Agents and the
electronic Package
Nordiska Film og TV-dagerne
by
Richard Gatarski, rgi@fek.su.se
Bergen, Norway june 8, 1996
| Agents and the electronic Package
Nordiska Film og TV-dagerne by Richard Gatarski, rgi@fek.su.se Bergen, Norway june 8, 1996
|
This is only the internet part of my presentation. I will make no efforts to keep this page updated. The Internet is in constant flux. Links that this document refers to might have moved, changed or vanished. Still I hope that you will find it useful. Please feel free to comment by e-mail to rgi@fek.su.se.
If you are unfamiliar with the different ways content can be found on the net, you might start with learning about that first. Therefore this part is divided into four sections:
Directories are managed by enterprises that collect and organize links on the net. Some examples are:
Search engines, or Robots as they sometimes are called, automatically search and index everything they can find and access on the net. For an overview see http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Compare/Search/.
These engines goes to a number of search engines and then summarizes the findings. Examples are:
To wet your appetite I would like to quote a few lines from the PAAM conference this February. This was presented by some researchers from Ericsson Medialab:
Very briefly intelligent agents are trained to work on behalf of their masters (human user). They can be divided into filter agents and search agents. The former filters incoming content, the latter actively search cyberspace for content. For a richer introduction see:
Since the topic of today is film and television, I have the pleasure of introducing you to a few agents trained on just that. But first comes a link to a CD-music agent. This agent is a search agent. The others are more like filter agents.
Andrew Lippman could unfortunately not make it to NFTV´96. But he is represented in Cyberspace. Maybe this quote from him, copied off the internet, might lure you there:
Forget television. In three years, there won't be any. Through the agency of digital broadcasting, the gizmo we use for entertainment will evolve into a richly personal, multi-network, realtime processor. This wave was begun with misdirected attempts at higher definition that assumed the technology of TV could be changed without sending ripples through the industries that create, distribute, and deliver video information. The HDTV people got the idea right but the sign bit wrong: instead of HDTV and nothing else, we now have normal-D TV and everything else.
Otherwise, this section contains four parts:
This is a list of links to a few of the live video related sites:
There are a vast number of sites where you can buy videos. Here are two examples:
While we in Sweden, or Europe for that matter, talk about digital television., they have it overseas. In June 1994 DirecTV (http://www.directv.com/) was launched over the US. Within 20 months 1.3 million subscribers started to use their services. March 11, 1996 Microsoft made an agreement which enable personal computers to receive digital video programming entertainment and new interactive data services from DirecTV. Two weeks later AT&T acquired for $137.5 million 2.5 percent of the equity in DirecTV, and options to increase its investment up to 30 percent over five years depending primarily on the number of DirecTV subscribers AT&T enrolls over specific time periods. The subsidiary Hughes Network Systems has a product call DirecPC. If you cannot guess what it does, check at http://www.direcpc.com/docs/home.html .
One of the interesting things with DirecTV from Hughes Electronics Company is their main owner, General Motors! You can get a financial overview of Hughes from Hoovers listing at http://www.hoovers.com/upside/42070ml.html
There are a lot of sites covering this very interesting subject. Some are complete soap operas, with episodes, backgrounders advertising etc.A few of these are multimedia with pictures and sounds. Others covers facts and discussions about TV soaps. For a more cleansing look, check these sites: