Open Television Network at Your Service

Is brought to you courtesy of Philip Hodgett, an Aussie émigré of DigitalProductionBuzz.com fame. These days, however, he concentrates on his new ventures, which, in addition to OTN, include his software company Intelligent Assistance and consulting outfit Big Brains for Rent. Here is one busy man!



In his word, quoted from David Williams’s interview with him in Digital Video magazine:

“It’s another entry into digital distribution. Some would say we are late getting into that game, but I have problems with most of the existing offerings out there. What we are trying to do is create an unmediated marketplace between content owners and those who want that content. Pretty much every other system has somebody sitting there as a gatekeeper between the content and the consumer. They decide what gets on the system, and if you have just a few pieces of content you can’t get any traction with them. We want to democratize distribution the same way that production has been democratized over the past decade.”

So OTN is available to you FREE, to sell your show to viewers and for viewers who want the option of controlling their own programming. It is built on a new technology called klickTab.

You can use klickTab to sell audio and PDF content too through a standard RSS feed (a podcast feed) that can be loaded into iTunes, Miro or compatible RSS aggregators. Is that cool or what?

With your channel feed loaded, your viewers can preview, get, download, manage and view your programs in one piece of software. Viewers have options like iPods, AppleTV, and other applications to deliver their content to a big screen TV for the traditional television experience.

Does “Open” mean that my videos can be pirated away?

Both OTN and I believe that the way to combat piracy is to offer a simple, convenient and fair way to buy the content people want to watch. There will always be some piracy, a fact of life that we all must live with. It's also not clear that a "pirated" copy is really a lost sale (most often it is not), and whether or not the promotional value of the piracy is worth more than the potential sale. There are certainly some in "big media" who believe that, and evidence suggests that independents and new media also benefit from "piracy."