, you have the right to lend it out. So the right to lend it out comes with buying the DVD in a library. With video, especially if it's on demand, it's not so easy. Actually the situation is unclear and from what I learned from other libraries in Europe,
it's still a bit unclear how to deal with video on demand or on the internet. Oh, I forgot an important detail. Of course, you don't only show this in the library, but we also provide online access through video on demand. So basically for rights owners, which we are already in touch with, it's from a rights point of view, it's a video on demand right that we deal with.
The advantage of this project is that the festivals can clear the rights with the rights owners directly because it's the rights owners that submit the films to the film festivals. And also because the project scope is that we just show the film festival films in the local library.
So for example, Interfilm, which is our Berlin partner festival, will show the films in the Berlin library and in the Berlin library it can be marketed to the rights owner as an extension of the festival. So basically the screening of the films in the library is an extension of the festival right that they have already given to the festival.
In the future, when we of course plan that these packages of films travel, that would be exploitation that would open another box of issues. But for the moment, as long as we deal locally, we can work with this extension of the festival rights to the library.
But this then is handled by the festivals because they are in touch with the rights owners directly. So, this is the project. Of course it all costs money. Money is always important, especially when doing a tech project like that.
We have received money to do that by the media program of the European Union, which is the body of funding content. And the thing they like, and also the thing that I'm going to promote here,
is that you have two very different institutions, film festivals, libraries, who I guess rarely collaborate. There are some projects that make the exception to the rules, but apart from Berlin, I don't know of any project where libraries and film festivals cooperate. And this cooperation has proven very successful.
Not only with the European Union, most likely we'll also get funding from the city of Cologne, which is very rare if you're not a carnival institution. And actually with all the other partners that we have, we are pretty much with everybody, we are already in negotiations with local funding authorities to get local funding for the thing.
Because of course, if it's a European Union project, you also need Europeans in a European Union project. The European partners that we have are festivals from six countries. Belgium, Leuven, with a library in Leuven. Cork in Ireland, with actually the university library of Cork.
Tampere in Finland, film festival with a local library there. Laguardimba, which is actually a festival in Calabria, very nice. Actually, they don't really have a library there, but they have a city council, and the city council, they'll put up a library.
Berlin and Cologne. Interfilm in Berlin, short film festival of Cologne, with the ZLB in Berlin and the Stadtbew take-off code. So we have a European project, and in every city that we have a partner in, we have a library and a festival. Very popular with funders, especially this collaboration between, let's say, an
educational or science institution, library and a festival, new media and cool. So we have just background info, we have two different, two other projects with a similar set-up. The one project just finished last week, if you have wondered why I haven't uploaded my material in time on the portal for this event.
That was because we had the final presentation for that project in Luxembourg. And that was between the University of Berlin, between us, the Cannes Film Festival, and a sales company from the film industry.
And it was on the developing of a new video codec. And we got H2020 funding, so science funding for a collaboration project between a festival and a science institution. And because it went so well, we have a second project with similar set-up.
So it's been digital, which is actually the spin-off of that University of Berlin technology section, doing research on video codecs. So there and there, us again, of course, and this time we took the biggest documentary film market in the world in the sunny side of the docks and Sheffield Documentary Film Festival to create VR play-outs for documentary films.
Also funded by H2020, €880,000 for five partners. Again, in the evaluation sheet that we got, we got the highest points for the concept.
And the concept was bringing technology to the people who really need it. And so this is something that proves highly popular. I can actually only invite everybody to think a bit out of the box about where you could use or who you could offer the technology that you develop, let's say, in the outside world.
Me being here, a representative from the outside world. So this has proven widely successful. Here too, which is a bit different because we're not H2020 here, but content funding. The project has proven very popular with media.
This time the other way around. Oh, so cool that we have content that now works with technology. So it's something that, in my experience, is something that should be explored much more often. Back to the project itself.
So what will you have if everything runs as we want? Already in July 2017, we'll present, let's say, the first version. You will have a number of viewing booths, which are in effect a server, which is in effect a laptop.
And for computers in all the participating libraries. So we buy the hardware, we put it there, we connect it to the internet. Then after this, maybe it's better to see this for orientation. Then after the hardware is installed and the festival is over, the festival will curate the programs that they have selected and clear the rights.
So basically we have a similar project already running in Stuttgart, which is a cooperation between the Animation Film Festival in Stuttgart and the Public Library. They tried that principle in the last two years. They got a 70% acceptance from the rights honours.
So 70% of the films that they asked the rights for actually run in the Stuttgart Public Library. So then the rights are cleared and then the festival, basically we are an online interface, uploads these films and this metadata to the server within the library.
And then actually the library users can watch it. In addition, if the library so chooses and if the rights honours so allow, we'll also have an online library, which is basically a video on demand service. As you have seen, we are a white label institution, so the video on demand service will look like the website of the library that we are cooperating with.
And in this website of the library, the library users will be able to log in and watch the films that are presented in this AVA project. And that's about it.
So I can only invite you to, if you think video, think not only video for the science community, think about us, the rest. And also think about basically new models of cooperation. I've seen here this great portal with, I'm searching for a horse and then jump to the horse in the video project.
That's really cool. But that can not only be used for scientific films, but for feature films, short films, documentaries of course as well. So share your knowledge, cooperate and we'll all be a bit happier.
Thank you for listening. I hope I didn't bore you and of course I'm open for questions. You certainly did not bore me at least, so I hope that's the rest for the rest as well.
So I'm sure that there are questions following this presentation. First of all, thank you for sharing this very interesting business model. My question is, have you determined any numbers as to how many people actually go to the libraries and watch the movies?
Because it is not so hard for me to imagine that they use their mobile phones or video on demand at home and watch these festival movies. But it's kind of hard for me to imagine that they go to a library, sit down in a viewing booth and watch these festival movies without being allowed to eat popcorn or peanuts.
So have you determined any numbers? Actually, when we researched the application for the library market, we just established that the library market is very big. Which was already a surprise for me because I have to admit that the last time I was in the library was in my student days, which are sadly long gone.
But the thing was that of course I talked to Tze-Tze being from Berlin, I talked to the Berlin library and actually I think Anna who is there is the better person to answer that. Because I'm just believing in her and her assessment.
Very popular in our library, which is a scientific library, an academic library, as well as a public library. And we have several thousand visitors a day in our building. Currently the films are lent out on DVD and Blu-ray, but we have half a
million, about half a million, the number of lent outs is about half a million a year. So film is highly popular and this means film in all, let's say, not only feature film but documentaries as well in all different areas.
What we do not know so far is how can we promote the new online access to our library users.
Because what of course will be highly interesting for the library users is the streaming video on demand and the use of mobile phones. But I think this is also a nice pilot project to explore how we can actively promote these new forms of access.
What we do know is that the younger audience and the library users, they tend to use streaming services. We know that for the music, access to music, it is already established.
We have services in the library that give access to streaming music on demand. But in the field of video and films, the services still have to be established and the copyright issues have to be cleared. So this is an interesting field for libraries to cooperate because I think once the libraries cooperate
together, then they can find new models for giving access to films and streaming video on demand. Maybe one more background information on the film industry, especially for the smaller films for GetDVD within the next five years.
Because less and less business is done with DVD and especially for smaller films, it just doesn't pay anymore to create DVD editions. So if you want to show films that are not Hollywood films, probably in not so long time, you will have to go video on demand and you can forget lending out DVDs.
So I think there is an urge to move to video on demand and when it comes to independent films, there are not many solutions that you can choose. By the way, cool project to put science videos into public libraries as well.
Any more questions? Alright.