In 2005 HP Labs had formed a great relationship with the Bristol Encounters Film Festival. They approaches us to help re-imagine their video library for an upcoming event. Imagine a room full of tapes on shelves where festival delegates could take a stack of tapes to view on an old style VHS player.
Whilst this was not a big enough challenge to open up interesting research questions for HP, we wanted to help and put together a system to move the festival towards a fully digital workflow. What was good for the local media and technology ecosystem was good for us.
So we put together a workflow, a server based video delivery application and loaned a bunch of high spec workstations and screens. You can see the version 1 user interface above.
Delegates would now view full resolution films on-demand over Bristol’s high-band media exchange network, delivered directly from HP’s data centre on the other side of the city. And all of this from the comfort of a dedicated workstation. Over the next few years we’d continue to enhance this and add the ability for attendees to bring their own devices, and simplifying the manual side of the workflow to create the content by removing the need for an operator to manually pump tapes through a digitiser.
Whilst this solution seems obvious now, as far as we know this was the first system of its kind at any film festival in the world. There are now a number of small companies offering exactly this kind of service to film and media festivals internationally.