Last week, Google unveiled YouTube’s Leanback experience. Like YouTubeXL before it, Leanback is aimed at users leaning back, away from their keyboards – perhaps with their laptops or desktops hooked up to their TV.

It’s an interesting way to browse, but to really feel the experience you need to get further away from the keyboard. As Wired noted, what Leanback really needs is a remote:

The YouTube Leanback beta works with a regular QWERTY computer keyboard, but other than the search function, the interface uses only five buttons: the arrow keys and the enter key. You may not even find yourself wanting to search the service at all, because it links up with your YouTube subscriptions and videos your friends have recently shared on Facebook, in addition to a wide selection of categories, in which case those five buttons are all you need to use it.

Of course, they’re thinking of a TV remote:

The television remote, that quintessential component of the lean-back viewing experience, includes the same five buttons, of course. This YouTube Leanback Beta works with your computer now, but when it emerges from beta it could provide the backbone of a Google TV version for couch potatoes who want to keep their cable or satellite provider and use the same remote. YouTube and Dish Networks were reportedly testing an Android-based satellite television set-top box earlier this year.

What about the little Apple Remote that shipped with my MacBook Pro? It’s got at least six buttons (more if you count the difference between click, double-click, and hold on each).

A quick search turned up two options: one paid, the other free (as in beer, not speech).

Mira, the paid option, seems to be a full featured application, which you can get with or without the Manta receiver (which you may need if your Mac doesn’t have a built in receiver). Lots of settings, lots of customization.

iRed Lite, the free option, is less slickly presented, but it gets the job done. To use it with YouTube Leanback, just create a new layer, associate it with the browser you’ll be using, and set the keys. (If you want to preserve up and down for volume, you can assign double-click up and double-click down to the up and down arrow keys for navigation).

iRed Layer for YouTube Leanback

Of course, you’ll still have to come back to the keyboard to do any searches, but it’s better than nothing.

If you’re not familiar with Coulton, two quick gems. First, Code Monkey:

Second, his great cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back:

In the interview (transcript here if you prefer reading to listening – I’m quoting from the transcript), Coulton talks about his use of social media to create direct relationships with his audience, and why some approaches have been more effective than others:

Facebook and Myspace are essentially duplications of my blog and my email which I already have a blog and email so you know, I don’t, I sort of don’t understand why bands use something like Myspace unless the answer is they can’t, they don’t know how to make their own website

Guess it helped that Coulton was originally a software developer. More to the point, Coulton identifies the risk of closed social networks and cloud platforms:

I was always suspicious of Myspace because for the very simple reason that you don’t have direct access to your network, you only have it through Myspace. If Myspace ever goes away your network winks out of existence, you don’t have your emails you don’t have any way of getting in touch with them. You are completely dependent on Myspace.

And you know you look at what happened with Friendster you know, guess what social networks rise and fall pretty quickly. That what happened with Friendster and it’s sort of what’s happening with Myspace I guess and no matter how great and eternal you think a social network platform is it’s an illusion it’s going to go away. And so to spend all your time building up this Myspace network is I think has the potential to turn out not so well.

Well put. I also really liked his point about creative commons licensing, which he leveraged very effectively early in his (recent) career and continues to use:

. . . you know it was kind of a scary thing but I really just rationalised the thing, well let’s just get the attention now and worry about making the money later, and you know, if the worst thing that happens is a million people get one of my songs for free, like you know, that’s okay, that something I can build on. And I would rather have that happen than make $15 from my friends who buy it and nobody else can hear it, you know.

The interview also touches on Eventful, rickrolling, Wil Wheaton, Ze Frank, podcasting in general, YouTube, and (of course) Twitter.

Well worth a listen, especially but not exclusively if you’re and independent musician or wanna-be independent musician.

Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to get to this one – and not because I can’t find San Francisco on my map. Unlike many U.S. Americans I believe in building up our future for our children and that our education here should help the Iraq and the Asian countries. ;)

One major place where the conflict between fully generative and contingently generative comes into play is on online video. YouTube‘s terms of service should give any independent video maker pause – both in terms of the license rights they claim and in terms of the susceptibility to take down on the basis of broad criteria[1].

Two things make me hopeful, though, for the future of video on the open web: Miro and Kaltura.

In other words, YouTube may suspend your account at virtually any time and for virtually any reason. Remember, since you’re also not allowed (per the Terms of Use) to download videos from YouTube, if the copy stored at YouTube gets deleted in theory it vanishes entirely, making your web browser connected to YouTube one giant tethered appliance. (“You agree not to access . . . YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”).

And don’t even get me started on DRM, which aims to replicate the experience of a tethered appliance with content on your own computer.

Last week Dean Jansen from the Participatory Culture Foundation came to visit the Berkman Thursday blog group to talk about Miro.

Miro, which I’ve blogged about many times in the past, is an open source, multi-platform, standards aware video player, as well as a collaboratively edited channel guide. If you spend any significant amount of time watching video on your computer, you should have it. (It’s especially great for longer-form video, high definition video, and disconnected mode – planes, trains, and automobiles).

(Yes, those are actually my subscriptions – click for full size image).

Two things I did not know about Miro that Dean showed us:

1. You can add additional web sites as “Guides” inside the Miro player. If they aren’t formatted as guides they won’t quite work the same way, but this makes it possible to have multiple guides from different sources, ensuring distribution of control of the media.
2. You can create an account on the Miro guide, which tracks your ratings of channels and then can suggest channels you might like, on the basis of those recommendations.

I’ve also been looking at (and talking to the team behind) Kaltura, which bills itself as:

The first open-source platform for video creation, management, interaction, and collaboration.

Kaltura not only enables you to embed video on your site (a la YouTube, Blip.TV, or several dozen others), but lets users collaboratively edit video, providing a complex and full featured editing environment all hosted in the user’s browser.

Kaltura has an interesting partnership with the Wikimedia foundation (see Yochai Benkler’s blog entry about it) and make a video extension for MediaWiki is available now from their downloads page; extensions for Drupal and WordPress are “coming soon.” These extensions let you integrate Kaltura’s SaaS offering inside your hosted application.

The “Community Edition Video Platform,” which will let people provide the full Kaltura functionality from behind a firewall or on their own server, is work in progress, but you can register on their site to be notified when it becomes available.

While it may sometimes seem that free software is not required for generative platforms – an argument Zittrain makes in his presentations above – free and open source solutions do help us to avoid the kind of contingent generativity Zittrain describes, since the worst case scenario is to take the software and run your own, or modify it in order to remove whatever restrictions (intentional or unintentional) the platform imposes. You just can’t do that with most hosted offerings.

[1] From the YouTube Terms of Use:

YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content or a User Submission is appropriate and complies with these Terms of Service for violations other than copyright infringement, such as, but not limited to, pornography, obscene or defamatory material, or excessive length. YouTube may remove such User Submissions and/or terminate a User’s access for uploading such material in violation of these Terms of Service at any time, without prior notice and at its sole discretion.