The YouTube folks describe the Screening Room as "a platform for top films from around the world to find the audiences they deserve." To quote the description in full:
Every other Friday, you’ll find four new films featured in the YouTube Screening Room.
These films always appear with the permission and involvement of the filmmakers, so be sure to rate, share and leave comments. This is your chance to not only watch great films from all corners of the globe, but also to converse with the filmmakers behind them.
While the majority of these films have played at international film festivals, occasionally you’ll find films that have never before screened for wide audiences.
All films playing in the YouTube Screening Room are displayed within our High Quality player to give you the best viewing experience possible.
Be a part of a new generation of filmmaking and distribution and help us connect films and audiences in the world’s largest theater!
The Screening Room arguably pushes the world of entertainment even closer to the inevitable: A multi-world, hybrid media that will allow us to chose what we want to watch and when we want to watch it. YouTube has recently signed deals with Lionsgate, Showtime, and CBS (yes, you can watch vintage episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 in full, any time you want), and its largest competitor, Hulu, currently partners with even more traditional television networks and film companies. YouTube and Hulu aside, you can use the old idiot box to get shows "on Demand," you can download your favs on iTunes (and other digital venues), you can record programs if you have cable connectivity and the right software, and, of course, there's the modern version of the VCR - the DVR. The point is that technological advances are pushing traditional venues of entertainment toward greater integration and increased availability for the viewer.
Enough gushing. Below, check out The Danish Poet - one of the first films to air at The Screening Room. Reminiscent of the reconstruction of the protagonist's random and chaotic genetic history in Jeffrey Eugenides's MiddleSex, The Danish Poet offers a lovely, animated take on the seemingly chaotic paths that lead to people to love.
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2 comments:
This makes total sense! Ever read Henry Jenkins? We got a piece of Convergence Culture in my media studies class, and it makes a good case for this sort of thing... though he mostly focuses on the user-generated content model as what's bringing it all to the point you bring up. I'd add that piracy technologies have had this sort of thing going for awhile, and it might just be catching on mainstream because corporate a-holes are finally figuring out how to monetize it (intervening advertisements, using reruns to promote new episode airings/series, etc.). Whereas something like YouTube gets dough from these big boys and the big boys get dough from the users of YouTube, nobody is really making cash through BitTorrent or something like OVGuide.com (except the minimal and strictly browser-based advertisers, which probably pull in a decent profit, but nothing like what media oligopolies pull in on a minute-by-minute basis).
I actually cited Jenkins in the abstract I wrote for the MLA paper. I like Jenkins's sidenotes and metacommentaries in the margins. He does what he describes as he describes it.
Do you know Edward Castronova's Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality? The guy makes some astute observations and articulates them in amazingly (and, at times, surprisingly) accessible prose.
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