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SXSW Interactive 2010: Awesome

Published on March 29, 2010

By David Wright

Austra Zubkovs and I attended the 2010 South by Southwest (the interactive part), which ran from March 12 to March 16 in Austin, Texas. I would like to share with you a general rundown of the most notable happenings that we were able to attend. First off, last year, the attendance of the interactive and film sections combined to equal the music participants. This year, the interactive section had the most participants, which makes for a good case of what SXSW could look like in the future. Are technology trends causing what was once an exclusive music festival into a film and technology festival? And the word used most frequently throughout the conference—“Awesome.”

Austin Convention Center Hallway, First Floor

Austin Convention Center,
first floor hallway

An interesting trend I’ve seen out in Austin has been the meshing of filmmakers and technologists coming together to discuss the future of distribution, broadcast and monetization of online media. At many of the beginner and intermediate panels, the usual suspects of tech gurus were in attendance, but surprisingly, there were quite a few filmmakers who knew little about how to harness the power of the internet and were interested in learning how to get their films distributed online. Twitter was all the rage and just about everyone had either an iPhone or Blackberry for their mobile device, and a Macbook Pro to complete their arsenal for live tweets, podcasts and even a little work while recovering from booze and dancing the night before. Awesome.

In a panel called “Beyond Advertising: Can Online Video Finally Pay?,” COO Will Coghlan & CEO Rob Mills of Dynamo Player threw up a PowerPoint chart on a projector showing the downward trend of DVD purchases over the past decade in comparison to the upward (albeit slower) trend of online viewing & downloads. They then went on to describe how difficult it is for the independent filmmaker to make any money from their precious projects in this day and age of YouTube, Amazon and iTunes.

The great thing about attending these panels is that you learn things that you’ve never heard of before. In this case, these two fellows spoke about sites such as My Content, Indie Flix, and other sites that allow the producer to publish their content, market, distribute and monetize it with the exception of sharing the wealth with these sites. Apparently their new player will allow producers to have complete control over their content via pay-per-view style streaming or full price downloads of which you keep all the profit—imagine you’re controlling Netflix. The folks over at Ustream.tv did an interview with them afterwords and you can find more info about it here. The only topic that never came up was how they were going to get paid themselves. Awesome, nonetheless.

Open Video panel

Another notable event came by way of a panel known as “What’s Open Video and Why Does It Matter?” run by Elizabeth Stark (Co-Founder, Open Video Alliance), Mark Surman (Executive Director, Mozilla), Elisa Kreisinger (Pop Culture Pirate) and Lance Kavanaugh (YouTube’s lawyer). This panel was quite amusing as everyone took full advantage of Kavanaugh trying to get him to ‘spill the beans’ on anything new happening at YouTube and their policies around taking down content that may be of an Open Video type. The discussion though quickly turned into a short explanation of what Open Video is and the possibilities that it could bring. There was talk of a culture of people ‘remixing’ videos by taking various clips and pictures from YouTube, Flickr and/or their own projects and creating a new video clip from it using a tool from Open Source Cinema.

Evan Williams at SXSW Interactive Interview

Twitter CEO Evan Williams

Twitter CEO Evan Williams participated in an interview conducted by Umair Haque (Havas Media Lab) where they discussed “The Next Generation of Social Media.” Williams opened with a short video with no sound that he simply narrated as the images showed us new integration methods of Twitter into your website and the ease of doing this. The interview started out highlighting all of the wonderful things Twitter has been able to achieve by simply connecting people, near instantaneously, to events that are happening in other people’s lives. It then took a path down the long road of how this technology can be used to connect the entire world and reach out to the farthest corners of the earth where the Twitter signal is weakest. Halfway through this one-hour interview, people started filing out and Austra and I began to lose interest. This made us wonder about the depth of Twitter and whether or not it is anything more than just a “texting tool.” We left early for some lunch.

Mashable party

The evening events were plentiful and every night was a night to remember. Status was purely based on what kind of badge you had (Platinum badges, which were the most expensive, got you into any event) and since we had Interactive badges we got into all of the interactive events, naturally. First on Austra’s list of parties was the Tumblr/Kickstarter party. Another night PBS had an evening party, but it got packed quickly and the line was so long we had to leave and find another venue.

Savoy at Pure Volume House in Austin, Texas

Savoy @ Pure Volume House

Another night we found ourselves at the giant Mashable celebration. Late that night we were able to get into an exclusive party at a club called Pure Volume House, which required a small green card as a means of getting in. Some nice guys Austra met who work for nclud (they designed the Mashable website) were kind enough to find us two extra passes their friends weren’t using. Once inside, our ears were treated to the drum and bass remixing wizards known as Savoy, rocking the house until the wee hours of the morning.

In general, while I walked away from this conference with a couple of fresh ideas that I can apply to our very own MediaRights.org, the vibe at this year’s SXSW: Interactive focused around the larger discussion of the change in the definition of media—an issue Arts Engine has been discussing for years. What is media? And how can it be used to affect change? By providing the end user (or consumer) with the tools and content so that their voices can be heard and spark conversation in their communities. By arming them with knowledge about social issues affecting us all and giving them the opportunity to shape that content with others and virally pass it on. By providing a portal (the internet) which knows no boundaries so that people of all races can communicate effortlessly with each other regardless of language or distance.

On the other hand, the producer (or content provider) will have far more options available to them in what they want that media to mean to the world in which they have made it for. It seems that we are at the cusp of figuring out how to monetize all of this in a way that doesn’t stifle this wonderful growth. Technology plays a pivotal role in all of this, and the future looks nothing less than—well—awesome.

FURTHER READING

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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