OURMEDIA.ORG... OPEN MEDIA NETWORK... GOOD THINGS CAN COME FOR FREE

Ourmedia has been getting some good press lately. A couple weeks ago, I went to a meeting to visit Mike Homer, a long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a pedigree from GO and Netscape, who is now heading Kontiki and just started a nonprofit content distribution organization called the Open Media Network. The focus of their content is on public television and radio programming and they have established relationships with many PBS stations throughout the U.S.

When I heard this, I was thinking this overlaps and competes with Ourmedia a bit. And I thought this was a great approach in capturing high quality content, and of course a great display of Kontiki's technology. Hmmm... there is room for both organizations, but it seems Ourmedia is more grassroots while the Open Media Network is a higher-end "customer." Anyway, it will be great to see how these two efforts and others, such as Google's and AOL's, change the landscape of content storage and distribution.

Suddenly it seems that everyone on the Internet, from corporate giants to nonprofits, wants to host your bulky video content--free of charge.

For independent filmmakers and video moms, the trend promises to provide venues for distributing the videos that have made easier than ever to produce by a new wave of tiny cameras, inexpensive editing software and more powerful computers.

But the dot-coms and dot-orgs offering to host these works for free are in it for something potentially far more valuable--the chance to control a Web of the not-so-distant future, one that's overflowing with moving pictures the way that the online world of today teems with text and still images. (full article)