Introduction

There is a project, very much outside the mainstream, that has the potential to create the largest legal nonhierarchical video distribution network ever - and its being developed by the Indymedia movement - who already have a track record of having shook-up the world of news. Is video next?

Indymedia

For those new to the name 'Indymedia' it is the label used to refer to a global network of news sites that allow anyone to add their own news, images and video. Various independent and alternative media organizations and activists originally established the project in 1999 for the purpose of providing grassroots coverage of the World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle. This network aims to; "... empower people to become the media by present honest, accurate, powerful independent reports...to enable people, while they're 'becoming the media,' to realize they can take control of other aspects of their lives that they previously left up to 'experts' or 'professionals.'" This movement consists of a huge number of local groups, each running a news website along the principals established by the movement as a whole.

Enter the IVDN

The video distribution network being created, known as the Indymedia Video Distribution Network (IVDN), harnesses the power both of the internet and the local network of media activists that Indymedia has built over the last 5 years to create, what is potentially, one of the largest non-commercial distribution networks ever. The distribution works by syndicating the content by both using a network of servers to host and catalogue the films and peer-to-peer (p2p) systems to facilitate further distribution. One of those working on the project, Lexi, explains more; "The IVDN project aims to provide a open publishing platform for widespreading free high quality formated videos. It will consist mainly of two parts: at one side the user frontend at http://video.indymedia.org/ for browsing and searching already available videos and giving a frontend for uploading and publishing new ones. At the other side we are going to start a decentralized network, trying to connect similar projects like New Global Vision (http://ngvision.org/), where we will syndicate the existing content between each other and will provide mirrors, so that in the end we get a stable, decentral network. A third thing we will do is to provide a overview of lesser quality videos, available at the local Indymedia Centers."

Lexi goes on the explain the P2P link in the project; "The most important thing i think is, that there will be a catalogoued index of the videos available in the network, browsable and searchable, so if you try to find a video about a special topic, video.indy and other projects in the network could become a good point to start. However, we are also going to provide P2P download sources over torrent and other networks, too."

Establishing an Identity

The network aims to separate itself from existing peer-to-peer projects by having a catalogued index of the videos available. Another difference with many existing peer-to-peer projects is the approach to dealing with copyrighted material that may end up on the network. On this point Lexi is pretty blunt, "Like on other IMCs, material that is not covered by a free license or public domain will be removed from the network." One of the characteristics of the Indymedia movement has been the large network of decentralized and fairly autonomous local sites that have sprung up over the globe. It is not anticipated that this new project will remove this autonomy, but instead provide extra tools for those using the site; "...we will provide a new platform for hq videos - content that is currently hard to publish, because of the big filesizes and missing infrastructure. Smaller videos will still be published at the local IMCs.."

The Future

Currently the project is still in its early stages, but just as the Indymedia network has had a huge impact on the world of news; "Open publishing is one phenomenon in which we can see the Net enabling changes to the nature of news and newsmakers." Says Graham Meikle writing on media-culture.org.au), that it would seem prudent to suggest that the IVDN will have a similar impact on the web film world.

Thanks to Lexi for his time!

Further information

About the Global Indymedia Project
http://www.indymedia.org/or/static/about.shtml

Imc Video Distribution Network Documentation
http://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/ImcVideoDistributionNetwork

Indymedia Video Distribution Network (still under development)
http://video.indymedia.org/en/