For most Americans, the 9/11 attacks unfolded through indelible images from television news. As the tenth anniversary of the attacks nears, these news broadcasts make up an immensely valuable, yet difficult to access record of history. In 2001, YouTube was three years away, many homes were still equipped with dial-up connections, and the significance and accessibility of online video was very limited. This means that most scholars’ ability to seek out, access, and cite television broadcast, even for events of massive significance such as 9/11, remains challenging.

The 9/11 Television News Archive is a project created by the Internet Archive. A mini-conference at NYU launched the project on Wednesday, bringing together a number of experts and scholars to discuss how television news shapes our perspectives on unfolding history and how we can preserve these media resources for future study.

The Internet Archive has been recording and archiving TV from 20 channels across many countries since early 2000, yet only a small fraction of it has been restored thus far. The Archive’s focus is on gathering news, which has become and will continue to be an invaluable source of historical-cultural information. Preserving these programs means creating a repository of unbiased data for future scholars looking to cite the records found in television’s perspective on important events.

The 9/11 Television Archive stands as an example of where these kinds of archives might be headed, as well as an indicator of its challenges – particularly over the course of a decade in which video and technology changed rapidly. Restoring the data of just one week’s worth of breaking news surrounding the event took two engineers over three weeks. The shows were on digital linear tape, since hard drives were too expensive in the early part of the decade, and were preserved in raw, unlabeled MPEG-PS format, with separate text files describing the file contents. Corruption issues over time further complicated the task, ultimately resulting in restoration of 93% of the available footage.

At this year’s conference, the archive will be accessible through a uniquely visual touchscreen interface. We are pleased to announce that this exhibit will be available at the 2011 OVC for attendees to experience. Stay tuned for more announcements from the Internet Archive at OVC.

Register today for the OVC.

In 1996, Congress took a big step towards increasing competition in the world of cable television. Following in the footsteps of FCC decisions that made it so you didn’t need to rent your phone from the telephone company or get your computer approved by your ISP, Congress told the FCC to put an end to the requirement that cable customers rent their set top boxes from the cable company.

Unfortunately CableCARD, the FCC’s first attempt to pry the cable boxes away from cable companies, did not work very well. CableCARDs never quite worked as well as they should have, the FCC regularly undermined them with waivers, and the vast majority of Americans kept renting their clunky cable boxes from the cable company.

Recently, the FCC decided to take another shot. The initiative, called AllVid, is designed to allow you to access your cable (and satellite) programming however you want without needing a clunky box. Your TV could have its own program guide that was updated since the end of the Soviet era. TV could be integrated into your phone, or your iPad, or your Xbox. Instead of one way to see what was available, devices and devs could compete to create the fastest, best looking, most intuitive program interface.

And, of course, that interface could show you more than just your cable subscription. Want to integrate web video? Go for it. Turn on your TV and see a mix of cable, YouTube, Revision3, and Netflix. Pick a movie and get a list of places to buy it from. Seamlessly switch between watching a live football game and a video of a hamster on a piano. Imagine Boxee with live TV.

This is the promise of AllVid. The AllVid gateway would act like a modem, transforming different kinds of cable or satellite feeds into a single, universal video standard. Any device on your home network could access the video and integrate it into its own interface.

Strangely enough, the recently announced merger of Google and Motorola Mobility may help move the AllVid process forward. One of the problems for AllVid proponents (of which Google has traditionally been, and Motorola had not been) was that most cable companies were locked into Motorola set top boxes. The cable companies claimed that the nature of the Motorola standards made implementing AllVid all but impossible. Now that Google owns Motorola, we may find that there are some fairly simple ways to solve those technical problems.

That could lead to a new push for AllVid. Now we need to decide exactly how we want AllVid to work. In a perfect world, what would a truly integrated video interface look like? What information should the AllVid standard include? What should it exclude? What is the best way to bring together all video content from all sources in one interface?

We’re pleased to announce that the Yale Law School Information Society Project has joined as a supporter of the 2011 Open Video Conference.

The Yale ISP is an intellectual center at Yale Law School that addresses the implications of the Internet and new information technologies for law and society, guided by the values of democracy, human development, and social justice. As a founding member of the Open Video Alliance, the Yale ISP has provided invaluable support and guidance to past OVCs, and we couldn’t be happier to have them along for the ride this year! As a fully non-profit event, support from organizations like the Yale ISP is critical to our ability to deliver an engaging and thought-provoking program. The Yale ISP will lend a unique perspective to OVC and allow us to better explore aspects of open video such as:

• Protecting and expanding access to knowledge.
• Developing legal rules, policy frameworks, and technical architectures to promote civil liberties online.
• Providing teachers and students with better access to digital education
• Encouraging intellectual property reform and innovation.

At this year’s OVC, we’re striving to answer important questions on issues like these that will shape the future of video on the Web. We’re looking forward to working with the Yale ISP to meet our shared goals.

Be sure to register today for this year’s conference!