 First of all, I thank you for the opportunity and the invitation to present the art player platform, which fact has been working on for only six months, it's a one year, it's actually not even a one year funded project, we've got till December to sort of get this to a point where we think it's ready to roll out across the sector. I'm just going to give a brief kind of introduction about myself, as I say, it's my name's Roger McKinley, and I am, oops, we're going too fast through that, I work for FACT, I've been at FACT for ten years, FACT stands for the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology. It's been running as an organisation for over twenty years in the sector, doing ground breaking exhibitions and education, with its ultimate aim to pioneer new forms of artistic collaboration and expression with a long history of working with commissions and presenting new work and creating content for the public, with the public and forward sort of distribution in partnership with other organisations. As it says there, and I'm going to attempt to pronounce some of these names, so we've worked with artists as diverse and as important, there's Pippolatti Rist, Bill Viola, Pitcha Pong, Beryth Saffical, Vita O'Consi and Isaac Julian. The part of FACT that I work in is actually, or have been working in for the last ten years, is the mites, which some of you will know, some of you have probably worked with before, mites is the moving in image technology and exhibition services, so its aim is to provide a service for the sector which will help support the production, display and presentation of new work by artists. The reason I mention that is because the art player TV platform is in some ways an extension of that activity, and I'll get onto that later. So art player TV, this is our logo. This is a very key and important point because I'm not going to really mention FACT again particularly unless anybody has a specific question about it. The art player TV product or platform isn't a FACT product, so FACT is not involved in some ways in branding art player TV. It's a self-contained, self-managed project that sits under the umbrella of FACT in a similar way that mites the moving in image technology and exhibition services did when it started back in 1992. So what is it? Well, the art player platform is, as it says here, a free-to-use national media player for the arts, so what we're designing is a place where arts organisations in the funded sector can put content that they create as part of their programme to enable it to redeploy it in a place where the public can access it. It's designed for the national portfolio organisations or RFOs, the regional, regularly funded organisations as they stand now, and it's, as I say, together moving image content for all to see. I think it's quite interesting and it's a good indication of the shift in how the arts council are considering the relationship between the organisations that funds and the sector in general. And I think that the Nesta fund is part of that kind of consideration as well. When you look at the difference in terminology between the regularly funded organisations and national portfolio organisations, so what that, I think to me what that kind of indicates is that they are kind of consolidating the way that the arts organisations within that they fund face the public. So the arts council are supporting a national portfolio, and what the art player platform is trying to do is try to find a way to present that national portfolio in a coherent and concise way. What will it look like? Okay, so basically at the minute it's going to be, it's essentially a website, so it's a website where people can create their own channels using the content they've already created, put it up online and people can go to it, see it, find it. It's for all organisations, it's a place where you can put your archive as well, and it's a place where hopefully, some way down the line, we'll be able to redeploy that content for other purposes. I'm not actually going to go to the website because I know the technical problems that can rise up from kind of jumping out of one platform and into another in terms of how you present things, but effectively it's going to look like a website. I was reading my middle son, some stuff from one of the Horrible History series, and by the way I think Horrible History is a fantastic series, bear with me. It was about the hunter-gatherers 300,000 years ago, and one of the key things that hunter-gatherers did was to work in packs or in groups. So if you wanted to kind of bag a mammoth, if you wanted to bag a fund, in some ways these days, as ever, 300,000 years ago, you have to work as groups. So with the art platform, what we set out very early on was some key organisations that were local to us that we could work with in terms of getting a good spread of the activities that they do and the way that reflects in some ways the activities across the whole region. So we have these are the list of current organisations that we work with. Anthony mentioned that the corner house was due to co-present this as well, and that's one of our key partners. What they were going to present on was a different thing to art player TV. They've got some funding and some hardware to actually record and present events, live events, stream them live. They formed a group called the Broadcast Group, and they were going to be the other part of this presentation. I've not been able to make it, but nevertheless I wanted to show you that we are in partnership there with the corner house. Each one of these organisations obviously have different skills bases and different set of practices. So the Unity, they're obviously a theatre group, they work very much with the community, they're both local and national. Griesdale, obviously it's driving forces kind of residency programmes and working with the people in the community up there. Sight Gallery, very much like FAC, they work with emerging media practices. Dada, again they have different sort of audience needs to a lot of the other group, and the corner house is a cinema and contemporary art organisation. Fact in some ways, sort of with the exception of Unity theatre as activities in Dada, in some ways sort of encompass some of all of those practices as well. So it's a platform and what do we want that platform to do? We want it to be able to provide that to reuse the content that people are making anyway, but of course not everybody is making content. So what we need is to build in other activities within the offer of the art player TV platform, and we basically isolated these three needs from the research that we did early on in the projects that will enable us, which is obviously very critical to creating content, to capture, edit and publish the work that's being done. So as part, and when partnership with the organisations have just shown you, we had training and recording techniques, we had training and editing techniques and training and managing content. So those three things, although some organisations will be of favour with it, most we found that weren't that of favour with it. This is, as I was saying before, this is going back to art player TV being an extension of the MIGHT services, in that it's able to provide a service to the sector which will enable them to create and raise the standard on the content that they're actually creating. So what we've been doing, in effect, what that means, what we've been doing is we have a small production team that go out to the organisations when they have an event, we find an event that they want to work with, we have a schedule. Once that event is established, the art production team will go out, record the event and then the organisations involved will put forward volunteers or staff or someone they want to work with or as an organisation perhaps even from outside of that arts organisation that they want to build a relationship with. They will then ghost on the production that we will lead on for the event and we'll use the opportunity to edit, once we've captured it, to edit it and publish it again with the affiliated either volunteers or staff or external organisation ghosting on that. Then we'll return to the venue for another event where we'll effectively do it in reverse. So then the organisations volunteers will be recording the content, be editing the content and be publishing the content on their channel on the site. So it's sort of one way and then the other to enable, to give enough time for those organisations and the volunteers or the people that are put forward to actually pick up on the train. So, okay, so I'm sort of explaining what we've been doing but what I wanted to do actually is to show you a short clip as well of one of the active or part of this is actually fairly long. I'm not going to show it all, I'm going to break it off halfway through. But to give an example of the kind of content we've been creating in partnership, this one is with the site gallery for a recent exhibition that they've been doing. So I'm going to play this now. I'm going to break it off halfway through. I'm not going to touch it. I consider myself more a dictator than an artist. More like one guy who sits on the sofa and sees what happens. Averyn Franco matters on media activists, they're pranksters, they're tricksters and they're artists who are difficult to sum up in a nutshell. My name is Franco, she's Eva. We work a lot with the internet, computers and the media in general. We are not very creative people, not especially. I mean I think that creativity, like genius and inspiration, all of that part is totally overvaluated. When you enter this exhibition first, what you see is a taxidermised cat in a cage with a little bird on top looking at him, like making fun of him a little bit. And it was made when we had an argument with a friend about creativity and art in general. We were saying that the internet creates more art in a date and artists can create it in his life. We said okay, we're going to open a website, the first image that comes out will try to make an artwork out of it. The first image that came out was a collage of a cat in a cage. They submitted it into an exhibition in America and they attributed it to Maurizio Catalan. Maurizio Catalan is a really famous international art world star and everybody went wild for the work and it was only when he stepped into the frame and said actually guys I wish I had made that work but it's not mine that everybody realised that they'd been hard and that this whole process was actually part of something much bigger. It's just the name of an artist that attracts so much attention and sometimes the context can let you think that something is more valuable or more artistic. The next work is a work called My Generation. It's a documentary film in a way but made up of found footage from the internet of kids getting enraged with their machines. They've gathered those things together and pointed out this cultural phenomena not just that we get angry with our machines but that there's this whole subculture of documentation. I would urge you to go and see the exhibition as well. I just wanted to show you, I'll give you an indication now of the kind of watermark of quality that we're looking at being able to create within the sector. Hopefully you can see from that that there's some possibilities around that level of quality being redeployed elsewhere. If we can create a culture within the art sector where we can create good quality content such as hopefully that's an example of then it gives us opportunities to use that content elsewhere. Basically, when we started off the project we needed to find what the need was. We needed to do some research around it. There's been some great research that Nesta have done in relation to business modelling. I read Hasan's report on the NT live project which I urge everybody to read before applying because in terms of creating a business model it's a really incredibly useful document. The research we did was taken out by a company called I was done by a company called PH Research. It's quite illuminating and what we thought would be the case anyway but at least we had the statistics to back it up. Actually quite a lot of organisations are producing content because moving image content is seen as a very legitimate and very useful way of people getting to know what you do and a lot of most organisations these days have their own websites or use other dissemination means for that content. I should just say that of the 145 RFOs that we did I think that's about a sixth of the total organisations at the time so hopefully it's a reasonable slice of the number of organisations that are in the sector and of those as I say 70% produce their own content and 86% of that 70% publish it online but only 36% of them actually publish it on their own websites so there seems to be a need for a space where content is being created and where it's being put or where to put it. We then as part of the survey put the proposal of what we intended to do in terms of creating this site this is one stop shop for moving image to the organisations and as it says 75% of them felt that that would be a benefit to the organisation 93% said the organisation would be interested in using it which is obviously a very high return and immediately we saw that within the sector there was not great understanding of the value of having a place where they could put video content. The key factors for those organisations the ones that they pulled out most in terms of what the platform would be used for was and I thought this was really interesting promoting the UK arts industry in general so there was awareness not just from your specific organisations point of view but from a general point of view raising the profile of the whole sector. Also very key was the ability of that platform to then push the audience to their own website to their own activities because what the website or what the space or what the platform can't do is actually recreate everything that you do it's actually specifically about aggregating moving image content but with the idea of then once you're there like you would do if you were on Vimeo like you would do if you were on YouTube push you to their own websites to whatever you want to do and sell tickets and so on and so forth so the traffic to the website for the organisations is very important and obviously the relevance of the websites audience so one would hope one would suspect that the audience coming to that website platform or player TV would be looking to do to find moving image content which will help which will help them to create a deeper understanding of what's going on across the whole sector rather than specifically with an organisation so the organisations that we approach so the PH research approach 84% of them use YouTube 41% use Vimeo and as I said 36% have their own web spaces to publish moving image content on to 15% use Facebook but that's on an upward curve and quite a steep one so there's a lot of activity on social media sites which arts organisations are engaging with which will grow which is growing and which will form a part social media will form has formed part of the art player TV platform so who wants it and who needs it so the arts organisations want it and need it I think because of as I said before the lack of use of moving image content on people's own web spaces so it's a way to focus that for the public and artists need it because what you're going to get hopefully is an aggregator of the activities across the whole sector over time also with an opportunity to put one's own archive on there so you build up a critical mass of content which effectively represents what the sector does to the sector and beyond the sector so basically to reach them as I say we're half way through the project now and what we need to move into the next phase in the August to September October period is essentially going out to those organisations beyond the core and finding key organisations to work with so if anybody here wants to work with us in terms of creating a channel which will help to create a critical mass around the content then please come and see me advertising campaigns social media services Facebook, Twitter, blogs are all areas that we're going to move into in terms of reaching people to actually engage with the platform and then around the marketing strategy we'll have ways of obvious ways of finding metrics around how well it's received how well it's being used how many times people are viewing it sharing it and where people are going to how long they're staying on the site so those will basically form part of the reporting back to the Arts Council about what the platform does and where to take it next We've got a kind of three stage three phase strategy so the first phase was the organisations I showed you at the beginning there are kind of first core partners that we're working with in terms of generating content we're moving in now to the second phase and we've not actually directly approached any of these organisations yet so if anyone's watching this online or if anybody's here from these organisations we will be getting in touch soon but we want to sort of take it out beyond look at the content that's actually already there and start to utilise some of the content that's already been created from the other organisations and then this is not personal or particularly scientific how we sort of got to this list of organisations it was just from the research that we did because these organisations said that they were producing four to six content pieces per month but not all of them actually had somewhere to put that content so in some ways it's strategic from our players point of view we're looking at organisations which are producing a lot of content but not necessarily redeploying or using it anywhere and these are the organisations that we're looking at it also covers some of the gaps that we had in terms of what the sector does so we'd not really specifically in the first phase worked with an organisation who was dealing specifically with music or poetry and it gives us an opportunity to kind of grow the massive content on the site related specifically to the sector so when's it going to happen the timeline for this basically is the project has started we started back in March at the minute we're kind of building the platform so there are no conclusions from this yet because actually we're only halfway through but nevertheless the platform is to build is happening as we speak and we're in the kind of interim period where we're about to report back to the Arts Council on how that's happening and where that's going and as I said earlier the August, September and October periods are the periods essentially when we're going to be going out and sharing the platform with other organisations to create a critical mass of content what are we doing for time? I'm out of time OK, quickly then partnerships we're going to have hopefully we want to line up with the BBC and other cultural industries if we're creating content we want to be creating content which is possibly linked up with production companies locally to organisations we want to do training as I mentioned already and we're creating sector-wise services what's factoring with that what might have traditionally always done that's an expansion of that