I just ran into Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation article on the future of internet video and how we can aim to push it toward more openness.

It is well written and questions the single service provider model that internet video is currently operating under.

Will internet video be centralized in huge services like YouTube or Google Video, or will it be more broadly distributed? (with technologies like RSS)

Some more questions to consider in the interest of “open” video on the internet:

1. Does the codec matter?

Google has fully embraced the flash video the codec. The software architecture has laid the foundation for a walled garden distribution mechanism. Video unlike images and text could be blocked from competing video search engines disabled in external players, and mediated by annoying market conditions ie advertisements. Fortunately we can still extract the flvs but flash does support locking these files away. Ogg theora on the other hand, is never locked away in a proprietary playback system, and will always be open for reuse inside our own gardens or by secondary service providers opening up the mediations of these cultural assets to everyone.

2. Beyond RSS what about arbitrary segment reference and dynamic sequence building?

In the metavid project we make arbitrary segments of video clips dynamic available for reuse in sequences on our site or off it. The meta data is freely available in its entirety, opening it up for secondary service providers and video content aggregators. For example any search in metavid can be a channel in democracy player. In time this may enable the types of rich interoperability we see happening with text in the blogospher. An environment where participants mix, match, tag remix visual content from a variety of video from a variety of sources with or without intermediary service providers which bridge the technoliteracy divide. Open systems like RSS and open API for hosting service providers enable secondary service providers like search engines to create much richer audio/video applications.
3. What would “videoPedia” look like?

Transparent versioned video Sequences pulling form huge repositories like archive.org and up to the minute video contributed by participants… collaborative editing tagging and aggregation enabling real time channels on given subjects/themes/memes. ie ~Real Open Source Television~

anyhow…I think the future is bright, even if we end up in a mostly google mediated reality its still much more open than the existing broadcast model… if we can fully enable participatory culture in the visual medium even better!