 So what I've tried to do here is give a kind of high level overview of some of the trends that I think are affecting the space of content today. Try to share some of my vocabulary and reflection, which hopefully will inform some of the discussion that follows. As I was asked to think about content, I do what I often do and punch the word into Google Image Search, which is an activity I really recommend doing, because it up pops all kinds of interesting things. That if we read them, we discover some new insights. One of the things that popped up was this image that sort of highlights the word content. But in the process of looking at it, I came to realize that the top order definition of content, where it comes from, is that which is contained as to be contents of a bottle or in a table of contents. And so that puts in my mind the crisis of content may well be that content is no longer contained, that it has become unmoored. I think there are enormous opportunities there, but I think it means we can't think about content in the same ways that we have thought about it in the past. Again, let me figure out what it is I'm doing here that makes. I'm figuring it out. OK, there's this. I see. It's on the left and the right. There we go. OK, I've got it. I figured it out. So this slide, which also popped up when I touched in the word content, asked the question, which is more important content or design? And this is a kind of eternal debate among the technology industries. And their answer, which is the one that I would agree with, is use. That is, what's our relationship to content? How are we using content? And specifically, how does content travel through culture? Is it core? What's central here? So what I have here in the talk are six propositions about how content is changing or how our new relationship to content. And the first of these is content is transmedia. Now, the word transmedia simply means across media, that there is a relationship across media. My last book, Convergence Culture, began with the question that convergence was widely understood as a technological phenomenon. It is, which black box does the media functions flow through? And today, the winner might well be the iPad or some equivalent tablet technology, but also the iPhone in which all of the media functions flow. I argue that we should think culturally about convergence as the flow of content across media platforms, but in an integrated or systematic or sustained way. And what I described as transmedia were particular modes of storytelling, which exploited the resources of both old and new media or the relationship between old and new media. So Hunger Games might be an interesting example of this phenomenon. Hunger Games, of course, was a book, and the content traveled into film in a way that we could describe throughout the history of motion pictures at a simple adaptation. But before the film opens, there's this online campaign around Hunger Games, which takes its core metaphor, that is, of the districts, the competitions, the sponsors, and uses that to solicit the participation and activity of fans and consumers. So basically, they're trying to get the fans to tweet about the release of this game by unlocking content city by city, depending on how many people in that city participate. So the metaphor they use is, is your district unlocked? That is, do you have access? If your district shows a certain level of activity, then, in fact, the sponsors will kick in and give you rewards. And so it takes the metaphors of the story and uses them to encourage us as influencers to become part of the social media campaign around the film. This is a piece of content that's traveled pretty far and wide over the last three or four months. It's a TED talk from 2023. That is, it's created around the film from Methius, which opens in another month. The TED talk was a structure that many of us in this room probably know. You probably watched TED talks videos on the internet. They created a fictional TED talk and had the spokesman for a future corporation speak as if he was speaking to TED in 2023. And threw that out there. Immediately, people who liked TED started circulating. It's a cool idea. It becomes part of the story. And it's one of a number of videos that the promoters of Methius have circulated in advance of the film's release, helping to flesh out our understanding of the story, the world, the sort of what the situation is in this particular film. So that precedes the release of a film. Here we see some of the comic books that follow from the release of television series. So Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Ghost Whisper, three American shows, have moved into comics at various points in the run of the series. Buffy most notably created an eighth series. There were seven run series, seven television-based series around Buffy. The eighth series was comics. And they simply moved the viewership from television into comics. And they engaged with that. Many of the fans crossed over and read the comics as a continuation of the series. So all of this could be described as what I talk about in convergence culture as trans-media storytelling, which is a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purposes of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So the words in color there are the kind of key words that it's about systematic spread or dispersal of pieces of information across multiple delivery channels. So the web, comics, film, television, printed books, physical live presentations in various parts of the world that's coordinated and unified. Trans-media is not just, I have a television show and I put it on Hulu in the same episodes and it's on the air, it's on Hulu. That may cross media, but it's not about a new content. It's something new emerging around that. And it's not about expanding outward the story as it touches other media. And that's where this idea of unique contribution comes into play. In the United States, trans-media has become the buzzword that the entertainment industry is talking about right now. The producer's guild of America created a trans-media producer, job category. Many programs are creating trans-media departments. There's an enormous interest in how we build content in such a way that it moves across platforms. This is actually not a brand new idea. I always think of L. Frank Baum, the creator of Wizard of Oz as the father of modern trans-media. Many of us think of the Wizard of Oz as a two-hour movie stirring Judy Garland as a simple story beginning, middle, and end. In fact, Baum wrote more than 20 novels set in the world of Oz. And beyond that, beyond that, also had theater presentations that extended those stories and re-imagined those characters, created a series of both short and feature-length films under his own production company, which added more layers to the Oz stories. Created either one-time rival comic strips, one by Baum and one by Dinslow, his illustrator, extending the characters in the world of Oz out in a variety of directions. And to coordinate it all, L. Frank Baum himself toured on Valdiville in the music hall in the UK lecturing as the royal geographer of Oz. So he saw Oz not as a story or even a story system, but as a world, and a world that could be explored through many stories focused around many different characters across many different media. And that's the really modern idea of trans-media. What we've added to that mix is network consumption. That is, how people are consuming stories, how they're engaging with stories, changes in a culture where we have networked computing. This is Kim Moses, the producer of a show called Ghost Whisperer. She's one of a number of content creators in the United States who increasingly sees audience building as a central part of their jobs. So she had a show that was aimed at teenagers and was gonna air at 9 p.m. on Friday night, which is typical date night in the United States. And she looked at the history and showed in almost every show that it debuted in that time slot, it lasted less than a season, and said, how do I get to the point that I can go on this indication? Is how do I produce four to five series of this program in order to get to the point where it's lucrative to sell off the episodes? And she said, I've gotta build my audience. And so she used trans-media and fan participation to create opportunities around the show so that people felt more deeply invested in the content. Then the result was she created a show that lasted five seasons. And so she met her goal. And she calls this 360 engagement, but it's really what we call trans-media that's at the heart of her strategy. There's been a shift in how trans-media is understood from world building or story building to with Glee increasingly performance at the center of Glee. You can imagine them taking the story of this high school and telling it across multiple media, but really they've taken the songs from Glee and played them out across multiple media. And it becomes a driver of the music industry to the point that the Glee cast now have more number one hits in the United States than either Elvis or the Beatles. Kind of extraordinary accomplishment for two years of a television production, right? It's reshaped the landscape of music. And it's done it through commercial releases, but what we see here are grassroots appropriations of Glee on YouTube. These are people lip syncing or karaokeing versions or doing animated music videos for versions of the songs. And all of that exists on YouTube. We can assume that the producers of Glee could, if they wanted to have shut that stuff down, sent out a cease and desist letter. Many companies have done that. They've chosen not to. And we have to see that's a moment where participation has been the central value of their strategy. That is allowing people to sing the songs of Glee and share what they do with each other creates a sense of value around that content, which is part of what's driven the sales of those songs. All right, my second big idea, content's participatory. So by participatory I mean people are given things to do. People are engaged in grassroots ways with the content of media. So what we're seeing here are people stenciling Spider-Man's logo for the new movie onto walls all across the United States, right? Now this is a curious moment because the commercial producers of Spider-Man authorized this, right? They gave kits and encouraged people to do things with their content in advance of the campaign. The city governments didn't necessarily authorize this. And so there's been legal battles as people have stenciled illegally Spider-Man logos on buildings across the country, things that the official promoters couldn't have done themselves, but they've encouraged people to vandalize buildings in order to promote their movies. And this is what it points to you as the kind of weird way in terms of what is and isn't permitted in terms of our participation at the current time. Now this is a good example of a looser sense of participatory culture. This is the Wikipedia page for the concept of fan fiction. So Wikipedia itself is a kind of participatory culture that is the development of an encyclopedia through grassroots contributions. It uses principles of collective intelligence, people building on each other's knowledge and pooling knowledge to create something bigger than any individual could do, and a kind of large-scale project. Fan fiction is a different kind of participatory culture where fans are taking the stories of their favorite TV shows, films, or comics, and extending them through the grassroots storytelling, writing original short stories and novels around hundreds if not thousands of different media franchises around the world and distributing primarily through the internet. So here we see one layer of participatory culture commenting on another. So here's what I mean by participatory culture. This is from a white paper I wrote for the MacArthur Foundation on youth and new media. I subscribe, participatory cultures is having relatively low barriers for engagement and participation, having strong support for sharing creations with each other, having an informal mentorship, typically where more experienced participants help younger, newer participants learn, and I'm carefully trying to avoid age there because it's sometimes young to old rather than old to young, the layers in which learning is taking place. The members believe their contributions matter and they care about each other's opinions of themselves and their work. And that could be description of gamer communities, fan communities, Wikipedia, a whole range of things that are defining the current digital moment. And I write there, not every member must contribute but all must believe they're free to contribute when ready and that what they contribute will be appropriately valued. By the way, this is an example of participatory culture because like I said, I like to punch words into the Google image search so I punched the word participatory culture and the slide came up. So when it made it somewhere else to explain my concepts in my white paper and I looked at it and I thought it's a better slide than I was gonna make anyway so I'll take their slide and incorporate it into my presentation. And that's sort of the way participatory cultures operate, that I create something, throw it out into the world, other people respond to it, tinker with it, improve upon it and that exchange can go both directions over an extended period of time and that's a driving force I think in terms of where our culture is at. Now I wanted to distinguish participatory culture from Web 2.0 and these things often are getting conflated. Web 2.0 is a specific set of technological and business practices which builds on the public's desire to participate in order to create a revenue stream of some sort. Participatory culture doesn't intrinsically create a revenue stream. Participatory culture could trace its roots back to folk cultures for example where cultures produced an exchange freely without being commercialized. It existed in the shadow of mass media for most of the 20th century and it's also been the rallying point for the public's desire to have a greater role in cultural creation and circulation. So I think it's important to keep those two things separate that the business aspect is Web 2.0 but if we look at any given Web 2.0 company we don't see the kind of nice harmony of consumer and producer that O'Reilly describes in his what is Web 2.0 document what we see is friction. We see consumers pushing back over data surveillance and privacy issues over copyright or censorship issues over branding and advertising issues that over membership and fee structures then almost every case where we've empowered people to participate through Web 2.0 companies there have been frictions between what the company wants to do to make money and what the public wants to do in order to participate in exchange culture with each other. And until we actually see them as separate forces we may not fully understand where those frictions are coming from or be able to tease out the new relationships as they emerge. All right, third point, content is remixable. So here we see an example of remixable content. This is someone has taken images from Pixar's Toy Story and created their own version of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick's movie. And it's sort of the playfulness of malleability of content in the current world that in a world where everyone participates where all content is digitized it becomes relatively easy to transform content from one form to another. Sometimes by the production company doing so and as in this case and many others consumers taking ownership of that content and repurposing it for their own reasons. Sometimes for cultural, just fun, the laws as they would say in the internet sometimes for political purposes. So this is a film called Right Wing Radio Duck that remixed footage from Walt Disney's Donald Duck cartoons with the Right Wing Radio host Glenn Beck in the United States to comment on the sort of worldview of sort of paranoid conservative media in the United States. What's interesting is the Right Wing Radio in terms attack this saying it had to be funded by the Obama administration because it was so well crafted. And it turns out it was made by a 24 year old college student in his dorm room, right? It's the shift in production capability that goes on now makes it really hard to separate out grassroots produced media from commercial produced media or even governmental media since they are all circulating through YouTube or similar platforms. This is an example of how the political effect of this plays itself out. So this guy featured in all four of these images is Pepper Spray Cop. And Pepper Spray Cop was a university of California Davis Campus Policeman who pepper sprayed a group of protesters from the Occupy movement that were sitting peacefully on the lawn of the university. Now historically this would have been a campus news story maybe a local news story. It happened on Saturday by Monday there were 200 mashups of Pepper Spray Cop in a variety of situations. Some explicitly political like the scene there of the sort of Lady Liberty some old movies this has been her some sort of famous paintings people peacefully gathering but in that process of this video these images being produced and circulated the result was that many more people saw this video and this image and it became an icon now of the Occupy movement in the United States not by a single news coverage but by the dispersal of that coverage across many different remixes that took place. We can think of these as kind of the people's editorial cartoons that just as the editorial cartoonist in the newspaper finds a memorable image to personify a set of current events and tries to fix them in the public imagination these are a series of bids to do the same thing and in fact in this case it's not a single image that people will remember but the Pepper Spray Cop himself as he moves across all of these media platforms. So the next fourth point is a content that is spreadable that is it circulates through the culture and that's the focus of my upcoming book Spreadable Media which is coming out in January and someone appropriated spreadable media as a concept and said because everyone keeps saying spreadable media sounds like butter sounds like jam someone created this image that circulates on the internet that says spreading media preserves culture. So it plays on the word jam being a kind and preserve meaning much the same thing. So let's think in terms of and this is the sort of where it comes from white paper I and some of my graduate students wrote calls it doesn't spread it's dead which is sort of intending to put spreadability against stickiness, stickiness being the idea you build something on the web and you attract eyeballs and you hold them there as long as you can and collect rints on it spreadability is a logic of circulation that is things gain value as they travel through the culture. So here's an example of a recent success of spreadable media and so many of you in the room will know 2020-2012 created by invisible children a relatively small, a non, relatively ununderknown nonprofit organization under San Diego, California that created this 30 minute video about a Ugandan warlord and child soldiering and so forth through it into circulation and it hit extraordinary success. So if you look at this these are some of the so-called viral successes of the web, the wedding dance, evolution of the dance, Charlie bit my finger, dramatic gopher, David after the dentist and probably most of you in this room know at least some of these videos on this list which reached a critical mass over time. We get down to the other end we see Old Spice, Susan Boyle, Cooney 2012. Now what this chart shows us is how many days it took for each of these videos to reach 70 million views. So what we see is it took Susan Boyle video seven days to get 70 million views. It took by comparison, the wedding dance 589 days to reach 70 million views. And it took Cooney 2012 four days to reach that level of visibility. By point of comparison, the highest rated show on American television gets about 40 million viewers in its peak episode. Hunger Games which opened that same weekend probably had 15 to 17 million viewers depending on how we calculate from box office numbers to tickets. But either way, Cooney 2012 dwarfed the highest rated show on American television and the top grossing film in the US that year up until The Avengers and over the four days that it opened. Now the people talking to the people at San Diego they say they expected about half a million views over about a two month period of time. They were completely and literally blown away to the point of personal destruction as some of you know what happened with Jason Russell as this video rolled out by the sheer speed with which this stuff spread not by broadcast media, but by network communication of people passing this along to other people. Again, Susan Boyle did much the same thing, right? On Susan Boyle's case, we're gonna part of what's interesting is that it spread far faster than the commercial sector could keep up with. So even though Fremantle, the production company that Britain's Got Talent has commercial deals with American networks, once it became clear that Susan Boyle was interesting in the States, they had no way to move fast enough to put Britain's Got Talent on the air. You know, I couldn't put it on broadcast, they couldn't get it on the cable, they couldn't work the deal out with iTunes, they couldn't get the deal going with Hulu. In fact, it only place you could watch Britain's Got Talent in the US was through pirates, right? There was no legal means to watch this content if you became invested in that story. The speed of spread was far faster than the commercial sector's ability to keep up. Now, long-term, they caught up when the albums released in the United States, it sold more, outsold Whitney Houston and a number of other major albums released that year. And they made a lot of money because the public had become so invested in Susan's success story that they were ready to support the release of the album and became a big commercial success in the US without ever a commercial release of the TV content around it. But the grassroots circulation is what built in. Now, this is not as the media likes to call it viral media, right? I think viral media as a model is all about a loss of agency on the part of consumers. Here's Neil Stephenson, the science fiction writer describing viral media in terms of we're all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas like mass hysteria or a tune that gets in your head that you keep on humming all day until you spread it to someone else. No matter how smart we get, there's always this deep irrational part that makes us potential host for self-replicating information. So look at all the ways in which we are denied agency in this comment that it's about susceptibility, mass hysteria, something trapped in our heads, it's irrational. We're host bodies for something that's self-replicating. In fact, invisible children built a strategy, used people who consciously chose to participate, they spread it because the content meant something to them and they made decisions about which networks ascend it to, which communities to spread it to, what messages to attach to it. So we're not gonna get anywhere understanding this stuff or if we derive it as viral, which is why we're arguing for spreadability. So the theory of spreadability is a theory of circulation. If we think about traditional models of media, they're based on distribution. That is, Fremantle made a decision, we're gonna air Britain's Got Talent in the US, not in America, and that's distribution. Circulation is grassroots sort of hybrid system, partially top down, corporately controlled, but still increasingly bottom up, shaped by unauthorized uses of people choosing to pass content along based on their own choices, not based on what's available to them on the broadcast dial. And as that happens, certain content gets enormous visibility, not by being pumped out by broadcast, but by the way it's spread by the consumers. Now that content could be commercial as it is in the case of Susan Boyle, it could be non-profit as in the case of invisible children's Cooney 2012, or it could be totally amateur content like Charlie bit my finger, but either way it's traveling through system circulation. Now, I use the word unauthorized use very cautiously here because I'm trying to avoid the word piracy. And piracy seems to be where people automatically go to describe this process. I want to hold it in vain not because I'm trying to justify piracy, but because I think the category has to be looked at very, very closely to sort of the moral charge of the word piracy shuts down conversations we should be having about who benefits from these acts of circulation. Piracy assumes it's not only unauthorized, but also destructive. Whereas in the case of Susan Boyle, unauthorized acts of circulation increased the value of the album when it was released. And this is increasingly true. It is companies that know how to monitor and respond to unauthorized circulation can find ways to profit from those processes even if it means losing control over the flow of content. And I think that's the paradox that we increasingly want to pay attention to that unauthorized circulation can decrease the value because it loses rents and revenue that you might have gotten. It may and may appreciate the value, right? It may increase the value both in terms of appreciating the meaning of the value and appreciating the economic value of the content. So if we look at what happened, this is a map that social flow has done of the circulation of Cooney 2012. And what we see here is several interesting patterns. This is the tweets going out, passing this content along is what we see over the first four days of its circulation. We see invisible which stands here for invisible children is probably the largest category of circulating this content. And we see Jason Russell, the producer is probably the second largest. So that's the authorized flow of the content as shaped by the organization. We see Kirsten Bell there who was a minor celebrity. She's the star in a show called Veronica Mars. And part of the strategy of Cooney 12 was to get fans to put pressure on celebrities to use their social media to up the visibility of the content. And she's the first celebrity to respond. So she crops up quite early. The interesting things there are the circled areas here which show us Dayton, Ohio, Birmingham, Alabama, Noblesville, Indiana, Oklahoma City, Pittsburgh. These are the cities that have the largest cluster of people sending out the Cooney 2012 message. What's interesting is New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, even Chicago and Atlanta which might have been traditionally the media hubs are not what's showing up here. What's showing up here is small to middle sized cities in the middle of the country where invisible children work through churches and college groups to build a base of support over about eight years that was ready to pass along its content. So the first wave, the strongest push comes from a set of networks they built over time that they wanted to spread this content. The video ends with the urge above all pass this along and that invitation to pass it along enable these groups to do it. This is interesting because this is a portal of the flow of Twitter messages that accompanied Cooney 12. We see some interesting things. One is that invisible children has been described as a stealth Christian organization which is to say in the United States it works with churches, it also works with schools. It doesn't have an explicitly religious message because it couldn't and get into American schools where there's a strong separation of church and state. What happens when it starts to spread is the church based population is the first to grab hold of this and spread it and we can see it with the size of God, Jesus, life, love. Those are words that are probably tied to Christian circulation of the video. And we see the next level down in size or university student, music, play, fan which probably is the university based words and circulation which suggests as this stuff spreads it's not just one message for one group but a variety of groups that are localizing the message as it enters into very specific networks that results in that content spreading. And I think that's very much part of the world we're involved with. Am I completely out of time or? Okay, let's keep going then. So we can think of this as having some impact on global politics, right? I have a soft view of the so-called Twitter revolutions as they're tied to Arab Spring. I think particularly as we talk about Iran, Twitter probably played very little role in the actual industry organizing but it plays a much bigger role from the experts I've talked to in shaping global awareness of these events that is where Twitter plays a role is in getting messages that might be blocked by governments or traditional media channels out of the protesters world and into the world of their supporters overseas. And in case of Iran and Egypt there's large diasporic communities of users around the world who were there ready to pass on that content and reframe it or recontextualize it for their local consumer groups. And so in a sense, the Arab Spring became spreadable media content in the ways in which it passed along. As that happened, at least in the United States the message that went out was CNN fail, right? That the people were tweeting alongside spreading grassroots conversations from the streets of Tehran, they were saying, where is CNN? Where is professional journalist in all of this? Because it's not that they wanted to displace professional journalists with messages from the streets but rather they wanted their agenda, their interest to drive what journalists covered. And they expected someone who had foreign policy expertise, connections to government spokesmen, fact-checking capability to follow behind them and clear up the misinformation that was circulating through Twitter. But there was an immediacy about Twitter that led to this kind of level of engagement. This is another example of spreadable media in a foreign policy context. This is a group of Palestinians marching through the occupied territory in a protest march. And this group marches every week, shoots a video of their encounter with the Israeli guards and so forth. And the videos get a few hundred supporters watching them. This particular week, they chose to paint themselves blue as the Navi from James Cameron's Avatar walked through the occupied territory saying sky people, you can't take our land. And recorded this confrontation with the Israeli troops who were very baffled by how to respond to an army of blue people marching upon the fence and put it out via YouTube where it got millions of hits and got covered by the media all over the world. So this became a politics of spreadable media, of taking entertainment content as a baseline from which to reframe a set of political issues and throwing out circulation. Counting in the novelty effect, just like in the pepper spray comp, they get people to spread it along and to engage with that content in a new way. And we're gonna see more and more of that. It's a kind of odd sort of protest, right? Now everyone probably won't have to paint themselves blue, but keep in mind that protest across early modern Europe, people painted themselves as Moors or Amazons in order to protest the government. And in my country, people, my founding fathers, painted themselves red as the Native Americans that throw tea into the Boston Harbor, there's a long tradition of masks of the other being used as the face of a protest. And there's a continuity, I'd argue, between these people and the Moors or the Amazons for which most of Europe were still imaginary people, people they didn't directly know that they were mimicking in some way through their protest. And so there's a continuity here, I think, to draw not just an exoticism of it. All right, point five, content is now global, right? So in this system, if we think about the Coney 2012, the striking thing was we'd got so many responses so quickly from people in Africa, right? There was a debate that was going on between the Western advocates of invisible children and the Ugandan Prime Minister went on YouTube and responded to the video, very other people corrected statements of fact in the video using YouTube. So it was a very porous system. In the past, that video, if it had been on television in the US, wouldn't have reached Europe, let alone Africa. There would not have been the back and forth that took place around it. So in some ways, the controversy around Coney 2012 tells us about global circulation. This is a scene from Smash on a contemporary American television series and they have an entire sequence in Bollywood. The language of Indian cinema is now being incorporated into the mainstream American popular culture, not because there's been a huge wave of commercial distribution of Bollywood in the United States. It largely still remains at ethnic grocery stores and ethnic theaters, underground video circulation, but because there's an enormous awareness of Bollywood in the United States and it becomes a language you can then use to incorporate into fictional shows. Further along that path might be anime, Japanese animation, which 20 years ago in the US, you literally couldn't get it on the air and so it had very little economic value. It entered the US through informal trades of video and then through networks of fan subbers who take the episodes, translate them from Japanese and English, put on unauthorized subtitles, put them into circulation. To commercial interest, moving in to take advantage of the market that had been developed informally and there's a kind of weird moral economy between the fans who are trying to build a base for anime support and the commercial distributors who tap that base in order to sell their content. So this is not a case necessarily of conflict between pirates and industry. It's a case where in fact industry has used pirates to take the initial risk of introducing new content into the marketplace and then use the data they got from that to begin to circulate things more carefully. My colleague Nancy Bame has talked about the Swedish music world in much the same way, where many Swedish bands now do concert tours in the US without ever releasing albums there because of the use of MP3, because of allowing certain things to be pirated and spread. It creates a demand for that music in the United States. Further down the scale, but moving fast is Nollywood, the Nigerian video industry, which is now the third largest media producer in the world, built entirely out of pirates in the marketplace, beginning to take proceeds from pirate and American media and putting it into local production and then using piracy as the first wave to get that content out to consumers and build a market in other parts of Africa and now in parts of Europe and the United States. It is a growth industry by a kind of weird collaboration between pirates and producers. The last point is content may well be increasingly independent in this new environment. That is to say that while mass producers have certain advantages still that they will always have in terms of commanding top visibility, independent producers have more opportunities than ever before to get their films into circulation and get them in front of people. It's still, they're still an uphill battle, but compared to the gatekeeping function of traditional film festivals and art houses and a handful of major distributors, they now have the capacity to appeal over the heads of the commercial structure directly to their consumer base. So this film, Inc., sort of fantasy film, low-budget fantasy film that got pretty big pit hit in the US by going directly to BitTorrent. As the filmmakers say, they tried to get commercial distributors, they couldn't, so they put it uploaded at the BitTorrent and they got half a million viewers in the first week on BitTorrent. And now if you go to Amazon, you can see it's selling very briskly. It has enormous support. And Amazon, they moved from illegal distribution to illegal circulation, illegal distribution. And the result is that they've now, certainly not a huge success by any stretch, but a niche success as an independent film. This is another film that sort of had some impact here in Europe so far, hasn't reached my country yet, but Iron Sky was produced heavily by a crowdsourcing crowdfunding model where most of the cost of production and a large amount of the special effects were generated by the audience in collaboration with the producer. And that in turn built base of support, a niche base of support for this film before it was ever released. And they're sort of around the world, there are people who really want to see Iron Skies, this kind of space Nazis comedy that was produced. And I think we'll be hearing more about that model. In fact, if we look at the models of independent production and circulation today, there's a complete loop we could point to. So Kickstarter in the US at least has become a micro-funding entity that people propose projects there directly to the public and say, would you like to invest a small amount now in realizing a project that you might like to consume later? And many independent films, comic books, games, music, get their initial seed funding, get started not by appealing to funding agencies or governmental bodies, but now in the US appealing directly to the public. The film called Zombies is a crowd sourced film, which is to say that they put out a call on the internet, they wanted to make a zombie movie, and they asked the public to provide shots. And so anyone with their camcorder shot the footage of zombies doing this, they described all the points they needed in their story, and they got all the shots from the public, and then they edited it together to create the finished film. And Brave New Films is a left of center documentary company in the US, which uses what I call crowd surfing, which is to say that they don't distribute to theaters, they distribute through Netflix and YouTube and encourage their supporters to hold screenings in their living room to invite their friends over to collect money and donate back to the organization to fund the next film. So while there's no one I've seen so far who uses all three of these, in theory you could take a film from conceptualization all the way through distribution, you know, via work collaborations between independent filmmakers and a community of support. Now what this means is that those filmmakers who have built-in bases of support have the greatest opportunity under the system. So it's no accident that Lost Zombies is a zombie movie, right, everyone knows what a zombie movie looks like. So getting the crowd to contribute to a zombie movie, fairly easy thing to do. So fantasy, horror, science fiction that have built-in fan bases do well in these clients, but so do films for minorities of one sort or another. Films for gay and lesbians, films for women, films for various racial, ethnic, minorities, immigrant populations, and for political minorities on both the right and the left, these models make sense as a means of building awareness, getting funding and rowing around traditional gatekeepers to get your content out to a public slash market that may be interested in what you're producing. The people that we most heard by this are the traditional art cinema directors who are individuals expressing their own worldview, but those are the ones who benefited the most under state subsidies, film festivals, art museums, the traditional routes of circulation. So it's not clear if this takes anything away from them. In fact, if anything, it may take away competition for funding through those traditional agencies as these groups move in another direction. But that's where content generation is likely to come from as we look to the next generation of media producers. So on that note, I will end and open it up for questions and dialogue.