The National Film Board of Canada yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the NFB Screening Room, an online site that opened the NFB to the world. The NFP has worked hard to make its work openly and freely available – open access to films, open source software underlying its site. A year later, the statistics tell the story:
- 3,000 film views per day in January 2009; over 20,000 film views per day in January 2010
- 500 films in January 2009; nearly 1,500 films in January 2010
- 3.7 million online film views in the past year
- 363,000 film views on the iPhone in Canada with another 120,000 film views internationally
It's a great achievement and validation of the benefits from openness. For those that have not visited the site, I've embedded Rip! The Remix Manifesto, the award-winning documentary on copyright, culture, and remix in streaming HD below.
rip!The Remix Manifesto
Thanks for the post, I really think that film should be required viewing by MP’s.
“We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses” Carl Jung
see i used that, Fair dealings…and gave credit..Woot.
you may want to read the following free (as in free beer and free speech) ebook…
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm
Bittorrent/downloads
Some of use have media centres and like higher quality files that aren’t in proprietary formats. If they used bit-torrent they could also save some cash on bandwidth costs.
Torrents
@Jeff Can we use bit-torrents to stream? We don’t have license to offer these as free downloads. There are too many rights complications / costs associated with the music, unions, etc to allow that.
Michael – Thanks for the amazing post!
Matt
Content Mgr, NFB.ca
web coordinator
Another “open content” project at the NFB is called GDP – an interactive one-year project documenting the economic crisis. What’s open about it, is that it’s rooted in the will to co-document the recession with Canadians. More than 25 videos have been posted by Canadians as reactions to the NFB-produced short films and photo essays. Photos and text comments have also been posted in the hundreds. Here’s for your pleasure: http://gdp.nfb.ca Don’t hesitate to post your own story.
Frédéric
Frédéric Dubois
Coordonnateur web | Web coordinator
Docu web PIB pib.onf.ca | GDP webdoc gdp.nfb.ca
f.dubois@onf.ca | Tel: (+1) 514-283-9443
Suivez PIB par Facebook ou Twitter, ou par le biais de l’Infolettre de l’ONF.
Follow GDP on Facebook or Twitter, or via the NFB Newsletter.
Office national du film du Canada (ONF) | National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
3155, ch. de la Côte-de-Liesse, P-39, Montréal, Québec H4N 2N4
more stats please
M. Dubois,
Congrats on the success — I love the work of the NFB.
Can you also let us know the model for payment for the artists who created these works for the NFB? It might be easy to assume that these works just came about without paid professional work going into them. In the NFB’s new “open” model, are filmmakers compensated according to the popularity of their films, or have they signed away royalty rights for front-end compensation?
Model for payment
@strunk&white This is a common question. Filmmakers are paid up front for their films with the NFB. Music, actors, etc have to be licensed separately – so it often costs a lot of money to buy the rights to make these films available.
Traditionally, after often brief runs in festivals and DVDs (most don’t ever get to theatres) many of these films would languish in a vault somewhere, inaccessible to the public and the filmmakers themselves. This site puts the films back in front of the people who paid for them in the first place – Canadian taxpayers.
Matt
Content Mgr
NFB.ca
managing content
Thanks Matt,
I agree — an excellent end result for the films. As long as the filmmakers are satisfied with their compensation and the other creative talent has been properly licensed, I see this as a near-perfect solution for the often tragic scarcity of Canadian creativity within our own country.
That said, I think it’s important to highlight the costs of production and creation, and not just the free-ness and openness of delivery. Without properly compensated professional creation, there would be no professional quality films for the NFB to “openly” screen.
For me this leads to a larger question — why DON’T most excellent Canadian docs and films make it into Canadian cinemas. Canadian screens are, I think, around 95% occupied by non-Canadian films at all times. How do we change that? Should we care to change it? Will creating in a model that only works when we give our films away for free on the Internet change things? Again, should we care?
Those are question I don’t expect you to answer, Matt, but it’s important to me that people understand there are two sides to “openness.” The delivery side and the creation side. Open source is a model that can work well for software creation, but there’s no real economic scaffolding for it in professional cultural creativity.
managing content
Thanks Matt,
I agree — an excellent end result for the films. As long as the filmmakers are satisfied with their compensation and the other creative talent has been properly licensed, I see this as a near-perfect solution for the often tragic scarcity of Canadian creativity within our own country.
That said, I think it’s important to highlight the costs of production and creation, and not just the free-ness and openness of delivery. Without properly compensated professional creation, there would be no professional quality films for the NFB to “openly” screen.
For me this leads to a larger question — why DON’T most excellent Canadian docs and films make it into Canadian cinemas. Canadian screens are, I think, around 95% occupied by non-Canadian films at all times. How do we change that? Should we care to change it? Will creating in a model that only works when we give our films away for free on the Internet change things? Again, should we care?
Those are question I don’t expect you to answer, Matt, but it’s important to me that people understand there are two sides to “openness.” The delivery side and the creation side. Open source is a model that can work well for software creation, but there’s no real economic scaffolding for it in professional cultural creativity.
Totally agree that there are two sides to openness. Thanks for making this explicit strunk&white.
In the case of the GDP project, we’ve got aroung 12 filmmakers on contract and about 12 photographers. As Matt said, we’re paying up front. This being said, the openness of the web delivery side is definitely helping the creative side in many ways, one of them being that exposure is way higher, especially for films and photo essays on a “tough-sell” issue like the economic crisis. Many documentary films are in that same situation, but have not been in the web delivery model until now.
Also, the fact that our creators engage much more in the conversation around their works, before and after the release of a new episode, online – often through platforms such as twitter and facebook – increases the level of transparency of the creative process. This alone, I find, is of great value for the openness of the creative side.
Frédéric
Frédéric Dubois
Coordonnateur web | Web coordinator
Docu web PIB pib.onf.ca | GDP webdoc gdp.nfb.ca
paid for already
The NFB owns these films, taxes pay for the NFB, so I don’t understand why they are not freely available and unencumbered to all without licencing fees required. They should all be shared via torrent to reduce distribution costs. How can this distribution method be justified? How can any sales of these films be justified, other than to recoup bandwidth costs and infrastructure. I could understand it when they lent out 16mm film and mailed those around the country, but now?