Video: Forecasting the Future of Public Media, from Silverdocs

Pat Aufderheide, the brainiac who runs the Center for Social Media at American University, put together a fun panel at Silverdocs last month to try to forecast the future of public media. The video is now available here. Responding to Pat's scary/fascinating/hopeful scenarios for the next five years were:

- John Boland, chief content officer, PBS
- Andy Carvin, social media strategist, NPR
- Doug Craig, senior vice president, home entertainment, Discovery Communications
- Paco de Onís, producer, Skylight Pictures
- Jacquie Jones, executive director, National Black Programming Consortium
- Scott Kirsner, editor, CinemaTech, and contributing writer, Variety
- Alyce Myatt, executive director, Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media
- Marita Rivero, vice president and general manager, Radio and Television, WGBH

The video below is the first segment... not sure if the other segments will play automatically... but the entire session ran about 90 minutes. That should supply plenty of Holiday Weekend Viewing Pleasure.

New Umbrella Site for PBS Video

Check out PBS' new video portal, launched today.

Funny how Hulu has suddenly become the gold-standard for video sites. My initial impressions are that PBS' site is not as fluid to navigate... that the videos aren't as well-described in text as Hulu... and that it isn't as clip-oriented. You have to dive in to watching a half-hour or hour-long program.

But according to a post on the NY Times' Bits blog, it will soon have a participatory element that sounds pretty cool:

The site is built on new technology that will also allow users to upload video, make comments and otherwise interact with the site and one another. For example, in conjunction with the Ken Burns documentary series “The National Parks,” which will be introduced this fall, users will be invited to upload videos of parks.

What do you think?

Talking Hollywood History with Filmmaker Cass Warner Sperling

At the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills earlier this week, I had a chance to sit down with author and filmmaker Cass Warner Sperling.

Her documentary The Brothers Warner premiered on PBS last month as part of the "American Masters" series. Two questions I wanted to ask: how did she get the film onto PBS, and what are her other distribution plans?

But we also talked about Cass' famous ancestors. Her grandfather Harry was one of the four original Warner brothers who founded the great studio. Since my new book deals with the way the Warner brothers helped usher in the sound era (they were also early proponents of Technicolor), I wanted to talk about some of that history. Cass tries to set me straight about whether her grandfather ever really said, "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"



The audio is also here in MP3 form.

There's some video from her film here (in non-embeddable form).