Open Video Conference marks major meetup of video 2.0 pioneers (19/20 June, NYC)

For those feeling underwhelmed by the scarcity of film 2.0 news coming out of Cannes, hold your breath as some of the biggest drivers and thinkers in the emerging Open Video movement will be heading to New York next month for the first Open Video Conference. In what is being billed as the first formal conversation between the cutting edge of entertainment, technology and law, a dialogue which much of our culture hinges on at the moment, the schedule reads like a who's who of the new media opinion-shapers and entreprenerds.

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program opens the event, running in NYU Law department on the 19th and 20th (EDIT!) June. Yochai Benkler, Professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center and author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom) also gives a Keynote. Xeni Jardin's there, co-editor of the web's no.1 ranked blog and daily presenter of BoingBoing.tv. An interesting presentation the BBC will doubtless be monitoring comes from Eirik Solheim, project manager and strategic advisor at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) where they've begun to distribute TV programmes through P2P torrents (it's almost cost free as a technology) and has been a success supposedly. There's Lance Weiller, feature filmmaker and self distributor interviewed in our film funding book, who runs the brilliant brilliant film2/open video/evolution of cinema multimedia group blog, the Workbook Project. There's Ted Hope, producer of countless features including 21 Grams, alongside Jamie King, the director of Steal this Movie and the brains behind a tipjar system for P2P networks. The most unpopular man in Hollywood (?), DVD Jon, the whizz who cracked the DVD protection system, and is now developing a legitimate multi device media management and purchasing system that seems to blow iTunes out the water for flexibility will be there, as will Nicholas Reville, the driver behind Miro, the incredibly useful open source iTunes-esque video manager, with youtube search and download, RSS syndication of videos/series and file management. There's no Arin, Liz, M Dot or Swarm of Angels - but there's presence/presentations from WikiMedia Foundation, Mozillia (Firefox), web video editing tool Kaltura, Adobe, Yale, Creative Commons , Blip.tv CEO Mike Hudack, Brett 'Remix Manifesto' Gaylor, Lizz Winstead, co-creator (I wanted to type co-greater) of the Daily Show (woo!), Matt 'Pirate's Dilema' Mason and a person whose job title is Director of Evangelism. The event closes with a 'capstone' from Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, entitled,The Future of Video and How to Stop It before a party headlined by UK mashup supremos Eclectic Method (see below) playing out.

Best of all, it will all be streamed online - so no need to burn up petrol flying there (tho I'm tempted). It'll be interesting to learn more about the Open Video Alliance, who are organisating the event, as Alliances and Openness have sometimes, in the past, been mutually exclusive! But given the quietness of activity in this area in the UK, it's very exciting to see so much movement and focus in the US.