Mike Industries

Since yesterday’s launch of OurMedia.org, a number of interviews and articles are beginning to surface which give us a better idea as to what this thing is all about. I found the podcast with J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter to be particularly educational.

Two things are now clear to me above all else:

1. This is the most ambitious attempt at free media we’ve ever seen.
2. It’s so ambitious that it seems to open as many new issues as it solves.

In my first admittedly terse post on the subject, I said that if OurMedia is financially sustainable, it is a development unlike any other we’ve seen. But that, unfortunately, doesn’t answer if it actually is financially sustainable. To get a better idea whether it is or not, let’s look at what may be on the roadmap for the next year or two:

Mass Storage

This is the area where OurMedia will experience the least problems. Storage is already cheap, and they have a ton of it via the archive.org servers. There are also very few rights issues to worry about when it comes to the pure storage of content. It’s the distribution of it that gets sticky. So at the very least, we should see a pretty robust system whereby any user can store a ton of media at no cost to them. This will have a ripple effect across other services like webmail, hosting, photo-sharing, etc., further lowering the price of storage at places like Gmail, Dreamhost, and Flickr.

Mass Bandwidth

The founders of OurMedia claim to have enough bandwidth to deal with demand, but that’s tough to imagine without introducing some sort of P2P framework pretty quickly. The way I see it shaking out is that OurMedia takes the 20% of content that’s the most popular at any given time (which, using the Pareto Principle, means that it accounts for 80% of the total bandwidth) and seeds it via torrents for peer-to-peer distribution. Then it hosts the tail directly from its own servers. Some variation of this stands a reasonable chance of working, given the right architecture. Can you use BitTorrent today to grab files? Sure. But this would take P2P from a technology used mainly by tech-savvy early adopters to a true worldwide distribution platform. That would be a huge development.

Blogging and Citizen Journalism

This is an area where the OurMedia site sets high goals (and one of the biggest reasons for my optimism), but I’m not so sure how quickly things will come along. Unlike the storage and distribution aspects of OurMedia (which can essentially be operated through an API in the near future), blogging and citizen journalism require a lot more of the “total experience” in order to work. The state of the UI on OurMedia is nowhere close to some of the other hosted services out there like Blogger, TypePad, and LiveJournal, and I’m skeptical as to the speed at which it will meaningfully improve. I have really nothing to base this on besides what I’m seeing at launch combined with the general lack of speed at which open source volunteer projects move, but I could certainly see this particular aspect of OurMedia not being a category leader for quite some time. If and when it does, it would be a huge development, but there’s that question of if again.

Rights Management

One of the most exciting aspects of OurMedia is their mission to provide content to the world devoid of proprietary DRM and other restrictive rights limitations. Sounds great but how exactly will that be policed? If we’re just talking about people’s home videos and what not, it’s cake. But what about when people post things they actually don’t have the right to post? I’ve personally bought “royalty free” music before for commercial use only to be contacted later by the actual creator of the music saying it wasn’t royalty free at all. What happens is that people download music, change a small aspect of it, and then offer it up as their own when they don’t really have the rights to. How was I to know this had happened? The site said “royalty free”. Without the site vigorously investigating the ownership rights of all content offered on it and even offering an expensive indemnification against it, how are potential users of this content supposed to feel safe using it? OurMedia will probably take the same approach to combating this sort of thing as it takes with other violations in that it will offer a “report abuse” button. But is that good enough? I don’t know. Let’s say a large media company catches OurMedia accidentally and unwittingly distributing their copyrighted content one time. How about three times? How about one hundred times? How many times does this need to happen before someone has a case?

So that’s the downside of rights, but the huge upside is that OurMedia, by offering free storage and distribution, is for the first time providing all content creators with a concrete and compelling reason to attach much more liberal rights policies to their content. Want to tie your stuff down with proprietary DRM? Fine, host it yourself. Want to get it out to as many people as possible? We’ll host it for you. And we’ll even help you get paid for it with an open DRM system we’re working on. Sounds great to me.

So where does this leave things?

There are many other implications to this noble effort but those are the big four in my mind. If all four are successful and financially sustainable, this will be pretty huge, but as some people have pointed out, how do we know if any of it will work? We don’t… especially considering that the proposed sources of funding are deep-pocketed sponsorship, micropatronage, and possible cuts from the sale of content. On the one hand, we have a growing group of very smart, resourceful, and accomplished people who will be working to achieve the vision. But on the other hand, it’s such a radical and unproven concept that requires the time and effort of so many volunteers that it could easily run out of funding before it even fully blooms.

But then again, that’s what they said about Wikipedia… and now it’s six times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica.